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The Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter #243 4/24/3 |
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Welcome to the 243rd 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: - Apollo
Theater: Show Time! ~~~~~ Cool Tricks and Trinkets is made possible by~~~~~~ A1 Discount Hotels (an affiliate of Hotels.com) offer discount rooms in over 20,000 hotels worldwide with choices from budget to 5 star hotels. Bookmark our site for you next trip. Group and Corporate Travel Services (contact info@a1-discount-hotels.com) http://www.a1-discount-hotels.com Visit us online or call our operators at 888-511-5743 <Editor's Note> A1 Discount Hotels is our primary business and source of income. You can support Tricks and Trinkets, by checking us out the next time you're planning a trip. For personal travel needs, write me at info@a1-discount-hotels.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Apollo Theater: Show Time! "Where stars are born and legends are made" can only be the legendary Apollo Theater in the heart of New York City, the launching pad for emerging black and Latino talent, from legends like Ella Fitzgerald and James Brown to relative newcomers Lauryn Hill and Jaheim. The Apollo has an online home at Apollotheater.com, where web users worldwide can visit the historic showcase of American music, from jazz to be-bop, disco to hip-hop. Learn about the Apollo's recent dramatic rebirth, from opening a major new Broadway-style musical to headlining major shows with artists from Tony Bennett to The Strokes. At Featured Events, learn about the new syndicated TV show, "The Apollo Theater Presents"; the nearly 70-year old Amateur Night where new talent gets "one mic, one stage, one chance" every Wednesday; and details about the box office, renting the Apollo for a (big) event, and backstage tours. Tech Tales They laugh, they cry, they save your butt - and they tell their tales at Tech Tales.com, where the Help Desk folks who finally answer the phone after your eternity on hold trade stories about the scrapes us non-techies get ourselves into. Tech
support staff are invited to submit favorite stories, like the woman caller
who, when told to "right click" on her mouse kept writing the
word "click" on her mouse. The month of March 2003 has nearly
30 stories alone, or click to any month going back to 1997 to find out
if we're learning anything about these machines. In 1997, for example,
when a help desk operator asked a caller if she had a mouse on her desk,
the caller replied "Thank God, no, this is a very clean office."
We're making progress, Accidental Obituaries The old joke about the octogenarian who reads the obituaries each morning to make sure he's still alive rang a little too true when CNN accidentally gave Internet viewers a peek at how the network would note the passing of Vice President Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan and other prominent figures. Preparing obits in advance is standard practice, but visitors to The Smoking Gun.com can read celebrity obits that were not just written, but also published, in advance. Once the glitch was caught and exposed, it was yanked by CNN in 20 minutes flat - but that was long enough for Smoking Gun to grab pages of the premature obituaries that had been housed in a publicly accessible area of the CNN server. In addition to Cheney and Reagan, read the pre-death farewells to Fidel Castro, Bob Hope, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela and Gerald Ford. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/cnnobit1.html SHORT TAKES Tax Tales It's April, and Taxgaga.com lets you sock it to the IRS by submitting jokes and horror stories at the IRS' expense. Each month, the visitor who submits the best Tax Horror Story wins $100. Those who aren't in the mood for laughing can check out the latest tax news, use online calculators and find a wealth of info related to that five letter word: taxes. http://www.taxgaga.com/dir-taxhaha.html
The Teddy Bear Museum celebrates teddy's arrival at the start of the 20th century to his continuing popularity at the online home of the museum, located in a 16th century building in Stratford, England. See photos of famous bears and heritage bears or shop the bears for sale like, naturally, William Shakesbeare. http://www.theteddybearmuseum.com
Easy Distinction is the essential field guide to Fox blondes, a handy way to tell if you're looking at the real E.D. Hill or another species of blonde also known to inhabit the Fox News Channel. Tips tell you how to distinguish among the fair-haired ladies of the Fox blonde brigade. http://homepage.mac.com/dzinkin/ed-hill/distinction.html Enjoy
the newsletter? Tell your friends to subscribe by sending an email to: Hot Hand in Sports A hot-and-cold basketball player might be called a "streak shooter," or a baseball player a "streak hitter." Professor Alan Reifman of the University of Michigan is both a sports fan and academic statistician who studies whether such patterns of streakiness are anything more than mere chance. At Hot Hand in Sports, the prof shares the knowledge of 15 years of "hot hand" research, giving the average sports fan something more intriguing to think about during the game than commercials and half-time shows. The site shares archives of analyses and features current announcements, like major league baseball teams who seem to be "going hot" after cold starts. Vast links include standard fare like ESPN.com, but zero in on articles about streakiness. More unusual links include Vassar College's calculator that tells the probability, for example, of a team that shoots a seasonal free-throw rate of .67 hitting 12-of-30. http://www.hs.ttu.edu/hdfs3390/hothand.htm Classical Music Archives Classical music fans will hear a symphony and enjoy non-stop encores at Classical Music Archives, claiming to be the largest classical music site on the Web and supporting its claim with an index of 15,171 WMA and MP3 files from 798 main composers, from the 17th century forward. Visitors
can hear live recordings in streamed WMA format and paying subscribers
can hear HiFi MP3 files to download and save. Still more audio files are
available via less-satisfying MIDI files. Beyond audio files, the site
offers composer biographies, a timeline, a 24/7 radio station and an excellent
learning center for newcomers to the site or to classical music. For $25
per year, subscribers enjoy extra goodies, like downloading ZIP collections,
access to "one-click" concerts, extra file downloads and http://www.classicalarchives.com/ PC Magazine Top 100 Web Sites Whether incredibly useful or incredibly silly, the sites named in PC Magazine's annual list of 100 Top Web Sites have a way of growing on you. See the list at PC Magazine.com, which focuses on the sites that you may never have heard of or discovered on your own in the dense jungle that is today's Web. Visitors may not love every site, listed in seven categories from Computing to Lifestyle to Travel, but they're guaranteed to find plenty of jewels they didn't know they couldn't live without. There's something for everyone, from Big Fun Toys for cool toys like Moon Shoes and the Sigmund Freud Action Figure; to Benefits Check-Up with info on 1,100 programs for older adults in all 50 states. And check-out PC Mag's Top 100 Classics, where the best of the past remain the best, year after year. http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,4148,7488,00.asp
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Mesopotamian Monsters The British Museum illuminates Mesopotamia at Gods, Goddesses, Demons and Monsters, where visitors can meet the beings who mere mortals believed controlled their universe, from rivers and trees to bread and pottery. Gods and goddesses protected each Mesopotamian city, living in temples built in city centers, while demons were created by gods with human bodies and animal or bird heads, and monsters were a mixture of animals and birds. Read the Mesopotamian myth about how and why humans were created. Explore the different gods, goddesses, demons and monsters of Mesopotamia. Or get interactive by taking the challenge at "The Cities of the Gods," a Shockwave game where visitors follow clues on a tablet to get the gods home in one piece and to the correct temple after a storm has rent asunder their statues - all under pressure of festival time. Alternative Journalism From a story about two Iraqi musicians who struggle to preserve their music school in the chaos of Baghdad today, to an article that accuses TV's "Married by America" of mocking what's actually good about arranged marriages, AlterNet.org is a source for independent and alternative journalism. A project
of the Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated
to strengthening alternative views, the online magazine mixes news, opinion
and investigative journalism about the environment, the drug war, sexual
politics, culture and policy with more than 7,000 stories from over 200
sources. The talent is provided by executive editor Don Hazen, former
publisher of Mother Jones magazine, and writers from the Village Voice,
Dissent and the Nation. Read featured stories or search the archives by
picking a month and year for a list of stories. In April 2003, for 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 ~ PixelPuddle - Weekly Photography
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Without it, Buddhas and wooden clogs are only pieces of wood. ~Zen Saying
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