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The Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter #275 12/4/3 |
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Welcome to the 275th issue of the Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter offering weekly insights into new, cool, useful, fun, unusual and interesting sites on the Internet. Currently there are over 170,00 subscribers.
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The peer-to-peer file-sharing technology that brought college kids free music downloads is delivering long distance telephone service. At Skype.com, learn about the super advanced and super simple technology known as Skype, offering free unlimited worldwide phone calls with superior sound quality. Easy to use without complex configurations, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology was popularized by such file-sharing applications as Napster and Kazaa, the world's top file-sharing software application. In October, Skype launched an enhanced Beta version with language support for Spanish, Finnish, Polish and Romanian and improved text messaging, call-quality, network reliability and support for USB phones. Skype is downloadable for free on the site, where users create their own Friends List that shows when a Skype friend is online and ready to talk. Greatest Album Covers Never Made Since 1939 when Alex Steinweiss, a designer at Columbia Records, came up with the idea of replacing plain labels on album covers with original art, album cover art from The Beatles' enigmatic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Blue Note Records has been as treasured as the music inside. With a project in which 100 graphic and fine artists were asked to create the definitive album cover of their favorite recording artist, The Art Rocks.com resurrects that lost art. Each artist chose a music icon from the 1940s to today, from rock to soul, Buddy Holly to Marilyn Manson. The results are displayed here, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, are going on tour and have been collected in an illustrated catalogue. Visit the Gallery to see the covers, check Tour for tour dates, or shop the Store. Appreciating Bernard Herrmann Though never as well-known or popularized as Sondheim or Gershwin, American composer Bernard Herrmann was one of the most influential film composers of all time. Herrmann scored such film classics as Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Psycho and Taxi Driver. Bernardherrmann.org seeks to keep his contributions and memory alive through interviews, biographies, presentations, photo tours and transcripts. Find vast information about Herrmann's career and contributions, which spanned the 1930s to the 1970s, including historical reviews, FAQs, concert and event dates, or join one of many discussion forums to chat about Herrmann and his legacy. http://www.bernardherrmann.org/
Send a love declaration or a Christmas wish sung by Judy Garland, Lou Reed, Christina Aguilara or many other artists at Let Them Sing It For You. Just type your message and the email address of your friend or lover, let the automated system search the database of sung words in pop lyrics, and then send your singing message. http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/p1/src/sing/default.asp <><><><> Structures Slideshow London's Tower Bridge, the Budapest Palace, the Great Wall and other international structures slide past to a musical interlude of George Strait's "I Just Want To Dance With You" at Cal's Gallery Plus, a structure slide show; no gimmicks or glitz, just pretty buildings set to music. http://www.wtv-zone.com/cal555/asil/framespg.html <><><><> Operation Slaps At the Hand to Hand Combat Facility, the schoolground game of "slaps" is revisited via virtual combat, where users choose a character then defend themselves with X and Z keys and win by making their opponent cross his or her pain threshold on the pain meter. http://www.operationslaps.com/ Enjoy
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Those who savor the wicked pleasure of watching some klutz knock himself out on the dance floor will find hours of nasty fun at Watch Me Dance.com, where the Danceman exposes his bizarre gyrations to web visitors. In 45 episodes of truly awful dancing, the Danceman flings, flails and flounders on the dance floor, mutilating hip-hop, boogie and shuffle in routines like the Digital Groove Monkey and Bling Bling Till You Sing. Visitors may not pick up any moves they want to take into the club on Saturday night, but watching Danceman may give a few graceless dancers the courage to get out there and get their groove on, in full confidence that they are not the worst dancer in the world. The Quilt Index American quilts are a material cultural record, and the history of quilting and vast collections have been gathered at the Quilt Index. The site offers images of quilts and documentary info that can be found in public museums and in library and private collections throughout the U.S., as well as bibliographies of materials relevant to quilt study and finding aids to help researchers locate hard-to-find quilt-related materials. The site presents quilts inventoried over the past 20 years by quilt documentation projects in Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan and Illinois. Featured Collections highlights such treasures as the Kentucky Quilt Project, a reference on more than 1,000 quilts. Browse by Collection, Time Period, Style/Techniques, Purpose/Function or Location. A Featured Quilt highlights a beauty, like Michigan's late 19th century Double Irish Chain quilt. The Grid Café Scientists imagine several million desktop PCs and workstations, mainframes, supercomputers, and data vaults all over the world, belonging to students, doctors and secretaries, and imagine connecting them to create a tool that acts as a single, huge and powerful computer. The Grid Café explains the vision known as The Grid. The Grid is still a work in progress being developed by hundreds of researchers and software engineers around the world, seeking nearly infinite storage space and computing power to collaborate with distant colleagues, safely share resources, data, procedures and results. On the site, learn what this sprawling computer system could do and how it works, view demos and join forums to discuss Grid projects, progress and potential. http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/ **********Advertisement**************
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The President Calling Three American presidents, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, bugged their White House offices and tapped their telephones, leaving behind thousands of secretly recorded conversations. American Radio Works.com lets visitors eavesdrop on these presidential telephone calls to hear how each man used one-on-one politics to shape history. Hear the tapes, read background material on the historical issues, read the transcripts. The recordings of JFK, the first president to secretly tape his calls regularly, show a man of both charm and limitations. The 9,500 calls LBJ secretly taped are a revealing record of his character and presidency, from Selma to Vietnam. Nixon taped more conversations than any president in history, and his recordings show both an astute politician and an isolated man negotiating one crisis after another. http://www.americanradioworks.org/features/prestapes/ Notorious Portraits Art is not always a pretty picture. At Artcyclopedia's Notorious Portraits, art's capacity to scandalize and outrage the public is revealed through portraiture of grotesques and horrors, illness and deformity, madmen and superstars. From the first Realist and Impressionist works exhibited at Paris Salons through the Armory Show introducing America to Picasso, see the art that defied convention by showing naked men and women in racy situations in the 19th century; Marcel DuChamp's shocking 1913 "Nude Descending Staircase"; over-flattering portraits of such luminaries as Napoleon; and such grotesqueries as the Tartars placing corpses of plague victims on catapults and launching them over the city walls of Caffa. http://www.artcyclopedia.com/featuredarticle-2000-11-port1.html 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 ~UKOrbit the UK Shopping and Information Directory
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