Archive for February, 2002

I love the tubcat site, if only for the fact that I like freakishly fat animals. What I don’t like about the site is that it’s been designed to look like one of those “Mahir” kind of pages, with a blindingly poor choice of colours, bad english and over-the-top spinning icons. So it’s made by a moron, right? Wrong. The domain is registered to someone at 4104 24th Street in Silicon City itself, San Francisco, which most likely places the maker in the SOMA district (a semi-scary neighborhood where many dotcoms were housed before the Crash). I can’t be 100% sure, of course, but I still think we’re being conned. In a gentle, furry kind of way.

Wait there just a minute. Why, with the chances of hitting the jackpot somewhere in the region of 14,000,000 to 1, do you do the lottery, week after week? Why? There are plenty of places where the statistics are weighed more favourably towards the participant, like WinToiletpaper.com, where you can, er… win toilet paper. Seriously.

So, you thought Britain’s brightest youth spent most of their valuable study time drinking subsidised beer in student bars, did you? Playing ever-more rediculous drinking games before rolling home half-cut and half-asleep, picking up stray traffic signs on the way? Of course, you couldn’t be more wrong.

What’s interesting about virtual pox isn’t the fact that someone has built a site based on the premise of sending illnesses via email, but that they’ve gone to a fair amount of trouble to gather together an impressive list of ailments: acne, athlete’s foot, black eye, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, cold sores, dandruff, diarrhoea, fish-odour syndrome, genital herpes, gonorrhoea, halitosis, nose bleed, pinkeye, pubic lice, rabies, scabies, syphilis, tennis elbow, tooth ache and warts — there’re all here.

Surely no-one is so stupid that they need help naming their pets? Especially with suggestions like Boneprone, Magnificat and Snootchie Pootchie. Pet-naming is easy. You call cats “Kitty.” Dogs are “Rover” or “Spot.” And goldfish should always be called “Copper Gavin.” Simple.

“The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.” Well, that’s OK, I guess. It’s only a sex offenders register, after all. I mean, it’s not like mistaken identity is ever a problem, is it?

“I came to the conclusion that Alcoholics Anonymous is really a cult religion, one that passes off its proselytizing under the guise of alcoholism treatment, in just the same way as the Church of Scientology sells its cultish psycho-babble and techno-babble nonsense as self-improving psychotherapy.” The Orange Papers is one man’s attempt to debunk the “myth” of the AA 12-step programme. I know he’s not alone in thinking like this (in fact there’s a very well reasoned argument along similar lines in Disinfomation’s “You Are Being Lied To” book), but why is it that so many of these people with obvious chips on their shoulders (however genuine) have websites where the design and choice of colours immediately casts doubt upon their sanity?

How to have fun today: First of all, order some disposable underpants. Secondly, take a photograph of yourself wearing said garment, and submit it to a site that’ll display the picture online. You’ll be amongst friends.

Don’t let this happen to your cat. Stop the danger. Close the seat.

Guinness have nicked the “Am I Hot Or Not” idea for a feature on their Guinness World Records site. It works…