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The Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter #202 7/11/02 |
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Welcome to the 202nd 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:
~~~~~ Cool Tricks and Trinkets is made possible by~~~~~~ <Editor's
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Those clever boys at Harvard have found a way to burn piles of tuition dollars under cover of their mouse and monitor, as they try to beat par at the Mini Putt, an addictive Flash miniature golf game residing on the Harvard University server. The course is simple and the play is solitary - no chance of accidentally clubbing an 8-year old on this virtual course -- but mini-putt conventions like a windmill hole are honored, and you get a full 18-hole play. Dotted lines help players gauge angles and stroke power, and a sunk ball gives a satisfying rattle as it circles the cup rim. A scorecard shows par for each hole and keeps track of your progress. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7epyang/flash/miniputt.swf Infinite Wheel Play games and music at Infinite Wheel, a dub selector site that lets visitors digitally create music loops as they play 7 different games. Select a bouncing animated icon to enter games like Echo Chamber and Little Axe, then choose breaks, loops and stops to record and replay your creation. Dub selector 2 is a screen of singing daisies, and selector 5 delivers a reggae Pac Man-like gobbler. The site also links to other offbeat sites like Planet Dirt and the charming Mrs. Miniver, a "coolhunter" of international renown who can spot trends at 30 paces. Right now, she loves henna and lavender hedges. http://www.infinitewheel.com/infinite_wheel.html Teaching with Historic Places The mind-numbing drill of memorizing dates is banished at Teaching With Historic Places, where history students read letters from Civil War soldiers to understand the Battle of Gettysburg or design and market a new car after studying Thomas Edison's "Invention Factory." Ancient ruins, Presidents' homes, main streets and battlefields are brought to the classroom via real properties listed in the National Park Service's registry of historic places, using primary source material to enliven social studies, geography, civics and other subjects. A rich mine for teachers, the site offers free downloadable lesson plans, teachers' guides, worksheets and tips on how to lead students to unearth local history in their own communities. http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/twhp/ SHORT TAKES The Skeptic's Dictionary Disbelievers will find a home at the Skeptic's Dictionary, a comprehensive critical survey of questionable therapies, eccentric beliefs and dangerous delusions, from werewolves to Yeti, urine therapy to unicorns. <><><><> Famous Monkeys Through History Gordo, Able and Baker stand in history beside Neil, Buzz and Alan - though the former may drag their knuckles on the ground. Famous Monkeys Through History celebrates the first three apes in space and other super-smart, super-famous or just super-lucky primates - like Hinko, the rare Japanese Macaque who lives with Cameron Diaz. http://www.ape-o-naut.org/famous/ <><><><> Matthias the Tinkerer Step into the world of a 21st century Tom Edison, who invents pipe organs, marble machines and other contraptions in a snow-covered inventor's workshop deep in the woods, paints and photographs the forest scenes around his workshop and has a day job as manager of firmware development for portable digital radio products. http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/index.html Enjoy
the newsletter? Tell your friends to subscribe by sending an email to: The Hip Surgery Music Guide Commuters who find themselves veering toward an oncoming semi when the car radio plays Sheryl Crow's Soak Up the Sun for the 6th time in an hour might want to get some preventive surgery at the Hip Surgery Music Guide. Innovative, unconventional and downright bizarre artists and their performances -- spoken word discs, comedy albums, novelty music, celebrity and exploitation releases -- take center stage. The site includes discographies and links to buying in-print albums (and track listings for out-of-print recordings) of such artists as the Bonzo Dada Dog Band, England's answer to Frank Zappa, and the dark and twisted Ween, whose psychedelic sea chanteys have earned a cult following. http://www.hipsurgerymusic.com/ Postcard Tour Today we carry PDFs and cell phones, but whether on a road trip upstate or a world tour, what traveler can resist buying a handful of postcards to send to the folks back home? America As It Was: A Tour of the USA in Vintage Postcards captures such old-time vistas as Hollywood Boulevard in the 20s, Colorado's Pikes Peak Highway in 1939, and 1908 Baton Rouge. Like an early 20th century cross-country road trip, the collections from genealogical societies, universities, libraries and private collectors invite you to click on a state and city, from Birmingham, Alabama to Laramie, Wyoming, to view postcards as if you'd saved every "Wish you were here" card you and your family had ever received. http://patsabin.com/VintagePostcards/ Cat and Girl "If selling babies is wrong, I don't want to be right," says Cat, co-star of the weekly comic strip Cat and Girl. This is no Garfield, but a funny and strangely sweet weekly walk on the wry side with a girl and her cat, who stumble through life with the help of their friendly neighbor, Death - who has his own comic strip. Called by creator Dorothy Gambrell a "metastatic cultural force," new strips appear each Monday but visitors can view all past strips on the site. Odd cat and girl gear is also for sale on the site, including stapled-together packets of photocopied comic strips and a homemade Chinese version, "printed red on yellow paper, and generally very confusing." **********Advertisement************** THE COOLEST COLOR BUSINESS CARDS These cards will make you proud to have a business. Create, personalize, edit, print and order a unique one of a kind business card. http://www.ebusiness-cards.com ******************************** Robert's Rules of Order "Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty." Thus spake General Henry M. Robert, whose name has become synonymous with the orderly, if complicated, conduct of public meetings, reproduced at Bartleby.com's Robert's Rules of Order. In 1876, Robert set out to bring order to the universe - starting with the American Congress - and published his Pocket Manual of Rules of Order. It stuck, and here visitors can find the complete rules and a subject index to learn, finally, what the heck a quorum is. National Security Archive Seekers of the unvarnished truth about international affairs might want to start at the National Security Archive, founded in 1985 by journalists, scholars and a public interest law firm who used the Freedom of Information Act to acquire what has grown into the world's largest non-governmental library of declassified documents. Using the latest digital indexing technology, the holdings include more than 2 million pages in over 200 collections, easily searchable by keyword. The physical archive in DC handles more than 2,500 info requests yearly, but the web site makes it easy to get the inside scoop on US decision-making from original documents, read news on such past policies as our inaction during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, or join the Archive e-mail list. http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/ 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 ~Lennon World - The Most Comprehensive John Lennon Site. ~NodeBlue.net - Affordable Website Monitoring ~John Stoller, CPA - Making IRS problems disappear. ~TV
Classics - Retro TV for Me. \\
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is the ability to go from failure to Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) oooO--------(
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