'The Simpsons' Top 20 Episodes
Celebrating 20 Seasons of 'The Simpsons'
By Nancy Basile, About.com
.To celebrate 20 seasons on the air, I'm presenting my list of the best 20 episodes of The Simpsons1.
Choosing the 20 best episodes of The Simpsons, though, is very difficult since there are far more than 20 that are just wonderful. Some I love because I laugh so hard, and some I love because they touch my heart. I also tried to pick episodes that focused on a variety of characters, though most of them are about Homer Simpson. Finally, ranking my picks from best to worst is pointless, as one episode isn't really any better than the other.
So, in alphabetical order, here are my favorite 20 episodes of The Simpsons.
"Bart the Daredevil"
2Twentieth Century FoxIn "Bart the Daredevil," Bart embarks on a life of death-defying feats when he sees a daredevil perform at a Monster Truck Rally. This episode makes my list mainly because of Homer's long, painful fall down the cliff... twice. "Bart the Daredevil," like other early episodes, isn't as much about Homer being a doofus, as a father whose trying his best, fails, and then redeems himself.
•Air Date: Season 2, 7F06
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 2 Episode Guide3 and The Simpsons Season 2 DVD Review4.
."Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk"
5Twentieth Century FoxIn "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk" (translated means "Burns Selling That Power Station") Mr. Burns sells the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant to a group of Germans. While I enjoyed the humor of Homer and the other workers either sucking up to or alienating their new German bosses, the best part of the episode has nothing to do with corporate takeovers or job loss: Homer in the Land of Chocolate. Homer imagines a Land of Chocolate, in which he prances through, eating even a passing dog. He gets excited about a 50% off sale, when the chocolate is all free. Who wouldn't love the Land of Chocolate?
•Air Date: Season 3, 8F09
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 3 Episode Guide6 and The Simpsons Season 3 DVD Review7.
."Cape Feare"
8Twentieth Century FoxIn "Cape Feare," Sideshow Bob is at his devious best. The Simpson family enters the FBI's Witness Relocation Program to escape Sideshow Bob when he is paroled from prison. But Sideshow Bob, determined to get to Bart, follows them, which leads to a final showdown on a houseboat. Bart is only saved when his last request before dying is to hear Sideshow Bob sing the entire score to H.M.S. Pinafore. Sideshow Bob replies, with his usual wit, "Very well, Bart. I shall send you to heaven before I send you to hell." Who else but Kelsey Grammer could play Sideshow Bob, with his rich baritone and elegant elocution?
•Air Date: Season 5, 9F22
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 5 Episode Guide9 and The Simpsons Season 5 DVD Review10.
."Duffless"
11Twentieth Century FoxI can't think of another primetime comedy that appeals to all ages where alcoholism is the punchline. In "Duffless," Marge asks Homer to give up beer (not "deer," beer) for a month after he's arrested while driving drunk. We see Homer attending AA-like meetings (Ned Flanders drank schnapps!) and riding Lisa's bike when his driver's license is revoked. The subplot involving Lisa using Bart as a hamster substitute in her science experiment brings home the rivalry between syblings. This is a well-rounded, hysterical episode, ending with Homer choosing Marge over beer.
•Air Date: Season 4, 9F14
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 4 Episode Guide12 and The Simpsons Season 4 DVD Review13.
."A Fish Called Selma"
14Twentieth Century Fox"A Fish Called Selma" showcases the considerable talent of Phil Hartman as Troy McClure. Troy McClure's agent (Jeff Goldblum) encourages Troy to be seen in public with a woman in order to boost his career. (There are rumors he does strange things with fish!) Troy starts dating Selma, and it pays off. Eventually they marry, but Selma, who really is in love, realizes that it isn't working. But during Troy's comeback, one of the best musical scenes of all Simpsons episodes has McClure starring in Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off! Sing with me, "I hate every ape I see, From chimpan-a to chimpan-zee."
•Air Date: Season 7, 3F15
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 7 Episode Guide15 and The Simpsons Season 7 DVD Review16.
."Homer Alone"
17Twentieth Century FoxMarge freaks out from the stress of taking care of her family, and sends herself to Rancho Relaxo. Lisa and Bart stay with Selma and Patty, and Homer is left with Maggie. I can relate to Marge's breakdown. I, too, fantasize about ordering alcohol and a hot fudge sundae from room service while I'm relishing a bubbly bath. I also belly laugh at Bart giving his aunt a bunion rubdown. Yecch. But the scene I enjoy the most is after Maggie has crawled away from home, and Homer can't find her. He phones the missing children hotline. When he's put on hold he hears Hall and Oates singing, "Baby Come Back." Hysterical!
•Air Date: Season 3, 8F14
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 3 Episode Guide18 and The Simpsons Season 3 DVD Review19.
."Homer: Bad Man"
20Twentieth Century Fox"Homer: Bad Man" originally aired in 1994, and sexual harassment was a hot issue in America. Only on The Simpsons could we watch an episode that begins at a candy convention and ends with Homer narrowly proving his innocence in allegedly sexually harassing his babysitter by showing a video made by a Scot named Groundskeeper Willie. (Homer only wanted to grab the rare Gummi Venus de Milo, which was stuck to her behind.) The end of "Homer Bad Man" provides great opportunities for trivia and the pause button: TV magazine Rock Bottom's fast-scrolling list of corrections.
•Air Date: Season 6, 2F06
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 6 Episode Guide21 and The Simpsons Season 6 DVD Review22.
."Homer the Great"
23Twentieth Century Fox"Homer the Great" is ridiculous, musical and features a wonderful guest star. Homer is inducted into the Stonecutters, a secret and exclusive group who have powerful means and influence. My favorite things about "Homer the Great:" The Stonecutters song (We do! We do!); the sly joke about Number One referring to the leader, who is played by Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard from Star Trek: Next Generation, (stay with me) who referred to his second in command as Number Two; the birthmark that declares Homer is the Chosen One; and the secret tunnel that allows Homer to zoom to work, bypassing a huge traffic jam.
•Air Date: Season 6, 2F09
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 6 Episode Guide24 and The Simpsons Season 6 DVD Review25.
."Hurricane Neddy"
26Twentieth Century FoxIn "Hurricane Neddy," Ned Flanders' home is the only one destroyed by a hurricane. It shakes his faith in God and sends him to the psych. ward. I love the crazy, dilapidated home Springfieldians put together for Ned, including the hallway that gets narrower and shorter, like something out of Alice in Wonderland. I also love seeing Ned go off his rocker, giving his neighbors a piece of his mind. It's one of the only times we've seen him crack. The best scene, though, is the flashback to his childhood, where we get to see his beatnik parents.
•Air Date: Season 8, 4F07
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 8 Episode Guide27 and The Simpsons Season 8 DVD Review28.
."The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show"
29Twentieth Century FoxAnother favorite episode of mine from the eighth season is "The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show." In this episode, Homer is hired as the voice of a new character on the "Itchy and Scratchy Show" named Poochie. Though Homer, and his writers, try to make the character cool and hip, Poochie is rejected. The entire story, though, is also played out as a new character, Roy, moves into the Simpson house. As Poochie is canceled and leaves Itchy and Scratchy to visit another planet, Roy leaves the Simpsons. The entire episode is a tongue-in-cheek take on the business of making cartoons.
•Air Date: Season 8, 4F12
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 8 Episode Guide30 and The Simpsons Season 8 DVD Review31.
"Last Exit to Springfield"
Twentieth Century Fox"Last Exit to Springfield" finds Homer Simpson the head of the union at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Because Lisa needs braces, he fights for the employees keep their dental plan. The episode is filled with great moments, such as Ralph Wiggum being shown "The Big Book of British Smiles" to get him to brush his teeth. Then there's Homer's "train of thought" when he hears Lenny shouting, "Dental plan!" and then Marge, "Lisa needs braces!" Mr. Burns asks, "Who is that firebrand, Smithers?" Why, it's Homer Simpson, Union Boss.
•Air Date: Season 4, 9F15
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 4 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 4 DVD Review.
"The Last Temptation of Homer"
Twentieth Century FoxIn "The Last Temptation of Homer," Michelle Pfeiffer guest stars as Mindy Simmons, the new employee at the power plant. Homer falls for her because she's gorgeous, loves donuts and burps frequently. In the end, Homer realizes he loves Marge too much to cheat on her. Michelle Pfeiffer is so elegant and beautiful, that the irony of her playing a burping love interest for Homer Simpson is funny enough. Also, the thorny issue of adultery is tackled in a way only The Simpsons could. Though Homer is contemplating cheating, he's a sympathetic and almost innocent character.
•Air Date: Season 5, 1F07
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 5 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 5 DVD Review.
."Life on the Fast Lane"
Twentieth Century FoxWhen Homer gives Marge a bowling ball as a birthday present, Marge vows to take up lessons. (At Bowl-a-rama, she declines a lane saying, "No thanks, I'm just here out of spite.") But she finds herself attracted to the charming instructor, Jacques (Albert Brooks). On her way to his apartment, she changes her mind, and my favorite scene of the episode takes place: In a parody of An Officer and a Gentleman, Marge marches through the power plant to find Homer. Then Homer announces, "I'm going to the back seat of my car, with the woman I love, and I won't be back for ten minutes!"
•Air Date: Season 1, 7G11
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 1 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 1 DVD Review.
."Marge vs. Monorail"
Twentieth Century Fox"Marge vs. Monorail" has many scenes and moments that are considered classic by Simpsons fans. For instance, Lyle Lanley's Music Man-inspired song and dance at the town hall meeting. Leonard Nimoy (Star Trek) serving as Grand Marshall while confused Mayor Quimby exlaims, "May the force be with you!" And the line my husband frequently quotes to me, much to my chagrin, occurs when Homer is considering what to use as an anchor for the runaway train. As he is regarding Bart, Bart says, "Think harder, Homer." There are too many sight gags to list, and seeing so many of Springfield's characters is always fun.
•Air Date: Season 4, 9F10
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 4 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 4 DVD Review.
."Mr. Plow"
Twentieth Century FoxIn "Mr. Plow," unlike other episodes, Homer starts a business that becomes successful. But his snow plow business is so successful, his friend Barney starts one, too. The competition becomes too fierce, but in the end, their friendship proves to be more important than money. The crowning glory of "Mr. Plow" is the jingle Homer composes for his late-night commercial. What fan can't sing, "Call Mr. Plow, That's my name, That name again, Is Mr. Plow?" Who needs Linda Ronstadt?
•Air Date: Season 4, 9F07
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 4 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 4 DVD Review.
."Natural Born Kissers"
Twentieth Century FoxHomer and Marge re-discover passion when they start making love in places where they could get caught. There aren't many couples on TV who work hard at staying together. It's heartening to see even if a cartoon couple dealing with the same issues everyone else does. My favorite scene is the one at the miniature golf course, with Ned, Maude and everyone else poking into the windmill, trying to retrieve a golf ball. Then, Homer and Marge flee, escaping in a hot air balloon. But during the ride, Homer winds up hanging onto the rope, being flown over Springfield in the buff. Naked Homer Simpson is always funny.
•Air Date: Season 9, 5F18
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 9 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 9 DVD Review.
."Radioactive Man"
Twentieth Century FoxMilhouse is one of my favorite characters, and he gets more than his 15 minutes in "Radioactive Man." In this episode, Milhouse wins the part of Fallout Boy in the Radioactive Man movie that's being made in Springfield. But Milhouse finds that movie-making isn't much fun. "Radioactive Man" focuses on the friendship between Bart and Milhouse, which is endearing and touching. The episode also pokes fun at Hollywood very effectively. To top it off, funny favorite characters Rainier Wolfcastle ("My eyes! The goggles do nothing!") and Lionel Hutz (Phil Hartman) are also in the episode.
•Air Date: Season 7, 2F17
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 7 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 7 DVD Review.
."Rosebud"
Twentieth Century Fox"Rosebud" focuses on Mr. Burns, a favorite character on The Simpsons. Mr. Burns searches for a stuffed bear from his childhood, Bobo. Back in season five, Homer wasn't as crass and shallow. When he discovers Maggie's bear is Bobo, he lets her keep it instead of taking $1 million from Mr. Burns. Though Mr. Burns makes Homer's life miserable, including depriving him of TV and beer, Homer never gives in. Finally, sweet Maggie gives back the bear. Also in this episode, we begin to learn Smithers' true feelings for Mr. Burns, and suspicions about his sexuality are, shall we say, aroused.
•Air Date: Season 5, 1F01
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 5 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 5 DVD Review.
."Selma's Choice"
Twentieth Century FoxIn "Selma's Choice," the family goes to the funeral of Aunt Gladys, who, in her video will, warns Selma and Patty that she should marry and have children before it's too late. Selma takes it to heart, but when she takes Bart and Lisa to Duff Gardens, she changes her mind. "Selma's Choice" is an example of an episode of The Simpsons dealing with real life issues, big ones, in a humorous and touching way. Scene after scene is full of jokes, from the funeral home, to Selma's experience with the dating service, to the entire disastrous visit to Duff Gardens.
•Air Date: Season 4, 9F11
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 4 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 4 DVD Review.
."A Streetcar Named Marge"
Twentieth Century Fox"A Streetcar Named Marge" not only showcases the musical talents of composer Alf Clausen and the singing talents of the cast, but also the buff upper body of Ned Flanders. Who knew! Why this episode? Let me count the ways. Jon Lovitz as director Llewelyn Sinclair. Apu ending his scene as the newspaper boy on a high, sad note. Maggie's covert liberation of everyone's pacifiers at the Ayn Rand School for Tots. Genius all!
•Air Date: Season 4, 8F18
•For more details, check out The Simpsons Season 4 Episode Guide and The Simpsons Season 4 DVD Review.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Friday, June 13, 2008
Cycling
A car collides into cyclists participating in a race in Mexico's northern border city of Matamoros, Sunday June 1, 2008. At least one person was killed and 14 injured when a driver slammed into a bicycle race.(AP Photo/Jose Fidelino Vera Hernandez)
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Got a manuscript? Publishing now a snap
By CANDICE CHOI, Associated Press WriterWed Jan 2, 8:29 AM ET
Getting a book published isn't the rarefied literary feat it once was.
New printing technologies are making published authors of legions of aspiring writers, a population that once toiled for years on tomes that might not see the light of day.
The vast majority of today's instant authors may sell only a few dozen copies of their books, but on-demand publishing is letting thousands realize the ambitions of generations of would-be writers.
On-demand publisher Lulu.com has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November. Retail giant Amazon.com got into the game this summer, offering on-demand publishing through its CreateSpace, which was already letting filmmakers and musicians burn DVDs and CDs.
The programs are easy for just about anyone to use: Authors select basic options, including the book's size, binding style and paperback or hardcover. After the manuscript is uploaded, users go to a page where they select a font and design the book's cover. Even after a book has been printed they can fix typos for later printings.
Unlike vanity publishing, in which aspiring authors pay to have their books run on traditional presses, on-demand publishing doesn't have to cost writers a cent.
Publishers produce books only after they're ordered and paid for, which eliminates overruns and the need for warehousing. They charge for printing, or take a cut of sales, and they set up payment systems, online bookstores and Web marketing tools.
Some authors publish on-demand books in hopes of catching the eye of a major publisher. But not all writers who use on-demand publishers aspire to write the great American novel.
The system also allows small businesses to print high-end brochures, screenwriters to shop their scripts around and others to assemble wedding and other special-event books for friends and family.
"I'm just amazed I have the book in my hand," said Catherine Dyer, a 49-year-old Atlanta resident who co-authored a cookbook with her four sisters through Lulu.com. "I knew trying to get a traditional publisher would take ages. With this, I knew at the onset I could have a book in my hand."
"You Want Me To Bring a Dish?" — the sisters' 104-page cookbook — sells for $22.76. They've ordered about 100 copies to stock stores around Atlanta and are promoting the book through local signings and radio appearances.
Dyer's already brainstorming ideas for a spinoff.
"Cause I know I can get it published," she said.
The challenge for authors now is getting the word out about their work.
"It's all about the marketing and distribution. We realized early on that that was the bigger challenge," said Eileen Gittins, founder and CEO of Blurb.com, an on-demand publisher with 11,000 available self-published titles.
To help authors, Blurb automatically creates widgets that can be dragged and dropped onto other Web sites.
What makes self-publishing viable is the Internet, which gives writers instant access to audiences that share their same interests, no matter how obscure. Authors also use online communities such as blogs, MySpace.com and others to market their works.
"It used to be, if you created a book about an obscure topic, your audience was limited. Now maybe you're part of an online gardening community, and you already have an audience of 5,000 who care deeply about roses," Gittins said.
For most aspiring authors, a book deal with a major publishing house remains the ultimate dream, however.
Big companies like Random House Inc. or HarperCollins Publishers can promote authors on a national scale and get titles in major bookstores. Professional editors also polish copy in the traditional publishing world, a step that can transform a manuscript into a best-seller or perhaps a masterpiece.
"The value and cachet of being with a larger house is still something authors value," said Tina Jordan, vice president of the Association of American Publishers.
Users of Amazon.com's CreateSpace are listed the same way as literary giants online. Keyword searches will pull up self-published books along with those of Grisham, Shakespeare, Hemingway or Rowling.
The writers are willing to live with drawbacks that would drive a purist crazy. Printing quality can vary, with images possibly emerging denser or brighter in some copies. Some in the industry say the quality of on-demand publishing has improved greatly and few would be able to distinguish the difference from those printed on traditional presses. And on-demand books are priced according to their length, making them pricier than books printed en masse.
But Gittins said shoppers are willing to pay a little more for a book tailored to a specific audience.
"It's really an opportunity for people to get their creative content out there to millions of people," said Stacey Hurwitz, spokeswoman for CreateSpace.
______
On the Net:
http://www.Lulu.com
http://www.Blurb.com
http://www.createspace.com
Getting a book published isn't the rarefied literary feat it once was.
New printing technologies are making published authors of legions of aspiring writers, a population that once toiled for years on tomes that might not see the light of day.
The vast majority of today's instant authors may sell only a few dozen copies of their books, but on-demand publishing is letting thousands realize the ambitions of generations of would-be writers.
On-demand publisher Lulu.com has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November. Retail giant Amazon.com got into the game this summer, offering on-demand publishing through its CreateSpace, which was already letting filmmakers and musicians burn DVDs and CDs.
The programs are easy for just about anyone to use: Authors select basic options, including the book's size, binding style and paperback or hardcover. After the manuscript is uploaded, users go to a page where they select a font and design the book's cover. Even after a book has been printed they can fix typos for later printings.
Unlike vanity publishing, in which aspiring authors pay to have their books run on traditional presses, on-demand publishing doesn't have to cost writers a cent.
Publishers produce books only after they're ordered and paid for, which eliminates overruns and the need for warehousing. They charge for printing, or take a cut of sales, and they set up payment systems, online bookstores and Web marketing tools.
Some authors publish on-demand books in hopes of catching the eye of a major publisher. But not all writers who use on-demand publishers aspire to write the great American novel.
The system also allows small businesses to print high-end brochures, screenwriters to shop their scripts around and others to assemble wedding and other special-event books for friends and family.
"I'm just amazed I have the book in my hand," said Catherine Dyer, a 49-year-old Atlanta resident who co-authored a cookbook with her four sisters through Lulu.com. "I knew trying to get a traditional publisher would take ages. With this, I knew at the onset I could have a book in my hand."
"You Want Me To Bring a Dish?" — the sisters' 104-page cookbook — sells for $22.76. They've ordered about 100 copies to stock stores around Atlanta and are promoting the book through local signings and radio appearances.
Dyer's already brainstorming ideas for a spinoff.
"Cause I know I can get it published," she said.
The challenge for authors now is getting the word out about their work.
"It's all about the marketing and distribution. We realized early on that that was the bigger challenge," said Eileen Gittins, founder and CEO of Blurb.com, an on-demand publisher with 11,000 available self-published titles.
To help authors, Blurb automatically creates widgets that can be dragged and dropped onto other Web sites.
What makes self-publishing viable is the Internet, which gives writers instant access to audiences that share their same interests, no matter how obscure. Authors also use online communities such as blogs, MySpace.com and others to market their works.
"It used to be, if you created a book about an obscure topic, your audience was limited. Now maybe you're part of an online gardening community, and you already have an audience of 5,000 who care deeply about roses," Gittins said.
For most aspiring authors, a book deal with a major publishing house remains the ultimate dream, however.
Big companies like Random House Inc. or HarperCollins Publishers can promote authors on a national scale and get titles in major bookstores. Professional editors also polish copy in the traditional publishing world, a step that can transform a manuscript into a best-seller or perhaps a masterpiece.
"The value and cachet of being with a larger house is still something authors value," said Tina Jordan, vice president of the Association of American Publishers.
Users of Amazon.com's CreateSpace are listed the same way as literary giants online. Keyword searches will pull up self-published books along with those of Grisham, Shakespeare, Hemingway or Rowling.
The writers are willing to live with drawbacks that would drive a purist crazy. Printing quality can vary, with images possibly emerging denser or brighter in some copies. Some in the industry say the quality of on-demand publishing has improved greatly and few would be able to distinguish the difference from those printed on traditional presses. And on-demand books are priced according to their length, making them pricier than books printed en masse.
But Gittins said shoppers are willing to pay a little more for a book tailored to a specific audience.
"It's really an opportunity for people to get their creative content out there to millions of people," said Stacey Hurwitz, spokeswoman for CreateSpace.
______
On the Net:
http://www.Lulu.com
http://www.Blurb.com
http://www.createspace.com
Friday, October 26, 2007
Zebra, Dolphin
In this photo and caption provided by Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, Beauregard, an 8-month-old male Grants zebra is greeted by Brandy, an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin while out on a daily walk around the park at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, Calif., Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2007. Beauregard was hand-reared at the park and takes daily strolls around the 135-acre park. (AP Photo/Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, Mike Owyang)
Friday, October 19, 2007
Re:Vision Theatre (Regarding what I have been up to)
Hey Folks,
Sorry for the mass email (all mass emails start this way). I just wanted to share with you a brief 'what is going on in Stephen's life,' moment.
Some of you may know... after 2 years of planning, two of my colleagues, Thomas Morrissey and David Leidholdt, and myself are opening a regional theatre in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Re:Vision Theatre
Regarding a new vision for theatre.
PO Box 973
Asbury Park, New Jersey 07712
Re:Vision Theatre will produce reinventions of previously produced classics, overlooked or forgotten work in a new way, and new work with a fresh voice.
We wanted a place near the city (New York, that is). It is about 55 miles from NYC. It's about 1 hour and 45 mins away on train or bus. Asbury Park is the new up and coming beach front town and we wanted to be part of the redevelopment boom. The beach and boardwalk are beautiful and the town is building 3,000 new beach front condos in the next 5 years. We rented a 3-bedroom house a few blocks from the beach and I will spend half my time there this winter and live there full time in the spring. (move-in date November 1).
Yes, Bruce Springsteen was discovered there and continues to be a part of the Asbury Park Community.
It is a very exciting project and we plan to kickoff our fundraising efforts this fall. Our goal is to have a full mainstage production in July 2008. Let me know if you want to escape the city for a weekend and help us out or if you would like to share your talents at one of our future benefits. Also forward this email to anyone you know on the Jersey Shore. There is already a buzz about us and we would like to ride that wave of momentum (notice my beach lingo).
Besides that, all is going well. Life is good and I can't complain. I hope all of you are doing well and email me back with an update on your 'what's going on' moments. Until then...Hang Ten!
Peace,
Stephen
--
Stephen Bishop Seely
New York, New York and Asbury Park, New Jersey
http://www.stephenbishopseely.com/ and http://www.revisiontheatre.org/
--
Stephen Bishop Seely
New York, New York and Asbury Park, New Jersey
http://www.stephenbishopseely.com/ and http://www.revisiontheatre.org/
Monday, July 30, 2007
Puppy Love
A male long-coated chihuahua named 'Heart-kun' with a heart-shaped pattern on his coat sits at Pucchin Dog's shop in Odate, northern Japan July 10, 2007. The one-and-a-half-month-old chihuahua was born on May 18, 2007 as one of a litter. The shop owner Emiko Sakurada said that this is the first time a puppy with these marks has been born out of a 1,000 that she has bred. She also said that she has no plans to sell the puppy. REUTERS/Issei Kato (JAPAN).
Monday, June 18, 2007
25 Web Sites to Watch Preston Gralla
Mon Jun 18, 4:00 AM ET
Think that all of the great Web sites have already been invented? Think again. The Internet is evolving in new and inventive ways thanks to mashups that pull data from all over the Web and to AJAX-based interfaces that give sites the same degree of interactivity and responsiveness that desktop apps possess.
To keep you ahead of the curve, we've rounded up 25 innovative Web sites and services that are well worth watching. Some of them help you design your own personalized Web site mashups; others enable you to create video mixes, build wikis, share personal obsessions, and more. But take note: A number of these sites are works in progress, and user-generated sites depend on developing a critical mass of content, which doesn't happen right away. With that in mind, check out the following dot-com destinations. One of them may become the next big Web hit.
Mashups, Maps, and More
Build your own Web feed, poll friends and strangers, and find your way with these tools.
Popfly
Popfly provides a friendly, visual way to build your own mashups.If you haven't already discovered the world of mashups, Microsoft's Popfly is a good place to start. Mashups combine multiple Web-based sites or applications to produce all sorts of useful things, such as an overlay of traffic information over Google Maps. With Popfly, you can create your own mashups--and you don't have to know a lick of code to do it. Just drag prefab building blocks, connect them, and you have an instant mashup that you can add to an existing Web page or turn into its own site. For example, you can easily produce a mashup that grabs pictures from a site like Flickr and then displays them in a rotating cube.
Yahoo Pipes
You need a little patience to learn how to build a mashup using Yahoo Pipes.Like Popfly, Yahoo Pipes lets you create your own mashups or "pipes." As with Popfly, you drag and drop prebuilt modules, and then create connections between them. But Yahoo Pipes is much harder to use than Popfly, and the way to go about building your own mashup isn't always obvious. But if you're willing to do some digging and learning, you can build very useful stuff, such as a mashup that uses Yahoo maps to show the locations of all apartments for rent in a certain neighborhood.
BuzzDash
If you were the type of child who continually asked, "But why?" BuzzDash should satisfy your endless curiosity.Are foreign movies better watched with subtitles or with dubbed dialog? Is it okay to cry at work? Who is the best center fielder of all time--Willy Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Ty Cobb, or Ken Griffey, Jr.?
If these are the kinds of issues that keep you awake at night, we have a Web site for you. BuzzDash lets you participate in, comment on, and see the results of numerous quick opinion polls. The polls are organized by topic, such as movies, football, and politicians; and if you have a burning question you want answered, you can create your own survey.
Wayfaring
Wayfaring.com lets you create personalized maps, such as one that pinpoints shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.If you're obsessed with cartography, wander over to Wayfaring.com. Here you can easily create personalized maps for a walking tour of London, say, or a wine-tasting trip through Napa or a pub crawl through Seattle. The site provides the tools you'll need to build annotated maps--complete with descriptions, Web links, and photos of your favorite stops--and then post them for others to view and discuss. It's fun to check out the maps other users have created. One of my favorites: a map of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, including links to Web sites that discuss each wreck.
CircleUp
CircleUp makes social planning easier by letting you organize your contacts into different communities.Anyone who has ever tried to organize an event--or to get a group of people to respond to a simple question like "Who can drive the kids to Little League this week?"--knows how tough it is to filter and organize the answers into coherent, usable form. That's where CircleUp comes in handy. Use this site to send an e-mail or instant message to a group of people; then wait for it to return a consolidated summary of responses to you. It's simple, it's free, and it will liberate you from the recurring feeling that you're herding cats whenever you try to coordinate an activity involving more than two people.
Organizers, Searchers and Optimizers
The Web has so much information that it's hard to keep track of everything. These sites will help you pull content together and move around the Internet more efficiently.
Pageflakes
Using Pageflakes, you can customize a Web site with just the news and information you want.The Web is just as chaotic as the world--but Pageflakes can organize both of them for you. This super-customizable version of a home page enables you to pick the news and information feeds you want to read, and to specify the "flakes," or applets, you want to include. Flakes let you add all sorts of cool stuff to your page--movie times, to-do lists, a notepad, e-mail, a horoscope--even sudoku or a personal blog. If you're looking for one-stop browsing, this is it.
Spock
Spock is a search engine dedicated to finding information about people.If you spend more time than you should googling folks, you need to check out Spock.com, a search engine designed to dig up information about people. Start by typing in a name, or a search term that describe a group of people--for example, Motown Singer, or Rastafarians. The site then searches through various social networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster, along with more-general Web sites, and reports on what it finds.
For many searches, you'll get multiple categories of links. For instance, type in Barack Obama, and you'll get groupings like 'Democrat', 'Senator', and '2008 Presidential Candidate'. Click any link, and you'll find pages related to both Obama and the larger category. There are also links to photographs, tags, Obama's Wikipedia entry, his Senate site, and so on. Spock is currently in beta form (its public launch is scheduled for sometime before September), and at the moment you need an invitation to gain access to it, but with luck you can wangle one by filling out the form on the site.
Swivel
Swivel charts everything from crime statistics to American Idol contestant popularity.Data and graph fanatics, you have a home. Swivel, holds a mind-boggling array of charts and graphs--from a line graph illustrating the relationship between wine consumption and crime in the United States over the past 30 years to a pie chart showing the percentage breakdown of bird flu cases in 14 Asian countries. But the site's most outstanding feature is its ability to integrate different charts containing seemingly unrelated data. Want to compare the national murder rate to the cost of a first-class stamp, or to total hours of media use in U.S. households, over the same period of time? Now you can.
Clipmarks
Clip elements of your favorite Web pages, and save them to your Clipmarks profile.The Internet is the best research tool in existence. That's the good news--and the bad news. Though finding information online is easy, keeping track of it all can be tough. Most people end up copying and pasting information from Web sites, printing it out, or bookmarking pages--with no good way to keep it all organized or find what they want fast.
Clipmarks solves the problem neatly by installing a toolbar that hitches on to Internet Explorer or Firefox. As you surf the Web, use the Clipmarks toolbar to clip and save sections of a page--text, graphics, and even YouTube videos. Clipping something automatically archives it under your Clipmarks profile, though you can also save it directly to your blog or send it via e-mail. You can even share your clip collections, or look at archives that other users have assembled.
OpenDNS
One reason the W eb sometimes feels poky, even when you use broadband, is the Internet's Domain Name System. When you type a URL (such as www.pcworld.com) into your browser, DNS servers must translate that alphanumeric information into a numeric IP address (such as 70.42.185.10) that Web servers and your PC can understand. Typically your ISP's DNS servers handle the translation work.
But OpenDNS speeds up the translation (called "name resolution") by handling the process on its own high-speed DNS servers. The service includes other cool time-savers, as well, such as the ability to create keyboard shortcuts. For example, instead of typing www.pcworld.com each time, you might arrange to type in the letter p and jump immediately to your favorite online destination.
Real Estate, Bookmarks, and Blogs
With these services, you can find a house, browse the Web from a single location, and make sure that your online prose never gets lost.
Trulia
Trulia gives you an idea of how much you'll have to spend when shopping for a home in a certain 'hood.There are plenty of real-estate sites on the Web, but this one comes with a twist. By combining social networking with mapping and search technology, Trulia gives you a high-tech way to find the home of your dreams. Use the different sliders and checkboxes to focus your search (price, square footage, and the all-important number of bathrooms), and Trulia will display qualifying homes that are for sale in the specified area, overlaid on a map. The site includes useful, city-specific real estate guides containing additional data on average home sale prices, most popular neighborhoods, crime statistics, and the like.
The Trulia Voices section hooks you up with other people to discuss neighborhoods, housing issues, or real estate in general. Trulia is relatively new, so that section is as yet quite sparse. But if the site gains traction, Trulia Voices may prove to be the most useful tool of all.
Tip: To view some cool time-lapse maps showing how an area (such as Las Vegas) has developed over time, hop to Trulia Hindsight.
PopURLs
Forget site hopping. Head to PopURLs, and scan all your headlines in one place.If you're an information hound, you probably spend lots of time jumping from Digg to Del.icio.us to YouTube to Fark to Google News to anything-dot-com. With PopURLs, you no longer need to waste time hopping around the Internet. An aggregator of all things informative, PopURLs features massive lists of headlines, videos, blogs, and content from all of those sites, as well as plenty of others.
One nice bonus is that you can search some of the sites--Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia, among others--straight from PopURLs. It's also easy to tweak the way PopURLs looks and works, too, including customizing the layout of the feeds so you can put the ones you view most regularly on top. The scrapbook is a particularly useful feature; just click the 'Add to Scrapbook' button next to any headline, and PopURLs will save it (and up to 19 other favorite items).
Goowy
Goowy lets you run different applications and widgets, all from the Web.For several years, observers have speculated that the Internet will become, in essence, a vast operating system, with applications built on top of it. To a great extent, that's the premise underlying Goowy. Create an account, and you can start building your own desktop, with applications for e-mail, contacts, instant messaging, file management, and more. You can also add prebuilt widgets, called "minis," to your desktop, for news, stocks, weather, and other tidbits of information.
Don't expect the site to replace your desktop at this point: Goowy lacks full-blown applications and doesn't access your hard drive. Still, it's a glimpse into what may be the future of the Internet.
BlogBackupOnline
If you have a blog and you aren't sure that your blog provider will always have a backup in case of a crash, head over to BlogBackupOnline pronto. The site is straightforward: Log in, enter information about your blog, and the site diligently backs it up every day (provided that you use one of the 11 supported blogging services--Blogger, Friendster, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Multiply, Serendipity, Terapad, TypePad, Vox, Windows Live Space, or WordPress). The site is also a great tool if you ever decide to move your blog from one platform to another. After you've backed up your blog, BlogBackupOnline can bring all of your old entries into the new service.
Ma.gnolia
Ma.gnolia is an online keeper of bookmarks, with plenty of community aspects to boot.If you're a fan of the social bookmarking site Del.i.cio.us but wish that it were a little more social--and a little less geeky--check out Ma.gnolia. As with Del.icio.us, you can save and share bookmarks and tags. But Ma.gnolia presents a far more appealing design, and it has a few nice extra talents, such as the ability to let you save snapshots of your favorite pages.
Ma.gnolia excels on the social networking front. You can join groups, share bookmarks, and browse groups and discussions for more bookmarks on topics that fascinate you. If you're strictly interested in bookmarking and tagging, Del.i.cio.us remains the best place to go. But if you want to share your findings with others, Ma.gnolia is worth a taste.
Five Ways to Create and Share
These services help you put your thoughts together and publish them on the Web, whether you're most comfortable talking, shooting video, or just typing.
Yodio
With Yodio, you can create an audio postcard that makes your picture worth a thousand words.Of course your friends and family want to see all of your pictures from your Venetian vacation--but wouldn't it be better if they could also hear your voice, telling you cool details about what they're looking at, or narrating a story regarding some gondola hijinks?
Yodio lets you combine photos with sound files to create an audio postcard. To make a recording, call a special Yodio phone number and start talking (or you can record your own MP3 file and upload it). Once you've transferred photos to the site, you can add sound and publish your postcard on the Web for others to admire. The site also has a scheme for making money from your productions, though we wouldn't bet the farm on it.
Meebo Rooms
Goal, or no goal? With Meebo's multimedia chat rooms, you can discuss videos and pictures with other fans.You may have heard about Meebo, the Web-based instant messaging program that lets you communicate with people over various IM services, such as AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo. (See our review of Meebo.)
Well equally cool is Meebo's newest launch, Meebo Rooms, which lets you participate in multimedia chats. You'll find chat rooms on everything from sports to SpongeBob Squarepants, and the rooms support videos and photos that you can discuss with fellow fans. If you can't find a topic you're interested in, simply create a new room and post visuals for others to discuss. You can even embed rooms into your site or blog, and use them to lure people to your own Web destination.
Squidoo
Squidoo makes it easy to create (or look for) Web pages that reflect your passions.Got an obsession or special passion you want to convey to the world? Squidoo is your ticket. Using the site's simple tools, you can build a "lens" (aka, a Web page) that includes information on any topic that's close to your heart, whether it's cats or Kafka.
A lens can be quite different from a blog. With lenses, you share links to resources, book recommendations, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, eBay auction items, and other cool Web content related to a single subject. Even if you don't build your own lens, the site is worth visiting to see what others have done. You can learn a lot more about lemonade or laptop bags than you ever thought possible.
SplashCast
Build your own streaming media channel using the tools on SplashCast.For anyone who has ever dreamed of becoming a broadcast mogul, here's a quick (and free) way to get a taste of what it might be like. SplashCast lets you create your own streaming media channel that combines video, music, photos, text, narration, and RSS feeds. A wizard walks you through the steps of building your channel. Start by uploading media files from your hard drive, or point to files on other sites. Add captions, commentary, and RSS feeds, and your channel is ready to go. Once you're done finessing your channel, you can send it to friends and family, or syndicate it to blogs and social networking sites. So far, there's no way for you to make money from your channels, but the site plans to start a revenue-sharing model.
Eyespot
With Eyespot, it's a cinch to create a video mix and share it with others.To create a video all you have to do is point your cell phone, digital camera, or camcorder at something, press a button, and stay focused. The result: an instant movie. What's not so easy, though, is organizing, editing, and combining your video clips to create something aesthetically pleasing. Eyespot simplifies this process. Upload your videos to the site, and then use its tools to crop and mix them either with other clips you supply or with free video from the site. You can even add effects, transitions, and titles before publishing your video mix for the world to see.
Sites for Collaborative Work and Play
Whether you're putting together an important document or an anniversary party, these services will help get everybody involved. Also, check out a snazzy online photo editor and a new way to search.
Approver.com
Approver.com lets you keep tabs on a document while passing it around to different recipients--and track its progress.Anyone who has collaborated with multiple people on a document knows the true meaning of frustration. You have to distribute the file to the entire group, convince every person to review it by a certain date and time, and get them all to sign off on it. Approver.com lowers the pain quotient considerably. Upload the document you want to track, and the site routes it to everyone who needs to see it. It also lets you set deadlines for reviewing the document, and keep track of approvals and comments. Approver.com works with a number of apps, including Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF, and Open Office; alternatively, you can use the site to create documents, and have your colleagues read them online.
Pbwiki
Create a community of opera lovers (or anything else) by building your own wiki.Though the whole world seems to know about Wikipedia these days, many people and organizations don't realize how useful it can be to build their own wiki. In business settings, it's an ideal way to share information within a group. For individuals, it's perfect for planning a get-together, organizing a fan club, or sharing memories with family members. Pbwiki makes creating miniature versions of Wikipedia a breeze. The site's simple, Web-based tools are perfect for building a wiki--you don't need to have any HTML know-how--and getting others in on the editing action.
MyPunchbowl
MyPunchbowl handles online invitations, sets up message boards, and maps your party with Google Maps.Planning a party, but unsure of what date works best for your friends? MyPunchbowl is basically Evite with a little extra kick. Like any self-respecting online invitation site, MyPunchbowl lets you create party invitations and then track who's coming, who's not, and who has yet to respond. But the site also enables you to send pick-a-date e-mail messages to see which day works best for people, set up message boards (useful for organizing things like who's bringing the vino), and produce a map of the shindig's location using Google Maps. You can also create an after-party message board where people can share comments, photos, and videos--if, um, appropriate.
Picnik
From sepia to soften, Picnik's photo editor lets you apply any number of effects. Now all we need is an old gum tree.You probably have hundreds or thousands of digital photos on your PC. And a lot of those photos would probably benefit from a little tweaking. But that doesn't mean that you have to download and install photo editing software. Picnik supplies a nice suite of tools for editing photos online. All you have to do is upload your photos, or have Picnik grab them from a site like Flickr (which doesn't have editing features), and then get to work. Picnik offers tools aplenty for performing simple editing--cleaning up red-eye or resizing photos, say--as well as doing more-extensive work, such as changing the exposure, fixing a color cast, or applying special effects.
Quintura
With Quintura, search and you shall find a standard results list, along with a visual diagram of related terms.Quintura provides a new way for you to search for things on the Internet. When you enter a search term, Quintura returns an ordinary list of results on the right-hand side, while on the left it offers a visual map (or "cloud") of related terms. Click any of these words, and the list of results changes to encompass the new term as well, which can help you narrow your search. The process may sound clunky, but it's surprisingly effective.
Alphabetical Listing
Keep an eye on these sites--you may be looking at Google 2.0. Here they are listed in alphabetical order.
Approver.com BlogBackupOnline BuzzDash CircleUp Clipmarks Eyespot Goowy Ma.gnolia Meebo Rooms MyPunchbowl OpenDNS Pageflakes Pbwiki Picnik Popfly PopURLs Quintura SplashCast Spock Squidoo Swivel Trulia Wayfaring Yahoo Pipes Yodio
Think that all of the great Web sites have already been invented? Think again. The Internet is evolving in new and inventive ways thanks to mashups that pull data from all over the Web and to AJAX-based interfaces that give sites the same degree of interactivity and responsiveness that desktop apps possess.
To keep you ahead of the curve, we've rounded up 25 innovative Web sites and services that are well worth watching. Some of them help you design your own personalized Web site mashups; others enable you to create video mixes, build wikis, share personal obsessions, and more. But take note: A number of these sites are works in progress, and user-generated sites depend on developing a critical mass of content, which doesn't happen right away. With that in mind, check out the following dot-com destinations. One of them may become the next big Web hit.
Mashups, Maps, and More
Build your own Web feed, poll friends and strangers, and find your way with these tools.
Popfly
Popfly provides a friendly, visual way to build your own mashups.If you haven't already discovered the world of mashups, Microsoft's Popfly is a good place to start. Mashups combine multiple Web-based sites or applications to produce all sorts of useful things, such as an overlay of traffic information over Google Maps. With Popfly, you can create your own mashups--and you don't have to know a lick of code to do it. Just drag prefab building blocks, connect them, and you have an instant mashup that you can add to an existing Web page or turn into its own site. For example, you can easily produce a mashup that grabs pictures from a site like Flickr and then displays them in a rotating cube.
Yahoo Pipes
You need a little patience to learn how to build a mashup using Yahoo Pipes.Like Popfly, Yahoo Pipes lets you create your own mashups or "pipes." As with Popfly, you drag and drop prebuilt modules, and then create connections between them. But Yahoo Pipes is much harder to use than Popfly, and the way to go about building your own mashup isn't always obvious. But if you're willing to do some digging and learning, you can build very useful stuff, such as a mashup that uses Yahoo maps to show the locations of all apartments for rent in a certain neighborhood.
BuzzDash
If you were the type of child who continually asked, "But why?" BuzzDash should satisfy your endless curiosity.Are foreign movies better watched with subtitles or with dubbed dialog? Is it okay to cry at work? Who is the best center fielder of all time--Willy Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Ty Cobb, or Ken Griffey, Jr.?
If these are the kinds of issues that keep you awake at night, we have a Web site for you. BuzzDash lets you participate in, comment on, and see the results of numerous quick opinion polls. The polls are organized by topic, such as movies, football, and politicians; and if you have a burning question you want answered, you can create your own survey.
Wayfaring
Wayfaring.com lets you create personalized maps, such as one that pinpoints shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.If you're obsessed with cartography, wander over to Wayfaring.com. Here you can easily create personalized maps for a walking tour of London, say, or a wine-tasting trip through Napa or a pub crawl through Seattle. The site provides the tools you'll need to build annotated maps--complete with descriptions, Web links, and photos of your favorite stops--and then post them for others to view and discuss. It's fun to check out the maps other users have created. One of my favorites: a map of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, including links to Web sites that discuss each wreck.
CircleUp
CircleUp makes social planning easier by letting you organize your contacts into different communities.Anyone who has ever tried to organize an event--or to get a group of people to respond to a simple question like "Who can drive the kids to Little League this week?"--knows how tough it is to filter and organize the answers into coherent, usable form. That's where CircleUp comes in handy. Use this site to send an e-mail or instant message to a group of people; then wait for it to return a consolidated summary of responses to you. It's simple, it's free, and it will liberate you from the recurring feeling that you're herding cats whenever you try to coordinate an activity involving more than two people.
Organizers, Searchers and Optimizers
The Web has so much information that it's hard to keep track of everything. These sites will help you pull content together and move around the Internet more efficiently.
Pageflakes
Using Pageflakes, you can customize a Web site with just the news and information you want.The Web is just as chaotic as the world--but Pageflakes can organize both of them for you. This super-customizable version of a home page enables you to pick the news and information feeds you want to read, and to specify the "flakes," or applets, you want to include. Flakes let you add all sorts of cool stuff to your page--movie times, to-do lists, a notepad, e-mail, a horoscope--even sudoku or a personal blog. If you're looking for one-stop browsing, this is it.
Spock
Spock is a search engine dedicated to finding information about people.If you spend more time than you should googling folks, you need to check out Spock.com, a search engine designed to dig up information about people. Start by typing in a name, or a search term that describe a group of people--for example, Motown Singer, or Rastafarians. The site then searches through various social networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster, along with more-general Web sites, and reports on what it finds.
For many searches, you'll get multiple categories of links. For instance, type in Barack Obama, and you'll get groupings like 'Democrat', 'Senator', and '2008 Presidential Candidate'. Click any link, and you'll find pages related to both Obama and the larger category. There are also links to photographs, tags, Obama's Wikipedia entry, his Senate site, and so on. Spock is currently in beta form (its public launch is scheduled for sometime before September), and at the moment you need an invitation to gain access to it, but with luck you can wangle one by filling out the form on the site.
Swivel
Swivel charts everything from crime statistics to American Idol contestant popularity.Data and graph fanatics, you have a home. Swivel, holds a mind-boggling array of charts and graphs--from a line graph illustrating the relationship between wine consumption and crime in the United States over the past 30 years to a pie chart showing the percentage breakdown of bird flu cases in 14 Asian countries. But the site's most outstanding feature is its ability to integrate different charts containing seemingly unrelated data. Want to compare the national murder rate to the cost of a first-class stamp, or to total hours of media use in U.S. households, over the same period of time? Now you can.
Clipmarks
Clip elements of your favorite Web pages, and save them to your Clipmarks profile.The Internet is the best research tool in existence. That's the good news--and the bad news. Though finding information online is easy, keeping track of it all can be tough. Most people end up copying and pasting information from Web sites, printing it out, or bookmarking pages--with no good way to keep it all organized or find what they want fast.
Clipmarks solves the problem neatly by installing a toolbar that hitches on to Internet Explorer or Firefox. As you surf the Web, use the Clipmarks toolbar to clip and save sections of a page--text, graphics, and even YouTube videos. Clipping something automatically archives it under your Clipmarks profile, though you can also save it directly to your blog or send it via e-mail. You can even share your clip collections, or look at archives that other users have assembled.
OpenDNS
One reason the W eb sometimes feels poky, even when you use broadband, is the Internet's Domain Name System. When you type a URL (such as www.pcworld.com) into your browser, DNS servers must translate that alphanumeric information into a numeric IP address (such as 70.42.185.10) that Web servers and your PC can understand. Typically your ISP's DNS servers handle the translation work.
But OpenDNS speeds up the translation (called "name resolution") by handling the process on its own high-speed DNS servers. The service includes other cool time-savers, as well, such as the ability to create keyboard shortcuts. For example, instead of typing www.pcworld.com each time, you might arrange to type in the letter p and jump immediately to your favorite online destination.
Real Estate, Bookmarks, and Blogs
With these services, you can find a house, browse the Web from a single location, and make sure that your online prose never gets lost.
Trulia
Trulia gives you an idea of how much you'll have to spend when shopping for a home in a certain 'hood.There are plenty of real-estate sites on the Web, but this one comes with a twist. By combining social networking with mapping and search technology, Trulia gives you a high-tech way to find the home of your dreams. Use the different sliders and checkboxes to focus your search (price, square footage, and the all-important number of bathrooms), and Trulia will display qualifying homes that are for sale in the specified area, overlaid on a map. The site includes useful, city-specific real estate guides containing additional data on average home sale prices, most popular neighborhoods, crime statistics, and the like.
The Trulia Voices section hooks you up with other people to discuss neighborhoods, housing issues, or real estate in general. Trulia is relatively new, so that section is as yet quite sparse. But if the site gains traction, Trulia Voices may prove to be the most useful tool of all.
Tip: To view some cool time-lapse maps showing how an area (such as Las Vegas) has developed over time, hop to Trulia Hindsight.
PopURLs
Forget site hopping. Head to PopURLs, and scan all your headlines in one place.If you're an information hound, you probably spend lots of time jumping from Digg to Del.icio.us to YouTube to Fark to Google News to anything-dot-com. With PopURLs, you no longer need to waste time hopping around the Internet. An aggregator of all things informative, PopURLs features massive lists of headlines, videos, blogs, and content from all of those sites, as well as plenty of others.
One nice bonus is that you can search some of the sites--Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia, among others--straight from PopURLs. It's also easy to tweak the way PopURLs looks and works, too, including customizing the layout of the feeds so you can put the ones you view most regularly on top. The scrapbook is a particularly useful feature; just click the 'Add to Scrapbook' button next to any headline, and PopURLs will save it (and up to 19 other favorite items).
Goowy
Goowy lets you run different applications and widgets, all from the Web.For several years, observers have speculated that the Internet will become, in essence, a vast operating system, with applications built on top of it. To a great extent, that's the premise underlying Goowy. Create an account, and you can start building your own desktop, with applications for e-mail, contacts, instant messaging, file management, and more. You can also add prebuilt widgets, called "minis," to your desktop, for news, stocks, weather, and other tidbits of information.
Don't expect the site to replace your desktop at this point: Goowy lacks full-blown applications and doesn't access your hard drive. Still, it's a glimpse into what may be the future of the Internet.
BlogBackupOnline
If you have a blog and you aren't sure that your blog provider will always have a backup in case of a crash, head over to BlogBackupOnline pronto. The site is straightforward: Log in, enter information about your blog, and the site diligently backs it up every day (provided that you use one of the 11 supported blogging services--Blogger, Friendster, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Multiply, Serendipity, Terapad, TypePad, Vox, Windows Live Space, or WordPress). The site is also a great tool if you ever decide to move your blog from one platform to another. After you've backed up your blog, BlogBackupOnline can bring all of your old entries into the new service.
Ma.gnolia
Ma.gnolia is an online keeper of bookmarks, with plenty of community aspects to boot.If you're a fan of the social bookmarking site Del.i.cio.us but wish that it were a little more social--and a little less geeky--check out Ma.gnolia. As with Del.icio.us, you can save and share bookmarks and tags. But Ma.gnolia presents a far more appealing design, and it has a few nice extra talents, such as the ability to let you save snapshots of your favorite pages.
Ma.gnolia excels on the social networking front. You can join groups, share bookmarks, and browse groups and discussions for more bookmarks on topics that fascinate you. If you're strictly interested in bookmarking and tagging, Del.i.cio.us remains the best place to go. But if you want to share your findings with others, Ma.gnolia is worth a taste.
Five Ways to Create and Share
These services help you put your thoughts together and publish them on the Web, whether you're most comfortable talking, shooting video, or just typing.
Yodio
With Yodio, you can create an audio postcard that makes your picture worth a thousand words.Of course your friends and family want to see all of your pictures from your Venetian vacation--but wouldn't it be better if they could also hear your voice, telling you cool details about what they're looking at, or narrating a story regarding some gondola hijinks?
Yodio lets you combine photos with sound files to create an audio postcard. To make a recording, call a special Yodio phone number and start talking (or you can record your own MP3 file and upload it). Once you've transferred photos to the site, you can add sound and publish your postcard on the Web for others to admire. The site also has a scheme for making money from your productions, though we wouldn't bet the farm on it.
Meebo Rooms
Goal, or no goal? With Meebo's multimedia chat rooms, you can discuss videos and pictures with other fans.You may have heard about Meebo, the Web-based instant messaging program that lets you communicate with people over various IM services, such as AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo. (See our review of Meebo.)
Well equally cool is Meebo's newest launch, Meebo Rooms, which lets you participate in multimedia chats. You'll find chat rooms on everything from sports to SpongeBob Squarepants, and the rooms support videos and photos that you can discuss with fellow fans. If you can't find a topic you're interested in, simply create a new room and post visuals for others to discuss. You can even embed rooms into your site or blog, and use them to lure people to your own Web destination.
Squidoo
Squidoo makes it easy to create (or look for) Web pages that reflect your passions.Got an obsession or special passion you want to convey to the world? Squidoo is your ticket. Using the site's simple tools, you can build a "lens" (aka, a Web page) that includes information on any topic that's close to your heart, whether it's cats or Kafka.
A lens can be quite different from a blog. With lenses, you share links to resources, book recommendations, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, eBay auction items, and other cool Web content related to a single subject. Even if you don't build your own lens, the site is worth visiting to see what others have done. You can learn a lot more about lemonade or laptop bags than you ever thought possible.
SplashCast
Build your own streaming media channel using the tools on SplashCast.For anyone who has ever dreamed of becoming a broadcast mogul, here's a quick (and free) way to get a taste of what it might be like. SplashCast lets you create your own streaming media channel that combines video, music, photos, text, narration, and RSS feeds. A wizard walks you through the steps of building your channel. Start by uploading media files from your hard drive, or point to files on other sites. Add captions, commentary, and RSS feeds, and your channel is ready to go. Once you're done finessing your channel, you can send it to friends and family, or syndicate it to blogs and social networking sites. So far, there's no way for you to make money from your channels, but the site plans to start a revenue-sharing model.
Eyespot
With Eyespot, it's a cinch to create a video mix and share it with others.To create a video all you have to do is point your cell phone, digital camera, or camcorder at something, press a button, and stay focused. The result: an instant movie. What's not so easy, though, is organizing, editing, and combining your video clips to create something aesthetically pleasing. Eyespot simplifies this process. Upload your videos to the site, and then use its tools to crop and mix them either with other clips you supply or with free video from the site. You can even add effects, transitions, and titles before publishing your video mix for the world to see.
Sites for Collaborative Work and Play
Whether you're putting together an important document or an anniversary party, these services will help get everybody involved. Also, check out a snazzy online photo editor and a new way to search.
Approver.com
Approver.com lets you keep tabs on a document while passing it around to different recipients--and track its progress.Anyone who has collaborated with multiple people on a document knows the true meaning of frustration. You have to distribute the file to the entire group, convince every person to review it by a certain date and time, and get them all to sign off on it. Approver.com lowers the pain quotient considerably. Upload the document you want to track, and the site routes it to everyone who needs to see it. It also lets you set deadlines for reviewing the document, and keep track of approvals and comments. Approver.com works with a number of apps, including Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF, and Open Office; alternatively, you can use the site to create documents, and have your colleagues read them online.
Pbwiki
Create a community of opera lovers (or anything else) by building your own wiki.Though the whole world seems to know about Wikipedia these days, many people and organizations don't realize how useful it can be to build their own wiki. In business settings, it's an ideal way to share information within a group. For individuals, it's perfect for planning a get-together, organizing a fan club, or sharing memories with family members. Pbwiki makes creating miniature versions of Wikipedia a breeze. The site's simple, Web-based tools are perfect for building a wiki--you don't need to have any HTML know-how--and getting others in on the editing action.
MyPunchbowl
MyPunchbowl handles online invitations, sets up message boards, and maps your party with Google Maps.Planning a party, but unsure of what date works best for your friends? MyPunchbowl is basically Evite with a little extra kick. Like any self-respecting online invitation site, MyPunchbowl lets you create party invitations and then track who's coming, who's not, and who has yet to respond. But the site also enables you to send pick-a-date e-mail messages to see which day works best for people, set up message boards (useful for organizing things like who's bringing the vino), and produce a map of the shindig's location using Google Maps. You can also create an after-party message board where people can share comments, photos, and videos--if, um, appropriate.
Picnik
From sepia to soften, Picnik's photo editor lets you apply any number of effects. Now all we need is an old gum tree.You probably have hundreds or thousands of digital photos on your PC. And a lot of those photos would probably benefit from a little tweaking. But that doesn't mean that you have to download and install photo editing software. Picnik supplies a nice suite of tools for editing photos online. All you have to do is upload your photos, or have Picnik grab them from a site like Flickr (which doesn't have editing features), and then get to work. Picnik offers tools aplenty for performing simple editing--cleaning up red-eye or resizing photos, say--as well as doing more-extensive work, such as changing the exposure, fixing a color cast, or applying special effects.
Quintura
With Quintura, search and you shall find a standard results list, along with a visual diagram of related terms.Quintura provides a new way for you to search for things on the Internet. When you enter a search term, Quintura returns an ordinary list of results on the right-hand side, while on the left it offers a visual map (or "cloud") of related terms. Click any of these words, and the list of results changes to encompass the new term as well, which can help you narrow your search. The process may sound clunky, but it's surprisingly effective.
Alphabetical Listing
Keep an eye on these sites--you may be looking at Google 2.0. Here they are listed in alphabetical order.
Approver.com BlogBackupOnline BuzzDash CircleUp Clipmarks Eyespot Goowy Ma.gnolia Meebo Rooms MyPunchbowl OpenDNS Pageflakes Pbwiki Picnik Popfly PopURLs Quintura SplashCast Spock Squidoo Swivel Trulia Wayfaring Yahoo Pipes Yodio
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Yankees Picture
Fans at Fenway Park in Boston wear blonde masks as New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez goes to bat in the first inning of their baseball game against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park in Boston Friday, June 1, 2007. (AP Photo/Winslow Townson)
Friday, May 04, 2007
The Top 25 Web Hoaxes and Pranks
The Top 25 Web Hoaxes and Pranks
by
Steve Bass
PCWORLD.COM
Thu May 3, 4:00 AM ET
Whether they take the form of a comic image of a giant cat or a desperate plea from a sick child, chain e-mail messages and Internet frauds are elements of the online landscape that we've all encountered. No topic is off limits: a medical warning, a promise of free money, or a believably (or shoddily) Photoshopped image. But at the end of the day, they're just elaborate hoaxes or clever pranks--and we've collected 25 of the most infamous ones ever to have graced the Internet or our inboxes.
Though some of these deceptions originated years ago, the originals--and dozens of variants--continue to make the rounds. If you keep a patient vigil over your e-mail, you too may eventually spot a message urging you to FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! And if you haven't had enough when you finish reading this article, take a hoax test at the Museum of Hoaxes, and then hop over to Snopes, the premier myth-dispelling site for coverage of zillions of other falsifications.
Hoaxes 1 Through 5
From the supposed last photo taken at the top of the World Trade Center to the endlessly revised request for assistance from a Nigerian functionary, here are our top five Web and e-mail hoaxes.
1. The Accidental Tourist (2001)
Quite possibly the most famous hoax picture ever, this gruesome idea of a joke traveled around the Web and made a grand tour of e-mail inboxes everywhere soon after the tragedy of September 11. It depicts a tourist standing on the observation deck of one of the World Trade Center towers, unknowingly posing for a picture as an American Airlines plane approaches in the background.
At first glance it appears to be real, but if you examine certain details, you'll see that it's a craftily modified image. For starters, the plane that struck the WTC was a wide-body Boeing 767; the one in the picture is a smaller 757. The approach of the plane in the picture is from the north, yet the building it would have hit--the North tower--didn't have an outdoor observation deck. Furthermore, the South tower's outdoor deck didn't open until 9:30 a.m. on weekdays, more than half an hour after the first plane struck the WTC. The picture is a hoax, through and through--and not a particularly amusing one, under the circumstances.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
2. Sick Kid Needs Your Help (1989)
This gem had its roots in reality. It all began in 1989, when nine-year-old cancer patient Craig Shergold thought of a way to achieve his dream of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records. Craig asked people to send greeting cards, and boy, did they. By 1991, 33 million greeting cards had been sent, far surpassing the prior record. Ironically, however, the Guinness World Records site doesn't contain any mention of Craig Sherwood or a "most greeting cards received" record, presumably because the fine folks at the site don't want to encourage anyone to try to break his mark. (Astonishingly, Guinness doesn't have an entry for world's stoutest person, either, but it does honor the World's Largest Tankard of Beer.)
Fortunately, doctors succeeded in removing the tumor, and Craig is now a healthy adult, but his appeal for cards has turned into the hoax that won't die. Variations on the theme include a sick girl dying of cancer, and a little boy with leukemia whose dying wish is to start an eternal chain letter. A recent iteration tells a tragic tale of a girl who supposedly was horribly burned in a fire at WalMart, and then claims that AOL will pay all of her medical bills if only if you forward this e-mail to EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! Okay, enough already.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
3. Bill Gates Money Giveaway (1997)
No, it's true. I thought it was a scam, but it happened to a buddy of mine. It seems that Microsoft is testing some new program for tracing e-mail, and the company needs volunteers to help try the thing out. He forwarded me an e-mail that he received from Microsoft--and get this, from Bill Gates himself! Two weeks later, as a reward for participating, my pal received a check for thousands of dollars! Sure he did. Another version of this hoax claims that AOL's tracking service is offering a cash reward. Tell you what--when you get your check, send me 10 percent as a finder's fee, okay?
4. Five-Cent E-Mail Tax (1999)
"Dear Internet Subscriber," the e-mail starts. "The Government of the United States is quietly pushing through legislation that will affect your use of the Internet." It goes on to reveal that "Bill 602P" will authorize the U.S. Postal Service to assess a charge of five cents for every e-mail sent. Not a bad way to cut down on the number of dopey e-mail chain letters and lame jokes people let loose on the world. But credulous curse averters and connoisseurs of boffo laffs can relax: This e-mail alert, which popped up in 1999 and comes back for a visit every year or so, just isn't true. Still, it sounded plausible enough to fool Hillary Clinton during a 2000 debate when she was running for the Senate.
5. Nigerian 419 E-Mail Scam (2000)
"DEAR SIR," the e-mail starts. "FIRSTLY I MUST FIRST SOLICIT YOUR CONFIDENCE IN THIS TRANSACTION; LET ME START BY INTRODUCING MYSELF PROPERLY..." I'm sure you've received one of these--a confidential, urgent e-mail message promising you a reward of mucho dinero for helping this person convey money abroad. All you need do in return is entrust your name and bank account number to the government bureaucrat (or his uncle, aunt, or cousin, the ostensible "credit offficer with the union bank of Nigeria plc (uba) Benin branch") who needs your help.
It's the Nigerian con, also know as an Advanced Fee Fraud or 419 scam (so called because of the section number of the Nigerian criminal code that applies to it). Ancestors of these scams appeared in the 1980s, when the media of choice were letters or faxes--and they're still wildly successful at snagging people. In fact, Oprah recently featured a victim of the Nigerian scam on her show. And if you think that smart, educated folks couldn't possibly fall for it, you'll be surprised when you read "The Perfect Mark," a New Yorker magazine article profiling a Massachusetts psychotherapist who was duped--and lost a fortune.
To see how the hoax works, visit Scamorama, a fascinating site that features a progression of e-mail messages stringing along 419 scammers, sometimes for months at a time. Finally, check out the 3rd Annual Nigerian E-Mail Conference, an absolutely perfect spoof.
Hoaxes 6 Through 10
The lower half of our top 10 ranges from a kidneynapping scare to a cookie recipe worth its weight in saffron.
6. It's Kidney Harvesting Time (1996)
The subject line is laden with exclamation points: "Travelers Beware!!!" If that's not enough to get your attention, the chilling story certainly will. The message warns that an organ-harvesting crime ring is drugging tourists in New Orleans and Las Vegas, snatching their "extra" kidneys, selling the organs to non-Hippocratic hospitals, and leaving the victims to wake up in a bathtub full of ice and find a brief note that explains the situation and conveniently identifies the phone number of the nearest emergency room. Hey, maybe they'll get lucky and the hospital will have a compatible replacement kidney on hand. But travelers, fear not!!! According to the National Kidney Foundation, this scenario has never actually occurred--though it does have the makings of a great horror flick. (Freddy's Last Harvest, anyone?)
7. You've Got Virus! (1999 and on)
There's isn't a Teddy Bear virus. Nor is there a sulfnbk.exe or A Virtual Card for You ("the "WORST VIRUS EVER!!!...CNN ANNOUNCED IT. PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!").
The jdbgmgr.exe hoax (also known as Teddy Bear because the jdbgmgr.exe file is represented by a teddy bear icon) warned recipients of the e-mail message that they were at risk of infection from a virus sent via address books or Microsoft Messenger, and that they should delete the file immediately. But in reality there was no virus--and unfortunately, jdbgmgr.exe was a necessary Java file. The sulfnbk.exe hoax nailed even advanced users with its insistence that the file--a legit one that's used for fixing long file names--was a virus. Lots of people removed it.
Similarly, A Virtual Card for You claimed that McAfee had discovered a virus that, when opened, would destroy the hard drive on an infected system and would automatically send itself to everyone on the user's e-mail contacts list. Of course, it didn't do anything except scare people. So before you forward an e-mail virus warning to anyone (especially to me), look it up on Sophos or Vmyths to make sure it isn't a fraud.
8. Microsoft Buys Firefox (2006)
Talk about scaring the entire open-source community. In October 2006, a previously unknown Web site popped up, announcing Microsoft's acquisition of Firefox and promoting the company's new Microsoft Firefox 2007 Professional. The site talks glowingly about the browser's new features and provides a video advertisement for the product. It was a great prank, and the image of the Microsoft Firefox 2007 box was so elaborate and professional looking that the blood pressure of real Firefox users went sky-high.
9. The Really Big Kitty (2001)
There are big cats and then there are even bigger cats. This one, reportedly tipping the scales at almost 90 pounds, was enormous. The claim seemed plausible and even snookered a lot of e-mail cynics (I'm raising my hand)--until they read the accompanying copy, that is. With nonsense about the owner working at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, and more balderdash about nuclear reactors, the jig was up. Eventually, the cat's owner fessed up to a creative Photoshop session, though he claimed that he never expected anyone to believe the photo was real.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
10. $250 Cookie Recipe (1996)
The woman loved the cookie she had just nibbled at a Neiman Marcus cafe in Houston, so she asked her waiter for the recipe. "Two-fifty," he said, and she agreed without hesitation, instructing him to add it to her tab. But when the woman's Visa bill arrived, it read $250, instead of $2.50. Bent on revenge, she proceeded to ask you to blast the recipe to--okay, ready?--EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! Like many hoaxes, this one predated the Internet, only to resurface in the electronic age. It appeared in a cookbook in the late 1940s as the $25 fudge cake, popped up in the 1960s as the Waldorf-Astoria red-velvet cake recipe, and re-emerged in the 1970s as the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe.
Hoaxes 11 Through 15
This group of five begins with a phoney e-mail message promising money and other prizes from Disney, and ends with the classic deaf-to-reason arguments of the Apollo moon landing deniers.
11. Free Vacation Courtesy of Disney (1998)
Dear Goofy... Forward this e-mail chain letter to everybody under the sun and, once 13,000 people have received it, Walt Disney Jr. will send five grand each to 1,300 lucky people on this list. And "the rest will recieve a free trip for two to Disney for one week during the summer of 1999." Is that Disney World, Disneyland--or Walt's house? The "Jr." after Disney, in reference to a nonexistent person, ought to have been the first clue that this was a hoax. And the misspelling of "receive" was the clincher--remember, hoaxters, "i" before "e" except after "c"). Yet people forwarded the message around the world using the time-honored e-mail chain letter adage: I'm sending it to you... just in case it's true.
12. Sunset Over Africa (2003)
Now that's a dazzling photo of Africa and Europe, taken right around sunset from the Space Shuttle Columbia. What makes the image especially amazing is that, while London remains in daylight, night has fallen in Italy (a little to the southeast) and the bright lights of Rome, Naples, and Venice are blazing. Too bad it's a digitally altered photo, most likely layered from multiple satellite images. To see an accurate, computer-generated illustration, check out the World Sunlight Map.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
13. Alien Autopsy at Roswell, New Mexico (1995)
Roswell, New Mexico: ground zero of UFO controversy. It's also where the movie of the Roswell alien autopsy was filmed 60 years ago. The story goes that a UFO crashed at this site, and the U.S. government performed a hush-hush autopsy on the dead alien.In the mid-1990s, unnamed individuals "discovered" the secret film and posted it for the edification of a disinformed public. Looks pretty real, right? Now fast-forward to 2006 and a conspiracy-deflating admission: The movie is a hoax created in 1995 by John Humphreys, the animator famous for Max Headroom, in his apartment in north London....Or was it???
14. Real-Time GPS Cell Phone Tracking (2007)
SunSat Satellite Solutions knows where you are.Have you heard about the Web site that can track the location of your cell phone in real time? It uses satellite GPS in combination with Google Maps, and it's amazingly accurate (not to mention a disturbing invasion of privacy). Go ahead, check it out yourself by going to the SunSat Satellite Solutions site and tracking your own cell phone's location. Select your country, type in your cell phone number, click the Start Searching button, and wait for it. (This is one of the year's best pranks. And I won't give away the ending.)
15. Apollo Moon Landing Hoax (1969)
You're aware that we never landed on the moon, right? It was all just an elaborate hoax designed to score Cold War points for the United States against the Soviet Union in a world of falling dominoes. The whole lunar landing thing? It was a video staged at movie studios and top-secret locations.
Okay, you can stop laughing now, but some sites, such as Apollo Reality and Moon Landing, still insist that the Eagle never landed. Of course, enemies of Flat Earthism will point to the Rocket and Space Technology site, which does an in-depth job of debunking the hoax. But true disbelievers should check out this terrific video spoof, complete with outtakes showing lights and cameras.
Hoaxes 16 Through 20
The world of weird eBay auction items starts off this page, which concludes with a photo hoax purporting to show a 1950s-era vision of the home computer of tomorrow.
16. Sell It on eBay! (1995)
You won't believe what people have sold on eBay--some of the items pranks, some of them for real, and some, well, it's hard to tell. For a sampling of the weird, you need look no further than a haunted tree stump and a pork chop shaped like a grizzly bear. The Internet itself once went on the market at a modest starting bid of a million bucks, as have a dozen spontaneous images of the Virgin Mary (on toast, on windows, and heaven only knows where else). Bidders have also had a shot at someone's soul, a guy's virginity, and a human kidney, with the price of this last item having reached $5.7 million before eBay pulled the plug. (Hey, guys, don't you know that what you lose in Las Vegas is supposed to stay in Las Vegas?)
But my favorite eBay offering involves a tattooed guy who, as a joke, dressed up in his ex-wife's size 12 wedding gown and put it up for auction. Only, the dress ended up selling for $3850, and the guy got five marriage proposals. Nice.
17. Chinese Newspaper Duped (2002)
Information on the Internet may want to be free--but if it's posted by a for-profit publisher, you'd better take it with a grain of salt. That's the lesson learned by China's Beijing Evening News, which was taken in by the Onion's Capitol Dome spoof. Famous for its authentic-sounding but tongue-in-cheek articles steeped in the language of the Associated Press, the Onion reported that Congress had threatened to leave Washington, D.C., and head for Memphis unless the District agreed to erect a new domed Capitol building with a retractable roof and luxury box seating. Having accepted most of the Onion article at face value, the Chinese newspaper at first stood by its source in the face of international derision and refused to back down. When it finally published a retraction, it blamed the Onion for the confusion: "Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money." Right.
18. The Muppets Have Not Already Won (2001)
Osama and Bert: a Sesame Street connection to terrorism?In early October 2001, just prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, protesters at an anti-American rally in Bangladesh showed their support for Osama bin Laden by marching, chanting, and waving placards. One of the posters captured on film by Reuters News Agency was a photo-montage of the Al-Qaeda leader, and in one of the shots a yellow felt puppet to his right glowers furiously at the camera. It's...Bert of Sesame Street. Originally a Zelig-inspired creation of San Francisco Webmaster Dino Ignacio, the satirical Web site Bert Is Evil depicted Bert hobnobbing with the worst of the worst in history, tormenting his roommate Ernie, and generally reveling in wickedness. After Ignacio retired from active efforts to expose Bert's career of evil, others filled the Photoshop void, capturing the cone-headed miscreant with all the latest baddies-du-jour.
Evidently, the company responsible for printing the pro-Osama poster found the doctored dual portrait irresistible, although (according to the Urban Legends References Pages) its production manager claims to have produced about 2000 copies of the Osama-and-Bert poster without realizing "what they signified." Well, if you can't trust pictures you find on the Internet, what can you trust?
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
19. Chevrolet's Not-So-Better Idea (2006)
The ad folks at Chevrolet thought they had a winner: Let site visitors create their own 30-second commercial for the company's 2007 Chevy Tahoe SUV. It'll be fun, they probably thought. We'll give them a choice of video clips and soundtracks, and let them add their own text captions. Yep, viral marketing at its best.
Unfortunately for Chevrolet, a few pranksters decided to use the opportunity to express what they thought of the SUV. One commercial said, "Like this snowy wilderness? Better get your fill of it now. Then say hello to global warming." Another lambasted the SUV as a gas guzzler: "Our planet's oil is almost gone. You don't need G.P.S. to see where this road leads."
20. Rand's 1954 Home Computer (2004)
This intriguing image of a room-size computer made the rounds of the Internet, accompanied by a breathless blurb: "This article is from an issue of 1954 'Popular Mechanics' magazine forecasting the possibility of 'home computers' in 50 years." The steering wheel in the picture is the predecessor to today's mouse, and the keyboard looks like those on teletype machines. It even comes complete with a guy right out of the Eisenhower era.
Cool stuff, and easy to believe--but it's not a 1950s Rand Corporation mockup of what a prototype home computer might look like. It's actually a shot taken of a submarine display at the Smithsonian Institution and subsequently modified for inclusion in a Fark.com image-manipulation competition.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
Hoaxes 21 Through 25
Our final five takes you from the ultimate instance of Microsoft hubris to an ill-conceived experiment in Internet democracy (or is that Internet anarchy?).
21. Microsoft Buys Catholic Church (1994)
More than a decade ago, an e-mail press release--from Vatican City, no less--landed in my inbox. Microsoft was announcing that it was in the process of acquiring the Roman Catholic Church in exchange for an unspecified number of shares of Microsoft common stock. The story was a prank, but it sure looked real, circulating for months and perhaps worrying residents of the Holy See.
Just think: If the press release had been true, it might have stopped the Vatican from using Linux. And no, I'm not kidding about the Linux part. Watch this video interview with the woman who helped build the Vatican's Web site.
22. Hercules, the Enormous Dog (2007)
Wow, that dog's almost as big as the horse. That's what I thought when I first looked at this e-mail. The picture depicts a couple, one walking a horse, the other holding the leash of Hercules, a 282-pound English Mastiff and "The World's Biggest Dog Ever According to Guinness World Records."
Horsepucky. Here's my analysis of the Photoshop modifications. First, take a close look at the grass under the people and the animals. The area has been subtly lightened in order to make all of the shadows match and look authentic. Next, examine the shadows and you'll notice two anomalies: First, the shadows of the dog and the man start at their feet, but the same doesn't hold true for the horse. Second, the woman's shadow is missing altogether; instead, the man's shadow extends in front of her. Oh and by the way, the Guinness World Records site doesn't have a listing for Hercules or for the world's biggest dog. Okay, okay, so the pictures of the big kitty and the big dog are both fakes--but have you seen the shot of Craig Sherwood riding the world's largest jackelope?
23. Lights-Out Gang Member Initiation (1998)
People have a tendency to believe e-mail messages that come from authority figures. In 1998, a message purportedly from a police officer working with the DARE program circulated around the Internet. It warned recipients not to flash their lights to inform oncoming cars that their headlamps were off. According to the message, a recently devised gang initiation ritual involved having new gang members drive at night with their headlights turned off until an oncoming car flashed its lights at them; then, in order to become initiated, they were to shoot everyone in that car. It's just another urban myth--and about as silly as the one claiming that gangs mark off their territory by hanging sneakers from power lines.
24. Hurricane Lili Waterspouts (2002)
It's weird, it's disturbing, and it's seemingly plausible--all of the elements necessary for a successful e-mail forward. The image shows three dark waterspouts in the distance. The subject is "here comes lili," and the e-mail began appearing in inboxes at about the same time that Hurricane Lili started battering the Louisiana coastline. But three waterspouts, all neatly lined up? According to About.com, the National Weather Service labeled the picture a hoax and said that it was a modification of a genuine photo taken in 2001 by a crew member of the Edison Chouest Offshore supply boat.
25. Pranks Shut Down Los Angeles Times Wiki (2005)
It seemed like a bright idea. The LA Times' "A Wiki for Your Thoughts" fandango asked readers to chime in on the newspaper's editorials via a Wiki. In their explanation of how it would work, the editors even acknowledged that "It sounds nutty." Yet they went ahead with it--and achieved disastrous results. The Wikitorial (the name was nearly as dumb as the scheme) brought out the best and then the worst in readers. On the first day, an editorial about the war in Iraq prompted civil and thoughtful contributions. On day two, pranksters littered the unmoderated Wiki with rude comments, pornography, and profanity. The Webmaster removed the offending entries, but only after they were available for public viewing. By the next morning, the publisher had dismantled the Wiki.
Hoaxes by Decade
E-mail, Web sites, Photoshop. The digital era has made it easier than ever to pull a fast one on a large audience.
Pre-1990 Apollo Moon Landing Hoax (1969) Sick Kid Needs Your Help (1989)1990-1999 Microsoft Buys Catholic Church (1994) Alien Autopsy at Roswell (1995) eBay Sales (1995 and on) $250 Cookie Recipe (1996) Kidney Harvesting (1996) Bill Gates Money Giveaway (1997) Disney Jr. Free Vacation (1998) Lights-Out Gang Member Initiation (1998) Five-Cent E-Mail Tax (1999) Virus Hoaxes (1999 and on)2000 and on Nigerian 419 E-Mail Scam (2000) Giant Cat Photo (2001) World Trade Center Photo (2001) Bert and Osama bin Laden (2001) Hurricane Lili Waterspouts (2002) Onion Dupes Chinese Newspaper (2002) Sunset Over Africa (2003) Rand's 1954 Home Computer (2004) Los Angeles Times Wiki (2005) User-Created Commercials for Chevy Tahoe (2006) Microsoft Buys Firefox (2006) GPS Cell Phone Tracking (2007) Hercules, the Enormous Dog (2007)
by
Steve Bass
PCWORLD.COM
Thu May 3, 4:00 AM ET
Whether they take the form of a comic image of a giant cat or a desperate plea from a sick child, chain e-mail messages and Internet frauds are elements of the online landscape that we've all encountered. No topic is off limits: a medical warning, a promise of free money, or a believably (or shoddily) Photoshopped image. But at the end of the day, they're just elaborate hoaxes or clever pranks--and we've collected 25 of the most infamous ones ever to have graced the Internet or our inboxes.
Though some of these deceptions originated years ago, the originals--and dozens of variants--continue to make the rounds. If you keep a patient vigil over your e-mail, you too may eventually spot a message urging you to FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! And if you haven't had enough when you finish reading this article, take a hoax test at the Museum of Hoaxes, and then hop over to Snopes, the premier myth-dispelling site for coverage of zillions of other falsifications.
Hoaxes 1 Through 5
From the supposed last photo taken at the top of the World Trade Center to the endlessly revised request for assistance from a Nigerian functionary, here are our top five Web and e-mail hoaxes.
1. The Accidental Tourist (2001)
Quite possibly the most famous hoax picture ever, this gruesome idea of a joke traveled around the Web and made a grand tour of e-mail inboxes everywhere soon after the tragedy of September 11. It depicts a tourist standing on the observation deck of one of the World Trade Center towers, unknowingly posing for a picture as an American Airlines plane approaches in the background.
At first glance it appears to be real, but if you examine certain details, you'll see that it's a craftily modified image. For starters, the plane that struck the WTC was a wide-body Boeing 767; the one in the picture is a smaller 757. The approach of the plane in the picture is from the north, yet the building it would have hit--the North tower--didn't have an outdoor observation deck. Furthermore, the South tower's outdoor deck didn't open until 9:30 a.m. on weekdays, more than half an hour after the first plane struck the WTC. The picture is a hoax, through and through--and not a particularly amusing one, under the circumstances.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
2. Sick Kid Needs Your Help (1989)
This gem had its roots in reality. It all began in 1989, when nine-year-old cancer patient Craig Shergold thought of a way to achieve his dream of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records. Craig asked people to send greeting cards, and boy, did they. By 1991, 33 million greeting cards had been sent, far surpassing the prior record. Ironically, however, the Guinness World Records site doesn't contain any mention of Craig Sherwood or a "most greeting cards received" record, presumably because the fine folks at the site don't want to encourage anyone to try to break his mark. (Astonishingly, Guinness doesn't have an entry for world's stoutest person, either, but it does honor the World's Largest Tankard of Beer.)
Fortunately, doctors succeeded in removing the tumor, and Craig is now a healthy adult, but his appeal for cards has turned into the hoax that won't die. Variations on the theme include a sick girl dying of cancer, and a little boy with leukemia whose dying wish is to start an eternal chain letter. A recent iteration tells a tragic tale of a girl who supposedly was horribly burned in a fire at WalMart, and then claims that AOL will pay all of her medical bills if only if you forward this e-mail to EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! Okay, enough already.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
3. Bill Gates Money Giveaway (1997)
No, it's true. I thought it was a scam, but it happened to a buddy of mine. It seems that Microsoft is testing some new program for tracing e-mail, and the company needs volunteers to help try the thing out. He forwarded me an e-mail that he received from Microsoft--and get this, from Bill Gates himself! Two weeks later, as a reward for participating, my pal received a check for thousands of dollars! Sure he did. Another version of this hoax claims that AOL's tracking service is offering a cash reward. Tell you what--when you get your check, send me 10 percent as a finder's fee, okay?
4. Five-Cent E-Mail Tax (1999)
"Dear Internet Subscriber," the e-mail starts. "The Government of the United States is quietly pushing through legislation that will affect your use of the Internet." It goes on to reveal that "Bill 602P" will authorize the U.S. Postal Service to assess a charge of five cents for every e-mail sent. Not a bad way to cut down on the number of dopey e-mail chain letters and lame jokes people let loose on the world. But credulous curse averters and connoisseurs of boffo laffs can relax: This e-mail alert, which popped up in 1999 and comes back for a visit every year or so, just isn't true. Still, it sounded plausible enough to fool Hillary Clinton during a 2000 debate when she was running for the Senate.
5. Nigerian 419 E-Mail Scam (2000)
"DEAR SIR," the e-mail starts. "FIRSTLY I MUST FIRST SOLICIT YOUR CONFIDENCE IN THIS TRANSACTION; LET ME START BY INTRODUCING MYSELF PROPERLY..." I'm sure you've received one of these--a confidential, urgent e-mail message promising you a reward of mucho dinero for helping this person convey money abroad. All you need do in return is entrust your name and bank account number to the government bureaucrat (or his uncle, aunt, or cousin, the ostensible "credit offficer with the union bank of Nigeria plc (uba) Benin branch") who needs your help.
It's the Nigerian con, also know as an Advanced Fee Fraud or 419 scam (so called because of the section number of the Nigerian criminal code that applies to it). Ancestors of these scams appeared in the 1980s, when the media of choice were letters or faxes--and they're still wildly successful at snagging people. In fact, Oprah recently featured a victim of the Nigerian scam on her show. And if you think that smart, educated folks couldn't possibly fall for it, you'll be surprised when you read "The Perfect Mark," a New Yorker magazine article profiling a Massachusetts psychotherapist who was duped--and lost a fortune.
To see how the hoax works, visit Scamorama, a fascinating site that features a progression of e-mail messages stringing along 419 scammers, sometimes for months at a time. Finally, check out the 3rd Annual Nigerian E-Mail Conference, an absolutely perfect spoof.
Hoaxes 6 Through 10
The lower half of our top 10 ranges from a kidneynapping scare to a cookie recipe worth its weight in saffron.
6. It's Kidney Harvesting Time (1996)
The subject line is laden with exclamation points: "Travelers Beware!!!" If that's not enough to get your attention, the chilling story certainly will. The message warns that an organ-harvesting crime ring is drugging tourists in New Orleans and Las Vegas, snatching their "extra" kidneys, selling the organs to non-Hippocratic hospitals, and leaving the victims to wake up in a bathtub full of ice and find a brief note that explains the situation and conveniently identifies the phone number of the nearest emergency room. Hey, maybe they'll get lucky and the hospital will have a compatible replacement kidney on hand. But travelers, fear not!!! According to the National Kidney Foundation, this scenario has never actually occurred--though it does have the makings of a great horror flick. (Freddy's Last Harvest, anyone?)
7. You've Got Virus! (1999 and on)
There's isn't a Teddy Bear virus. Nor is there a sulfnbk.exe or A Virtual Card for You ("the "WORST VIRUS EVER!!!...CNN ANNOUNCED IT. PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!").
The jdbgmgr.exe hoax (also known as Teddy Bear because the jdbgmgr.exe file is represented by a teddy bear icon) warned recipients of the e-mail message that they were at risk of infection from a virus sent via address books or Microsoft Messenger, and that they should delete the file immediately. But in reality there was no virus--and unfortunately, jdbgmgr.exe was a necessary Java file. The sulfnbk.exe hoax nailed even advanced users with its insistence that the file--a legit one that's used for fixing long file names--was a virus. Lots of people removed it.
Similarly, A Virtual Card for You claimed that McAfee had discovered a virus that, when opened, would destroy the hard drive on an infected system and would automatically send itself to everyone on the user's e-mail contacts list. Of course, it didn't do anything except scare people. So before you forward an e-mail virus warning to anyone (especially to me), look it up on Sophos or Vmyths to make sure it isn't a fraud.
8. Microsoft Buys Firefox (2006)
Talk about scaring the entire open-source community. In October 2006, a previously unknown Web site popped up, announcing Microsoft's acquisition of Firefox and promoting the company's new Microsoft Firefox 2007 Professional. The site talks glowingly about the browser's new features and provides a video advertisement for the product. It was a great prank, and the image of the Microsoft Firefox 2007 box was so elaborate and professional looking that the blood pressure of real Firefox users went sky-high.
9. The Really Big Kitty (2001)
There are big cats and then there are even bigger cats. This one, reportedly tipping the scales at almost 90 pounds, was enormous. The claim seemed plausible and even snookered a lot of e-mail cynics (I'm raising my hand)--until they read the accompanying copy, that is. With nonsense about the owner working at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, and more balderdash about nuclear reactors, the jig was up. Eventually, the cat's owner fessed up to a creative Photoshop session, though he claimed that he never expected anyone to believe the photo was real.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
10. $250 Cookie Recipe (1996)
The woman loved the cookie she had just nibbled at a Neiman Marcus cafe in Houston, so she asked her waiter for the recipe. "Two-fifty," he said, and she agreed without hesitation, instructing him to add it to her tab. But when the woman's Visa bill arrived, it read $250, instead of $2.50. Bent on revenge, she proceeded to ask you to blast the recipe to--okay, ready?--EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! Like many hoaxes, this one predated the Internet, only to resurface in the electronic age. It appeared in a cookbook in the late 1940s as the $25 fudge cake, popped up in the 1960s as the Waldorf-Astoria red-velvet cake recipe, and re-emerged in the 1970s as the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe.
Hoaxes 11 Through 15
This group of five begins with a phoney e-mail message promising money and other prizes from Disney, and ends with the classic deaf-to-reason arguments of the Apollo moon landing deniers.
11. Free Vacation Courtesy of Disney (1998)
Dear Goofy... Forward this e-mail chain letter to everybody under the sun and, once 13,000 people have received it, Walt Disney Jr. will send five grand each to 1,300 lucky people on this list. And "the rest will recieve a free trip for two to Disney for one week during the summer of 1999." Is that Disney World, Disneyland--or Walt's house? The "Jr." after Disney, in reference to a nonexistent person, ought to have been the first clue that this was a hoax. And the misspelling of "receive" was the clincher--remember, hoaxters, "i" before "e" except after "c"). Yet people forwarded the message around the world using the time-honored e-mail chain letter adage: I'm sending it to you... just in case it's true.
12. Sunset Over Africa (2003)
Now that's a dazzling photo of Africa and Europe, taken right around sunset from the Space Shuttle Columbia. What makes the image especially amazing is that, while London remains in daylight, night has fallen in Italy (a little to the southeast) and the bright lights of Rome, Naples, and Venice are blazing. Too bad it's a digitally altered photo, most likely layered from multiple satellite images. To see an accurate, computer-generated illustration, check out the World Sunlight Map.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
13. Alien Autopsy at Roswell, New Mexico (1995)
Roswell, New Mexico: ground zero of UFO controversy. It's also where the movie of the Roswell alien autopsy was filmed 60 years ago. The story goes that a UFO crashed at this site, and the U.S. government performed a hush-hush autopsy on the dead alien.In the mid-1990s, unnamed individuals "discovered" the secret film and posted it for the edification of a disinformed public. Looks pretty real, right? Now fast-forward to 2006 and a conspiracy-deflating admission: The movie is a hoax created in 1995 by John Humphreys, the animator famous for Max Headroom, in his apartment in north London....Or was it???
14. Real-Time GPS Cell Phone Tracking (2007)
SunSat Satellite Solutions knows where you are.Have you heard about the Web site that can track the location of your cell phone in real time? It uses satellite GPS in combination with Google Maps, and it's amazingly accurate (not to mention a disturbing invasion of privacy). Go ahead, check it out yourself by going to the SunSat Satellite Solutions site and tracking your own cell phone's location. Select your country, type in your cell phone number, click the Start Searching button, and wait for it. (This is one of the year's best pranks. And I won't give away the ending.)
15. Apollo Moon Landing Hoax (1969)
You're aware that we never landed on the moon, right? It was all just an elaborate hoax designed to score Cold War points for the United States against the Soviet Union in a world of falling dominoes. The whole lunar landing thing? It was a video staged at movie studios and top-secret locations.
Okay, you can stop laughing now, but some sites, such as Apollo Reality and Moon Landing, still insist that the Eagle never landed. Of course, enemies of Flat Earthism will point to the Rocket and Space Technology site, which does an in-depth job of debunking the hoax. But true disbelievers should check out this terrific video spoof, complete with outtakes showing lights and cameras.
Hoaxes 16 Through 20
The world of weird eBay auction items starts off this page, which concludes with a photo hoax purporting to show a 1950s-era vision of the home computer of tomorrow.
16. Sell It on eBay! (1995)
You won't believe what people have sold on eBay--some of the items pranks, some of them for real, and some, well, it's hard to tell. For a sampling of the weird, you need look no further than a haunted tree stump and a pork chop shaped like a grizzly bear. The Internet itself once went on the market at a modest starting bid of a million bucks, as have a dozen spontaneous images of the Virgin Mary (on toast, on windows, and heaven only knows where else). Bidders have also had a shot at someone's soul, a guy's virginity, and a human kidney, with the price of this last item having reached $5.7 million before eBay pulled the plug. (Hey, guys, don't you know that what you lose in Las Vegas is supposed to stay in Las Vegas?)
But my favorite eBay offering involves a tattooed guy who, as a joke, dressed up in his ex-wife's size 12 wedding gown and put it up for auction. Only, the dress ended up selling for $3850, and the guy got five marriage proposals. Nice.
17. Chinese Newspaper Duped (2002)
Information on the Internet may want to be free--but if it's posted by a for-profit publisher, you'd better take it with a grain of salt. That's the lesson learned by China's Beijing Evening News, which was taken in by the Onion's Capitol Dome spoof. Famous for its authentic-sounding but tongue-in-cheek articles steeped in the language of the Associated Press, the Onion reported that Congress had threatened to leave Washington, D.C., and head for Memphis unless the District agreed to erect a new domed Capitol building with a retractable roof and luxury box seating. Having accepted most of the Onion article at face value, the Chinese newspaper at first stood by its source in the face of international derision and refused to back down. When it finally published a retraction, it blamed the Onion for the confusion: "Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money." Right.
18. The Muppets Have Not Already Won (2001)
Osama and Bert: a Sesame Street connection to terrorism?In early October 2001, just prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, protesters at an anti-American rally in Bangladesh showed their support for Osama bin Laden by marching, chanting, and waving placards. One of the posters captured on film by Reuters News Agency was a photo-montage of the Al-Qaeda leader, and in one of the shots a yellow felt puppet to his right glowers furiously at the camera. It's...Bert of Sesame Street. Originally a Zelig-inspired creation of San Francisco Webmaster Dino Ignacio, the satirical Web site Bert Is Evil depicted Bert hobnobbing with the worst of the worst in history, tormenting his roommate Ernie, and generally reveling in wickedness. After Ignacio retired from active efforts to expose Bert's career of evil, others filled the Photoshop void, capturing the cone-headed miscreant with all the latest baddies-du-jour.
Evidently, the company responsible for printing the pro-Osama poster found the doctored dual portrait irresistible, although (according to the Urban Legends References Pages) its production manager claims to have produced about 2000 copies of the Osama-and-Bert poster without realizing "what they signified." Well, if you can't trust pictures you find on the Internet, what can you trust?
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
19. Chevrolet's Not-So-Better Idea (2006)
The ad folks at Chevrolet thought they had a winner: Let site visitors create their own 30-second commercial for the company's 2007 Chevy Tahoe SUV. It'll be fun, they probably thought. We'll give them a choice of video clips and soundtracks, and let them add their own text captions. Yep, viral marketing at its best.
Unfortunately for Chevrolet, a few pranksters decided to use the opportunity to express what they thought of the SUV. One commercial said, "Like this snowy wilderness? Better get your fill of it now. Then say hello to global warming." Another lambasted the SUV as a gas guzzler: "Our planet's oil is almost gone. You don't need G.P.S. to see where this road leads."
20. Rand's 1954 Home Computer (2004)
This intriguing image of a room-size computer made the rounds of the Internet, accompanied by a breathless blurb: "This article is from an issue of 1954 'Popular Mechanics' magazine forecasting the possibility of 'home computers' in 50 years." The steering wheel in the picture is the predecessor to today's mouse, and the keyboard looks like those on teletype machines. It even comes complete with a guy right out of the Eisenhower era.
Cool stuff, and easy to believe--but it's not a 1950s Rand Corporation mockup of what a prototype home computer might look like. It's actually a shot taken of a submarine display at the Smithsonian Institution and subsequently modified for inclusion in a Fark.com image-manipulation competition.
Image courtesy of Snopes.com.
Hoaxes 21 Through 25
Our final five takes you from the ultimate instance of Microsoft hubris to an ill-conceived experiment in Internet democracy (or is that Internet anarchy?).
21. Microsoft Buys Catholic Church (1994)
More than a decade ago, an e-mail press release--from Vatican City, no less--landed in my inbox. Microsoft was announcing that it was in the process of acquiring the Roman Catholic Church in exchange for an unspecified number of shares of Microsoft common stock. The story was a prank, but it sure looked real, circulating for months and perhaps worrying residents of the Holy See.
Just think: If the press release had been true, it might have stopped the Vatican from using Linux. And no, I'm not kidding about the Linux part. Watch this video interview with the woman who helped build the Vatican's Web site.
22. Hercules, the Enormous Dog (2007)
Wow, that dog's almost as big as the horse. That's what I thought when I first looked at this e-mail. The picture depicts a couple, one walking a horse, the other holding the leash of Hercules, a 282-pound English Mastiff and "The World's Biggest Dog Ever According to Guinness World Records."
Horsepucky. Here's my analysis of the Photoshop modifications. First, take a close look at the grass under the people and the animals. The area has been subtly lightened in order to make all of the shadows match and look authentic. Next, examine the shadows and you'll notice two anomalies: First, the shadows of the dog and the man start at their feet, but the same doesn't hold true for the horse. Second, the woman's shadow is missing altogether; instead, the man's shadow extends in front of her. Oh and by the way, the Guinness World Records site doesn't have a listing for Hercules or for the world's biggest dog. Okay, okay, so the pictures of the big kitty and the big dog are both fakes--but have you seen the shot of Craig Sherwood riding the world's largest jackelope?
23. Lights-Out Gang Member Initiation (1998)
People have a tendency to believe e-mail messages that come from authority figures. In 1998, a message purportedly from a police officer working with the DARE program circulated around the Internet. It warned recipients not to flash their lights to inform oncoming cars that their headlamps were off. According to the message, a recently devised gang initiation ritual involved having new gang members drive at night with their headlights turned off until an oncoming car flashed its lights at them; then, in order to become initiated, they were to shoot everyone in that car. It's just another urban myth--and about as silly as the one claiming that gangs mark off their territory by hanging sneakers from power lines.
24. Hurricane Lili Waterspouts (2002)
It's weird, it's disturbing, and it's seemingly plausible--all of the elements necessary for a successful e-mail forward. The image shows three dark waterspouts in the distance. The subject is "here comes lili," and the e-mail began appearing in inboxes at about the same time that Hurricane Lili started battering the Louisiana coastline. But three waterspouts, all neatly lined up? According to About.com, the National Weather Service labeled the picture a hoax and said that it was a modification of a genuine photo taken in 2001 by a crew member of the Edison Chouest Offshore supply boat.
25. Pranks Shut Down Los Angeles Times Wiki (2005)
It seemed like a bright idea. The LA Times' "A Wiki for Your Thoughts" fandango asked readers to chime in on the newspaper's editorials via a Wiki. In their explanation of how it would work, the editors even acknowledged that "It sounds nutty." Yet they went ahead with it--and achieved disastrous results. The Wikitorial (the name was nearly as dumb as the scheme) brought out the best and then the worst in readers. On the first day, an editorial about the war in Iraq prompted civil and thoughtful contributions. On day two, pranksters littered the unmoderated Wiki with rude comments, pornography, and profanity. The Webmaster removed the offending entries, but only after they were available for public viewing. By the next morning, the publisher had dismantled the Wiki.
Hoaxes by Decade
E-mail, Web sites, Photoshop. The digital era has made it easier than ever to pull a fast one on a large audience.
Pre-1990 Apollo Moon Landing Hoax (1969) Sick Kid Needs Your Help (1989)1990-1999 Microsoft Buys Catholic Church (1994) Alien Autopsy at Roswell (1995) eBay Sales (1995 and on) $250 Cookie Recipe (1996) Kidney Harvesting (1996) Bill Gates Money Giveaway (1997) Disney Jr. Free Vacation (1998) Lights-Out Gang Member Initiation (1998) Five-Cent E-Mail Tax (1999) Virus Hoaxes (1999 and on)2000 and on Nigerian 419 E-Mail Scam (2000) Giant Cat Photo (2001) World Trade Center Photo (2001) Bert and Osama bin Laden (2001) Hurricane Lili Waterspouts (2002) Onion Dupes Chinese Newspaper (2002) Sunset Over Africa (2003) Rand's 1954 Home Computer (2004) Los Angeles Times Wiki (2005) User-Created Commercials for Chevy Tahoe (2006) Microsoft Buys Firefox (2006) GPS Cell Phone Tracking (2007) Hercules, the Enormous Dog (2007)
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Sumo baby
AFP - Sat Apr 28, 6:38 PM ET Sumo baby : University student sumo wrestlers attempt to make babies cry during the "Baby-cry Sumo," an annual contest which is supposed to bring good health, at Tokyo's Sensoji temple in Tokyo.(AFP/Toshifumi Kitamura)
Monday, April 23, 2007
Geese
Geese over an irrigation canal near the Klamath River in the Pacific Northwest. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times)
Friday, April 20, 2007
Virginia Tech Coffee Cup
A coffee cup left by a mourner is shown at a memorial for the victims of Monday's shooting at Drillfield on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., Thursday, April 19, 2007. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
Dog Goggles
Cool Hendrik : Jack Russell terrier crossbreed "Hendrik" wears special dog goggles as he enjoys a ride through Berlin in the convertible of his owner Thomas.(AFP/DDP/Sebastian Willnow)
Knut the German Polar Bear
A combination of file photos shows polar bear cub Knut during the bear's first two days of public presentation at Berlin zoo, March 23 and 24, 2007. Germany's celebrity polar bear cub Knut has received an anonymous death threat, causing alarm at Berlin Zoo on Thursday and prompting heightened security. Knut, born on December 5, 2006, had to be hand fed every four hours by Berlin zoo employee Thomas Doerflein (seen on picture top 2ndR and CL) after its mother Tosca refused the baby. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann/FileS
Monday, March 26, 2007
Tiny House
AFP/File - Fri Mar 23, 3:29 AM ET Photo taken 10 March 2007 shows a house belonging to a stubborn Chinese homeowner Wu Ping, who has become a national cause celebre for holding up a major property development in southwest China in her three-year battle to protect her house, after refusing to accept a compensation deal by a property developer is surrounded by the ongoing building site excavation in Chongqing.(AFP/File/Mark Ralston)
Monday, February 19, 2007
Snow Angel
AP - Sat Feb 17, 3:20 PM ET
Thousands of people flap their arms and legs in unison, creating angel imprints, during a world record attempt for the most snow angels, in Bismarck, N.D., Saturday, Feb. 17, 2007. Organizers said they believe almost nine thousand people took part in the event. The previous world record was 3,784. (AP Photo/Will Kincaid)
Tiny duckling has rare mutation: 4 legs
AP - Sat Feb 17, 10:51 AM ET
Stumpy, a four-legged duckling at Warrawee Duck Farm, Copythorne, Hampshire, England, Saturday Feb. 17, 2007. A rare mutation has left the bird with two legs behind the usual two. (AP Photo/PA, Barry Batchelor)
Stumpy, a four-legged duckling at Warrawee Duck Farm, Copythorne, Hampshire, England, Saturday Feb. 17, 2007. A rare mutation has left the bird with two legs behind the usual two. (AP Photo/PA, Barry Batchelor)
LONDON - Webbed feet run in Stumpy's family, but he's the first to have four of them.
A rare mutation has left the eight-day-old duckling with two nearly full-sized legs behind the two he runs on. Nicky Janaway, a duck farmer in New Forest, Hampshire, 95 miles southwest of London, showed the duckling to reporters Saturday.
"It was absolutely bizarre. I was thinking 'he's got too many legs' and I kept counting 'one, two, three, four,'" Janaway said.
Stumpy would probably not survive in the wild, but Janaway, who runs the Warrawee Duck Farm in New Forest, says he is doing well.
"He's eating and surviving so far, and he is running about with those extra legs acting like stabilizers," Janaway said.
The mutation is rare, but cases have been recorded across the world. One duckling named Jake was born in Queensland, Australia, in 2002 with four legs but died soon after.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Gadget toilet made for modern kings and queens
Roto-Rooter's 'Pimped Out John' in an undated handout photo. Roto-Rooter says its 'Pimped Out John' is designed to 'fulfill all your wildest bathroom dreams'. Special features include an iPod music player and speakers, an Xbox video game console, a refrigerator filled with drinks and snacks and a cycling exercise machine. (Roto-Rooter/Handout/Reuters)Wed Feb 7, 11:42 AM ET
Think you deserve a throne? A U.S. plumbing firm has created a luxury toilet equipped with laptop computer and flat-screen TV which it plans to give away in an online sweepstake.
Ohio-based Roto-Rooter says its "Pimped Out John" is designed to "fulfill all your wildest bathroom dreams." Special features include an iPod music player and speakers, an Xbox video game console, a refrigerator filled with drinks and snacks and a cycling exercise machine.
"The bathroom is the perfect place for your very own throne. It shouldn't always be regarded as the room of last resort," said Steven Pollyea, Roto-Rooter vice president of marketing, in a press release emailed to Reuters.
"The average person spends 11,862 hours in the bathroom, which equals one year, four months and five days in a lifetime... a toilet should be the most wonderful location in your home."
Roto-Rooter spokesman Paul Abrams said the firm spent about $5,000 on parts and components to customize the toilet.
Any resident of the United States could win this "gleaming monument to personal convenience" by entering the sweepstake at www.rotorooter.com before April 2.
You might never want to leave your bathroom again.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Staging a revival
Consumers' growing demand for arts spurs creation of new local venues
By Sandy Coleman, Boston Globe Staff January 18, 2007
Picture it: A warm summer evening, classical music softly drifting from an amphitheater stage to a crowd of concert goers stretched out on picnic blankets. It's not Lenox -- home of legendary Tanglewood -- but Hingham, where a new amphitheater is being planned at the redeveloped Hingham Shipyard.
That seaside music venue is just one part of the bigger, richer arts scene unfolding across the region.
Thayer Academy, the private day school in Braintree, is deep into plans for a new performing arts center that officials say is needed to keep up with growing student interest in the arts.
In Quincy, Mayor William J. Phelan has set up a "vision committee" to explore the creation of a cultural and performing arts center that he hopes will draw crowds from well beyond the region and be what he calls an economic engine. In Brockton, an arts task force created by Mayor James E. Harrington last spring is crafting a long-term plan for the city's cultural community.
Meanwhile, ArtSouth -- a South Shore collaborative that has been talked about for years -- finally is coming together. Organizers say it will mean improved communication among groups, fewer scheduling conflicts, and, ultimately, more opportunities for arts consumers.
"There is more demand for the arts on the South Shore," said Nina Wellford, managing director of the Hingham Symphony Orchestra and a founder of ArtSouth, which has participants representing about 30 organizations.
"More and more people are living here who really value what arts bring to life. You don't want to go to Boston to get your beauty in life. We want it right here where we are," she said.
"I think people here on the South Shore are finally recognizing that we can have it here. There is enough critical mass, interest, and support to make these things flourish, and that's really exciting."
Liz Haywood-Sullivan, first vice president of the North River Arts Society and ArtSouth member, agrees. "We are looking at the Greenbush Line coming in, everything you read talks about it being the largest growing area in Massachusetts. At the same time, we have people who are proactive in the arts saying: What can we do to improve the access and the offerings of the arts?"
Adding to momentum is a recent announcement from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and MassDevelopment about the establishment of the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund. There is $13 million available this year to fund grants to promote the acquisition, design, repair, expansion, or construction of cultural facilities in the state.
Since the December announcement, inquiries have been coming nonstop, said Jay Paget, fund project director.
Count Quincy among the intrigued. Phelan recently established a committee to explore the arts center concept and scout locations as part of a larger attempt to stimulate tourism and economic development downtown.
The state's decision to make investment in cultural facilities a priority is encouraging, and an indicator that the time is right for expanding the cultural scene in the region, said Dave Murphy, the mayor's spokesman. "This isn't the reason why we're doing it, it's just a happy coincidence."
Dave Casanave, director of communications at Thayer Academy, could say the same. The school is planning to break ground before summer on a 500-plus-seat, $10 million to $14 million center for visual and performance arts, and grant money would come in handy.
The primary focus will be to serve the educational purposes of the school. Over the past eight to 10 years, the number of the students interested in arts programs has nearly doubled, and space is needed to keep up with the demand, he said. But the facility also will serve the community by allowing local groups and organizations to use the space in the evenings and on weekends and by offering arts-related classes for adults and children.
"We hope to draw the entire community," said Casanave. The center also likely will be a permanent home for the Hingham Symphony Orchestra, which does not now have a permanent performance space.
As more arts opportunities are created in the region, it will become increasingly important for arts organizations and institutions in the region to work together if they are to broaden their reach and prevent scheduling conflicts, noted Wellford. "There are a couple of obvious things we can do together -- coordinate what's going on on the art scene and ideally produce a website or central location to find out what's going on."
That's where ArtSouth comes in. It is a collection of arts organizations and institutions that, acting together, hope to be a one-stop shopping clearinghouse for consumers looking for events.
Member groups also seek to support each other, and share information so that events do not overlap and conflict.
Discussions are underway about developing a website of events or creating a kiosk where people could get information as well as buy tickets.
Already, networking and collaboration is paying off. It was through a brainstorming session with Wellford and a meeting with ArtSouth members that the idea for the Hingham amphitheater developed, said Martin Cohn, spokesman for Samuels & Associates, one of the shipyard developers.
"There is a tremendous demand for venues, especially in the Hingham area. Aside from the South Shore Conservatory, there aren't many places for people to come and listen to music," said Cohn.
"What happened in thinking through the shipyard redevelopment is that Samuels & Associates said we have this piece of land that we can't develop because of certain restrictions. We were going to put a park there anyway. But, from that [meeting with ArtSouth] came this idea."
Construction is expected to start next year.
Sandy Coleman can be reached at sbcoleman@globe.com.
What do you think?
Is the region ready to support and appreciate more venues for the arts, especially the performing arts? Share your comments at boston.com/southtalk. Or e-mail us at globesouth@globe.com, with your name, hometown, and a daytime phone number (number for verification only).
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
By Sandy Coleman, Boston Globe Staff January 18, 2007
Picture it: A warm summer evening, classical music softly drifting from an amphitheater stage to a crowd of concert goers stretched out on picnic blankets. It's not Lenox -- home of legendary Tanglewood -- but Hingham, where a new amphitheater is being planned at the redeveloped Hingham Shipyard.
That seaside music venue is just one part of the bigger, richer arts scene unfolding across the region.
Thayer Academy, the private day school in Braintree, is deep into plans for a new performing arts center that officials say is needed to keep up with growing student interest in the arts.
In Quincy, Mayor William J. Phelan has set up a "vision committee" to explore the creation of a cultural and performing arts center that he hopes will draw crowds from well beyond the region and be what he calls an economic engine. In Brockton, an arts task force created by Mayor James E. Harrington last spring is crafting a long-term plan for the city's cultural community.
Meanwhile, ArtSouth -- a South Shore collaborative that has been talked about for years -- finally is coming together. Organizers say it will mean improved communication among groups, fewer scheduling conflicts, and, ultimately, more opportunities for arts consumers.
"There is more demand for the arts on the South Shore," said Nina Wellford, managing director of the Hingham Symphony Orchestra and a founder of ArtSouth, which has participants representing about 30 organizations.
"More and more people are living here who really value what arts bring to life. You don't want to go to Boston to get your beauty in life. We want it right here where we are," she said.
"I think people here on the South Shore are finally recognizing that we can have it here. There is enough critical mass, interest, and support to make these things flourish, and that's really exciting."
Liz Haywood-Sullivan, first vice president of the North River Arts Society and ArtSouth member, agrees. "We are looking at the Greenbush Line coming in, everything you read talks about it being the largest growing area in Massachusetts. At the same time, we have people who are proactive in the arts saying: What can we do to improve the access and the offerings of the arts?"
Adding to momentum is a recent announcement from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and MassDevelopment about the establishment of the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund. There is $13 million available this year to fund grants to promote the acquisition, design, repair, expansion, or construction of cultural facilities in the state.
Since the December announcement, inquiries have been coming nonstop, said Jay Paget, fund project director.
Count Quincy among the intrigued. Phelan recently established a committee to explore the arts center concept and scout locations as part of a larger attempt to stimulate tourism and economic development downtown.
The state's decision to make investment in cultural facilities a priority is encouraging, and an indicator that the time is right for expanding the cultural scene in the region, said Dave Murphy, the mayor's spokesman. "This isn't the reason why we're doing it, it's just a happy coincidence."
Dave Casanave, director of communications at Thayer Academy, could say the same. The school is planning to break ground before summer on a 500-plus-seat, $10 million to $14 million center for visual and performance arts, and grant money would come in handy.
The primary focus will be to serve the educational purposes of the school. Over the past eight to 10 years, the number of the students interested in arts programs has nearly doubled, and space is needed to keep up with the demand, he said. But the facility also will serve the community by allowing local groups and organizations to use the space in the evenings and on weekends and by offering arts-related classes for adults and children.
"We hope to draw the entire community," said Casanave. The center also likely will be a permanent home for the Hingham Symphony Orchestra, which does not now have a permanent performance space.
As more arts opportunities are created in the region, it will become increasingly important for arts organizations and institutions in the region to work together if they are to broaden their reach and prevent scheduling conflicts, noted Wellford. "There are a couple of obvious things we can do together -- coordinate what's going on on the art scene and ideally produce a website or central location to find out what's going on."
That's where ArtSouth comes in. It is a collection of arts organizations and institutions that, acting together, hope to be a one-stop shopping clearinghouse for consumers looking for events.
Member groups also seek to support each other, and share information so that events do not overlap and conflict.
Discussions are underway about developing a website of events or creating a kiosk where people could get information as well as buy tickets.
Already, networking and collaboration is paying off. It was through a brainstorming session with Wellford and a meeting with ArtSouth members that the idea for the Hingham amphitheater developed, said Martin Cohn, spokesman for Samuels & Associates, one of the shipyard developers.
"There is a tremendous demand for venues, especially in the Hingham area. Aside from the South Shore Conservatory, there aren't many places for people to come and listen to music," said Cohn.
"What happened in thinking through the shipyard redevelopment is that Samuels & Associates said we have this piece of land that we can't develop because of certain restrictions. We were going to put a park there anyway. But, from that [meeting with ArtSouth] came this idea."
Construction is expected to start next year.
Sandy Coleman can be reached at sbcoleman@globe.com.
What do you think?
Is the region ready to support and appreciate more venues for the arts, especially the performing arts? Share your comments at boston.com/southtalk. Or e-mail us at globesouth@globe.com, with your name, hometown, and a daytime phone number (number for verification only).
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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