Welcome to the 171st issue of the Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter offering weekly insights into new, cool, useful, fun, unusual and interesting sites on the Internet. 

In this issue:

- Paper Veins Museum
- The Kitchen Link
- BuzzWhack
- Short Takes
- Pearl Portal
- The Girl with (Artificial) Intelligence
- Preserving Web Culture
- The Mistress Of Murder
- Planet Feedback
- Subscribers' Sites 


Paper Veins Museum

Experimental artists and their fans who long for a home will find it at Paper Veins Museum of Art. Created in 1995 to showcase the interactive arts, the site features over 50 visual artists, filmmakers, writers and performers in a diverse collection of web projects and performance showcases.

Organized like a brick-and-mortar museum, Paper Veins holds a film room, a poetry room, four floors of exhibition space and, on the top floor, The Artists' Café where artists and their portfolios are profiled, including site creator Virgil Wong. Coming up: Artists will custom-code their own artificial intelligence personality for you to chat with online, with live and MPG-recorded experimental music performances. Note: Adult language and content.

http://www.paperveins.org/

The Kitchen Link

Year-end is a delicious time to settle into the kitchen with family and food, and the Kitchen Link is a must-have connection. Called the Yahoo! of food sites, it's an enormous compendium of info about cooking, recipes, cookbooks and original content.

Users can browse 10,000 "hand-selected" recipes and links, find cookbooks, click through a huge list of hot topics like gingerbread-baking and candy-making or shop for everything from coupons to bake ware. Also, find local resources where good cooks can also be good neighbors to the homeless and hungry, providing you with all the ingredients to fill your home with good smells, good eats and good spirits this winter.

http://www.kitchenlink.com/

BuzzWhack

If your idea of an "action item" is lifting your head off the pillow in the morning, add a visit to Buzz Whack to your To Do list and find all kinds of ways to make yourself sound productive in the corporate world. 

Buzz whackers, or those who get a kick out of bursting verbal bubbles, have a field day here, with real-life examples like "expanded collaborative commerce" and "on a going forward basis." Download a free copy of the Buzzword Compliant Dictionary, track the top ten buzzwords making the rounds, or sign up to get a buzzword e-mailed daily to your office cube so you can decipher those urgent interoffice memos.

http://www.buzzwhack.com

SHORT TAKES:

Gobler Toys

Señor Sandwich is one of the first, and by no means the last, of the toys created by the imaginary Gobler Toys - that's imaginary, not imaginative. Nope, the toys don't really exist, but a catalogue, ads and an interview with Ira Gobler, the founder of Gobler Toys, make it all seem somehow real.

http://www.goblertoys.com/

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You've Got E-mail Everywhere

Mail2web eliminates the worry of how to pick up your e-mail when you're on vacation, out of town, on the lam. This cool tool gives you access to your e-mail from any account on any computer, worldwide, in 16 different languages, just by entering your e-mail address and password. 

http://www.mail2web.com/

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Dancing Properly: Advanced Seminar

Warning: Before attempting any dance demonstrated on Dancing Properly: Advanced Seminar, master the "How to Dance Properly" tutorial. Take a look at one of the eight dance demos and the warning makes sense: just watching dances like "Stop it, Silly" or "Talk to the Hand" may cause severe laughter-induced injuries.

http://www.zefrank.com/dance2/index.html

Pearl Portal

The pearl is a symbol of both affluence and purity, cherished as a gem and an heirloom, captivating scientists and celebrities. At the American Museum of Natural History's web site, called simply Pearls, visitors learn about marine and freshwater pearls and the natural processes that are duplicated to create cultured pearls. 

The human history of pearls is traced through 6,000-year-old archeological evidence, from Aphrodite's stunning pearl-studded pin circa 300 B.C., to Coco Chanel's pearl-sewn fashions of the 20th century. The result of an irritant trapped inside a mollusk, the pearl remains one of nature's most enchanting products.

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/pearls/index.html

The Girl with (Artificial) Intelligence

Ramona may not be a girl you'd pour your heart out to over coffee, but she's smart, polite and well-read - for an avatar. Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence Network is a showcase for ideas and technologies about biological and artificial intelligence: scary to some, intriguing to others.

Your guide is Ramona, the web's "first photo-realistic, interactive, lifelike avatar (virtual personality)" who converses with users by responding to typed questions with lip-synched speech, facial expressions and a brain that serves as a visual map of the site. She even gives intuitive leads to info about each thought expressed, glossary definitions, links and answers to questions about Raymond Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, the source of this controversial and stimulating web site.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/

Preserving Web Culture

Without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory -- and the explosion of the Internet could make for an amnesiac future. With info on the Internet disappearing in a blink, the Internet Archive, a collaboration with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, was created to prevent "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past.

One of the coolest features is the Wayback Machine, letting users surf pages stored in an archive by entering a URL or clicking on specific collections. Already preserved: the profoundly moving web response to September 11; a handful of sites created by web pioneers way back at the genesis of all this; and an archive of the historic 2000 Presidential election. 

http://www.archive.org/index.html/

The Mistress Of Murder

Delicious Death: The Agatha Christie Works List, leaves no mystery about the books by the world's most popular writer of whodunits. The content is more database than text: a comprehensive listing of every Christie story, its plot summary, characters, scene synopses, film, TV and audio performances and original cover art of virtually every edition of every novel. 

Also listed, the appearances of famous sleuths Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple in novels and short stories; a chronology of the late author's life and works; winners of the Agatha Awards since 1989; a bulletin board and poll for serious fans; and a listing of all translated titles (in their native language) of every Christie book.

http://www.stmarymead.com/

Planet Feedback

You've just suffered through a late flight or a lousy meal -- or enjoyed great service from an e-commerce site. Now you want someone to know about it. Welcome to Planet Feedback, the site that orbits the universe of praise and gripes to help you say what you want and deliver it to the right person.

Get help writing letters of gratitude or complaint, then access a database for easy sending. And if the company isn't in the database, just enter the contact information into a few fields and it will be taken care of for you. Once the letter is sent, users also grade the company's response.

http://www.planetfeedback.com/

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SUBSCRIBERS' SITES - Many of our subscribers have fascinating on-line projects. This weekly section will introduce you to some of these sites. Please let me know about your project so that I might mention it in this section. Write me at info@tricksandtrinkets.com

~It's About Christmas - Great Christmas Album

~Dcviews - Digital cameras and photography

~Proud to be an American

~Hurry for Harry Potter - UK guide to Harry Potter Games and Books. 

~Calvert Cliffs Fossils


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The monk shaved his head
as a symbol of renunciation,
but now he goes nowhere
without his little cap.

~TAO~

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Have a great weekend.

Charles Kessler