Welcome to the 186th 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:

- Desktop Adventures
- Biographies R Us
- Information Retrieval
- Short Takes
- Women Who Rock
- Techniques of Wildlife Painting
- New Web Pick
- Life Magazine: Cover Search
- Book-A-Minute
- Subscribers' Sites


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Desktop Adventures

Couch potatoes can ease into action at Adventure TV, where visitors
virtually experience wildlife, indigenous cultures and worldwide adventure
gathered from broadcast media around the globe, re-packaged and handed over
to web surfers.

Mountain bike through India, hunt with Australian bushmen or dive the Great
Barrier Reef by
viewing streaming video of mountains, deserts, jungles and snow. Or just
click on a map to pick the region you want to visit and see new videos from
Africa to Southeast Asia. Videos are gathered from tour companies, tourism
groups and independent adventure shows, so the fare is varied and
constantly refreshed, making a quick get-away as easy as it gets.

http://www.adventuretv.com/

Biographies R Us

Anyone who has graduated from high school and thinks back on all the
biographies s/he has had to research and write will appreciate what
Biographies R Us could mean to a kid. With 350 personalities, from I.M. Pei
to Osama bin Laden, in categories from Architect to Terrorist, the site
deserves its name. It's a famous people mall.

The material is a snap to use: searchable by name, category or life span,
each biography includes a chronology, achievements, contributions, famous
quotations and a picture. A search by life span using the dates 1800 to
1850, for example, shows that Nietzsche and Alexander Graham Bell were
contemporaries, and then hooks you up. Plus new biographies are added weekly.

http://www.top-biography.com/navigation%20menu/

Information Retrieval

It's tough enough to keep up with everyday news. Imagine being a surgeon,
engineer or mathematician trying to keep track of advances in your field.
And as a consumer, you want your surgeon or attorney to know everything,
right now. At Info Retrieve, professionals get help digesting their
ever-expanding fields of knowledge.

Billed as the "definitive research portal," the site finds and delivers
published materials in a wide range of categories, from the arts to
physics. The one-stop journal shopping site is a vast and diverse virtual
library, gathering both electronic info sources. The site also offers an
alert service with tables of contents of journals the user selects and
stores in a profile, and pay-per-view content for in-depth searches.

http://www4.infotrieve.com/

SHORT TAKES

Flag Grading

Some countries send up a flag just to see if anyone will salute, but the
creator of Flag Grading looks at color, originality and shape to give
grades from A to F to dozens of national flags, with hard-fast rules (no
maps, no slogans) and kudos for those with simple beauty, like Gambia,
which moves to the head of the class.

http://138.251.140.21/%7Ejosh/flags/intro.html

<><><><><><><><><>

Gum Wrapper Chains

Almost 8 miles long, made of over 940,000 gum wrappers, and costing more
than $65,000 in gum to produce, the gum wrapper chain created by Gary
Duschl is a world record-holder. See the photos, read the story and learn
how to be a contender by starting your own wrapper chain. But get started
now. Gary has a 37-year start on you.

http://www.gumwrapper.com/

<><><><><><><><><>

Yeti@Home

Sure, you think that was just a really big raccoon digging through your
trash last night, but what if it was Bigfoot - and you with no camera aimed
to catch the phenomenon! Yeti@Home shows idle web surfers how to convert
their computer's idle time into a Bigfoot/Yeti/Creepy Crawler camera system
for detecting and capturing an image of unidentified creatures who go bump
in the dark.

http://www.phobe.com/yeti/

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Women Who Rock

Elvis and Jerry Lee gained worldwide fame, but Wanda, Lorrie, Janis and
Brenda Lee - the queens of rockabilly - could growl, sass and strut their
stuff like the kings. Welcome to the Club, the online version of the PBS
documentary, puts the four women on center stage, along with their
sometimes raunchy, always aggressive, vocal and personal styles.

Wanda Jackson, Brenda Lee, Janis Martin, and Lorrie Collins sang of
parties, hot rods, love and angst on stages from country fairs to
honky-tonks, and all survived hard knocks to become the rockin'
grandmothers to today's grrrl power bands. Here, the women discuss their
passion for the music, the highs and lows of their careers and personal
lives, and share the defiance and exuberance that made them icons.

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/welcometotheclub/

Techniques of Wildlife Painting

How many of us have come upon a wildlife scene and wished we could paint it
to preserve the glory that a snapshot just doesn't capture? At Techniques
of Wildlife Painting, visitors learn principles of balance, contrast,
movement and proportion for putting nature on canvas.

Under the virtual tutelage of renowned landscape artist Carl Rungius, who
died in 1959, and other wildlife artists, the Natural Museum of Wildlife
Art has created this site as part homage, part lesson, part beginner's art
studio. Making the most of the interactive capabilities of the Internet,
learners go through through animated art principles, an interactive
Composition Gallery and a Critique Gallery where they can show their
completed work for feedback.

http://www.wildlifeart.org/Rungius/index.html

New Web Pick

To experience the web's most avante garde design work, skip Lycos and the
conventional portals and go to New Web Pick, featuring personal and
professional web sites by mostly young Japanese artists.

Representing the choices of the site creators and fans of outstanding
designs in artistic expression, the portfolios here are geared to art
lovers who crave graphic image and sound rather than ease of delivery or
broad appeal. Select from such categories as animation, audio, Flash,
experimental or just "very cool" sites, then sit back, click around and see
the beautiful, often astounding work that technology and creativity inspire.

http://www.newwebpick.com/


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Life Magazine: Cover Search

No one has captured American life better in photos than the venerable Life
Magazine, launched by Henry Luce in 1936 to "see life, see the world."
Since then, the magazine has given us an unparalleled photographic history,
and you can view the best at Life Magazine: Cover Search.

Search all covers from 1936 to 1972, the years when Life was published as a
weekly magazine, with four covers throughout its history featured daily:
March 18th for example, offers a 1940s chorus girl and a 1966 Barbra
Streisand cover. Search by specific day, month and year or by topic, or
browse the 60 "classic" or "wacky" covers, like a 1937 Eisenstaedt photo of
a young woman kissing a courthouse colonnade for a feature story on Reno
divorces.

http://www.lifemag.com/Life/search/covers

Book-A-Minute

So many books, so little time. Those who have already multi-tasked
themselves out of their book group may find a solution at Book-A-Minute,
where readers can digest an entire season of Oprah picks on your lunch break.

As the name suggests, the site condenses books of all kinds into a
script-like format anyone can read in under a minute. The oft-dreaded text
Beowulf, for example, becomes five quick lines that pretty much capture the
main plot points, if not the poetry, of the original. Books are grouped by
Science Fiction/Fantasy, Bedtime, and Classics and occasionally readers are
allowed to vote - very quickly - for their favorites.

http://rinkworks.com/bookaminute/

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


~Rock Creek Aviary - Quality handfed baby birds.

~Magical Solutions - Unique service for corporate entertainment.

~Personal Tupperware Site

~My Dear Diary

~Folk Songs by Cara Dillon

~Gantley Shoe And Harness

~Proud to be an American

~Zaac Organ

~Cool Flash Games



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OOo-(_)-oOOo--------

Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.

Richard Ben Sapir

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Have a great weekend.
Charles Kessler