3. Magazines and Newspapers
4. Political Sites
5. Books, CD's and Movies
6. Web and Computer Related Sites - including Web Search
Engines!
7. Miscellaneous, with an Emphasis on the Wild and
Crazy
The following are the other Crossroads pages:
Peace Corps Crossroads Home Page Table of
Contents
1. Peace Corps Related Web Sites
2. Third World and Eastern Europe Related Web
Sites
The Journal of African Travel-Writing
includes some essays by RPCVs. Although the articles are not online, there
are some excerpts at this site.
Maiden Voyages Magazine
bills itself as a literary consumer magazine for women who travel
or dream about travel.
Michael Kinsley's Slate may be
ridiculously overhyped, but it's also pretty good. (I actually now pay my
$19/year for a subscription, and think it's well worth it.)
The New York Times is now online
as in the Washington Post.
You must REGISTER on the home page, or else you won't be allowed more than
one visit... but registration is free.
You don't have to believe in faith healing to appreciate the Christian Science Monitor's excellent site,
which includes an archive of articles going back to the early '80s. (There
is a link to today's paper at the bottom of the page.)
Scientific American puts part of
their magazine online every month.
I don't have a huge amount of respect for USA
Today, but their web site is quite good, and perhaps better suited to
the short attention span netsurfers (including me) often have. It's also
good on cross-links and background information. Sports fans will
find this a good source for the latest scores.
The Economist is online as
well...
... as is The Atlantic Monthly,
and
... and the ever provocative Reason
magazine.
HOT! Here's a great
index to online newspapers: The
American Journalism Review News Links Site.
Newspage describes itself
as the web's leading source of daily business news.. It tracks
thousands of news stories by industry group.
If you read the New Republic..,
you might want to check out their home page.
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HOT! You've probably
heard most of what Paula Jones alleges occurred in that hotel room with
Bill Clinton, but reading the the
full text of Paula Jone's complaint will flesh out your mental image
of the scene with some unusual details. (See esp. points 18 through 24.)
For info on how your congressional representative is voting, visit
Project Vote Smart.
Here's a page that's a good place for political junkies to get a fix:
The National Journal.
Current issues are discussed in depth at Policy.com
And of course you've heard of THOMAS...
(if you haven't, it has the complete Congressional Record on line, as well
as a bunch of other stuff.)
The libertarian Cato Institute has
become one of Washington DC's most influential think-tanks. Even if you're
a dyed in the wool liberal, you should read their condemnation of corporate
welfare.
...but before you start worshipping at the libertarian alter, you should
check out Critiques
of Libertarianism.
If you're more interested in liberalism than libertanianism, Turn Left (The
Home of Liberalism on the Web) should appeal to you.
How could you resist the
Political Babble Generator ?
Speaking of anarchy, check out the high quality Nothingness.org
web site.
And speaking of oxymorons, how about a Luddites
on Line web site? (Their motto: Life was better before sliced
bread.)
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Books
If you want to do some book browsing, try Amazon
Books. It's got an online catalog of 1,000,000 books. (I first posted
this link in 1996, when no one had heard of Amazon. Wish I had thought to
buy some of their stock.)
Here's a specialty online bookshop you might want to check out: The Adventurous Traveler Bookstore.
In addition to books, it's got some maps and CD Roms, and even screen savers
for sale.
The Globe Corner Bookstore
is another online travel bookstore, with books organized by region.
HOT! For an excursion
into literary surrealism in the form of a series of very brief short stories
(about two paragraphs each), check out The
Spiritual Cockroach Engenderment Museum. Amazing and bizarre.
I occasionally read sci-fi, and therefore enjoyed my visit to the unpretentious
Science Fiction Weekly.
One of the issues has an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, author of
the superb Red Mars etc. trilogy. I like his books so much I even
forgive him for being a kook politically (in my view.) By the way, another
sci-fi book I've recently enjoyed is Nancy Kerr's Beggars in Spain,
and its sequel, Beggars and Choosers.
You can find a searchable archive, by title or author, of books online
at the On-Line Books Page.
Tons of classics here, all downloadable for free.
BookWire is chock full of book
reviews.
If you are a fan of the Jewish cowboy (who is also a former Peace Corps
volunteer), check out The Kinky
Friedman Page
You can also read an online interveiw with the Kinkster at London Calling - Music Kinky.
The list of his favorite things is not quite the same as those found in
The Sound of Music.
CD's and Tapes
For tape and CD browsing, check out World
Wide Music: CDs, Cassettes and More!... It's a good source for your
favorite third world music artists.
If you came to love the pop music of your host country..... be sure
to check Roots World out!
Richard Dobson
is an RPCV and country music singer. This page has clips from several of
his songs in mp3 format.
Phil Ochs may have
had bizarre politics, but he sure wrote some beautiful songs.
Television
Anything good on the boob tube in the next few days? Check out ClickTV and see.
Movies
The Movie Review Query Engine lets
you search the net for a review of your favorite films. I tried it on the
recent Sean Connery film A Good Man in Africa, and it came up
with five well written reviews.
If you're a fan of Roger Ebert (he's the short one), you can access
a database of Roger
Ebert Film Reviews.
If you enjoy movies (and who doesn't?) Boxoffice
Magazine is a fine 'zine with articles, interviews, and a huge library
of reviews of recent films.
James Berardielli is an electrical engineer in New Jersey whose web
site, Reel Views, contains
over 1,000 movie reviews that are generally well written and informative.
The Internet Movie Database not
only rates movies, but includes classic quotes, actors, and so forth for
some of them.
Visit the Movie Critic Rate-O-Matic,
which starts out by asking you to rate 12 movies you have seen, and then
makes judgements about whether you will like other films. It also tells
you how others like those films. (Can a computer really guess which films
you would like? The New York Times described it as surprisingly accurate.)
Visit the Movie Snapshot
for brief descriptions plus ratings (on a one to four bag of popcorn scale)
of what appears to me to be virtually every movie made since 1994, including
those currently in theaters. This is not an amateur site!
The Picture Palace allows you
to purchase film and music videos online with an extensive database to search.
It also has profiles of must see movies, some of which you may
never have heard of.
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HOT! I've tried
a few different default home pages for my browser, but I like my Excite Home page the best (at least for now.)
It's got news, movie reviews, the Excite search engine, and more all on
one page. What's best, you can create your own customized page, that will
show only the categories of news you are interested in, listings of the
tv channels you watch, and even the prices of any stocks you may follow!
(If you use Netscape, you can change your default home page under the Options
- General Preferences - Appearance - Startup section. I'm sure MSIE users
can do it as well, though I don't know how offhand.)
You can make some nice greeting cards, party invitations, and other
print projects using the resources available on Printsville,
a part of Hewlitt Packards web site.
Looking for free clip art? Check out the Clip
Art Connection.
Net Surfing Tools
Here's a handy little tool for seaching the web: Search
Thingy.
If you want to learn the secrets of the search engines, check out Search Engine Watch.
HOT! Check out the
Ferret Brothers -- three great freeware
products for doing various types (WWW, News, and Email address) of searches.
(A former PC Crossroads Download of the Month!)
The Liszt Database is the place
to look for a listserver devoted to your arcane interest.... it has a directory
of over 55,000! (I did a search on science fiction, and it came up with
sixteen groups.) It will also walk you through the process of subscribing
to a group.
HOT! For good software
downloads, I have two favorite sites: Nonags
and ZDNet Downloards. The
advantage of Nonags is that none of the software will nag you to send anyone
money!
You can find a list of the top 100 most visited sites at Hot
100 Web Sites Updated Weekly.
HOT! Most sites
of sites (the PC Crossroads included) categorize and subcategorize
and sub-subcategorize. But the Big Eye
is an uncategorized archive of carefully selected Websites. Sounds
odd, but uncategorized makes it kind of fun. For example, among its 1,000
eclectic sites you'll find a Winnie-the-Pooh
link close by a link to a site that debunks the Chief
Seattle Hoax, with a site in between (the
Skeleton Closet) that dishes out dirt on just about every politician
in DC (from the Newt
to Ralph Nader). And yes,
the Big Eye has a link to The Peace Corps Crossroads! Great background
music, as well.
HOT SHEET is a very succinct
guide to a variety of good web sites, by category... I rate this one a "must
bookmark" (or hotlist, or whatever your browser calls it).
And here's the "original" Cool
Site of the Day.
Carnegie Mellon's English
Server has a well organized set of links, although with a decidedly
left wing bias.
Computer Tools and Utilities
HOT! Want to start
a list server? Don't want to pay a fee? Check out egroups
for a free, easy to use list server that allows you and your list subscribers
a wide range of options (including the valuable digest option.) The emails
will have ads in them, but hey, it's free.
There's no need to every buy FTP software: there is an excellent freeware
package called LeechFTP,
that does it all!
HOT! If you're a
Windows 95 user, be sure to download Tab2Desk.
This little utility (about 30k) will allow you to use the Alt-Tab key to
get to your desktop (i.e., minimize all programs). I use it several times
a day!
Slice.com
is a elegant little (about 2k!) MS-DOS solution to a big problem -- or,
more accurately, a problem with bigness. If you have a file that is too
big to fit on a floppy, it will slice it up and put it on as many floppies
as it takes, and then guide you in reassembling it when you move it to another
PC. It's free, and easy to use. Download slice.doc as well, another small
(2k) file that shows you how to use slice.com. If you download slice.zip,
you'll also get slice.asm, the assembler version, which you don't need unless
you want to see how it's coded in assembler.
HOT! Here's a top-notch
freeware program, well worth a download, especially if you're lucky enough
to have a direct connect internet line (from your office, for example):
Pointcast. It will run in background
on your PC, downloading up-to-date news stories and other information (stock
quotes on stocks you specify, for example, or weather reports on cities
you pick) of interest to you in background while you do other things.
HOT! Eudora Light
is perhaps the best known freeware mail manager program, and deservedly
so. It's probably all you'll ever need to retrieve, categorize, store, and
respond to your email. There are both Mac and PC versions. For more information,
visit the Eudora Light Site.
(By the way, Steve Dorner, the program's author, named it for Eudora Welty
after reading her short story Why I Live at the P.O.. Just thought
you might like to know.)
Here's a nice little online HTML tutorial, called HTMLementary.
Listen to the Web! With Real Audio.
Want info on starting your own web page? A trip to Web
Communications Publishing would be a good place to start your information
gathering process.
Looking for a guestbook for your web page? Check out The
World Famous Guestbook.
The URL-minder:
Your Own Personal Web Robot! will automatically track your favorite
web pages and tell you when they change.
Check your links with The
Web Page Doctor, or with LinkScan.
Anybody visiting this page own a Panasonic CF-M32? If so, then check
out the web site and
bulletin board I created.
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Jump to Miscellaneous, Wild, and Crazy
Miscellaneous but Serious
HOT! You don't need
a short wave radio to listen to the BBC
- all you need is an internet connection and RealAudio! If you're an RPCV,
chances are you listened to it during your years of service - now, listen
to those great news broadcasts and those goofy quiz shows while you surf
the net!
You won't have to be a journalist to find lots of good sources of info
at the Journalism Resources
site.
Travel @ the Speed
of Light is a great place to find on-the-edge, off-the-wall travel
stories, by the (often strange) people who voyage around the world.
Despite an annoying use of the destestable frames, Highlife
on the Net is a great site for you highlife fans, since it features
a RealAudio highlife
show.
InterAction is a coalition
of over 150 US-based non-profits, including the National Peace Corps Association,
working in relief, development, refugee assistance, environment, population,
and global education.
If you're interested in the import/export business, check out the ACR Import Export Library.
Here's a fun site that you just might find useful: enter you telephone
number into Phonespell (with or
without the area code) and it will do its best to generate words which correspond
to your telephone number on the dial. (For example, 234-5678 translates
into beg-lost.) Who knows, maybe it will help that cute blonde you met at
the Polka festival call you for a Sunday brunch.
HOT! Net
Grocer is a fun service: it allows you to order your non-perishable
groceries online from anywhere in the country.
Here's an article on using your web access to bring you the World
Wide Radio. It's got some good links.
HOT! CNN
has a great page for getting the latest news.
Another good up-to-the-minute online news source is News
from Reuters Online.
Get free stock quotes online (subject to a 20 minute delay) at Investors Edge Stock Server.
Stop by Bloomberg Online....
for news, quotes, etc. from the best in the biz.
Planning a trip abroad? You might want to stop by Shoreland's
Travel Health Online, for info on general and specific (to the country
you're visiting) health tips.
Here's a place to find info on subscribing to The
Caretaker Gazette. It's publisher tells me that he has a lot of
returned Peace Corps subscribers who take advantage of the rent-free living
situations offered. I've checked out a copy of the Gazette, and there
certainly appear to be a variety of interesting alternatives, many of which
may well appeal to RPCV's.
HOT! Find your old
sweetheart with Banyon Systems Coordinate
Division Switchboard, an online telephone and address directory of everyone
in the U.S.! Businesses and people (as long as their numbers are listed.)
And it's free to use... and remarkably fast.
HOT! ... and then,
if you need a map to get there, visit Mapquest,
which you give you a map to get to any address in the country. (Yes, even
where you live! Try it and see.)
The Electric Library describes
itself as the "Web's most comprehensive one-stop digital archive".
Give it a free trial, and you'll be impressed. Allows searches by subject
of a large database of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. I've used this
resource (it's been available to Prodigy subscribers as "Homework Helper"),
and it is superb. I even used it to do my primary research on a paper I
wrote for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on a history of Latin American
investments. (If you're really bored, a summary of the paper is online.)
The Internet Reminder
Service will make sure you never forget Mom's birthday... or any other
important date you register with it. (It will send you e-mail reminding
you several days in advance.) And it's free!
Looking for a quote? Check out Bartlett's
Quotations On Line
The Vincent Voice Library
has short samples of many of the over 500,000 voices it has on file.
Thinking about writing a movie script? Then check out The
Writer's Guild of America site.
HOT! The
Life Alive Page lets you watch and alter artificial communities (e.g.,
sharks and fish) that evolve and disappear on your PC, live. I doubt this
page works without Netscape 2.0, but let me know... maybe it can handle
MSN. A neat site, even if I do have it in the serious section.
The venerable Eliza
is an occasionally intriguing but generally unconvincing demonstration of
artificial intelligence.
Want to eavesdrop on police
scanners in LA, Dallas, New York, or other cities?
HOT! Africa:
The Art of a Continent is an online museum of African art from the Guggenheim
museum. The pics are just grand.
And speaking of grand pics, check out the NSSDC
Photo Gallery for some great outer space shots. Or stop by the Astronomy Picture of
the Day.
Miscellaneous, Wild, and Crazy
I rarely watch t.v. (hey, how do you think I find the time to maintain
this site?), but thanks to Adcritic.com
I can still see some of the most popular commercials. You'll need to install
a recent version of Apple Quicktime, and the downloads aren't speedy, but
still it's a fun site. My favorite isn't even a commercial: it's the President
Clinton: Final Days video. While it is a daunting 16 meg download, if
you have a good internet connection (don't hate me because I have a cable
modem) it is definitely worth watching.
How do you get rid of a dead whale?
How about dynamite? Just don't park your car too close by....
If you're not familiar with the works of the comic
artist Callahan, you don't know what you're missing.
If the thought of a cartoon frog in a blender, and the President of
the United States being overly familiar with a gebil (and similar antics)
totally disgusts you, stay away from Joe
Cartoon.
HOT! If you've ever lived
in a small town, you probably know the joys of reading the weekly police
blotter in the newspaper. (Typical entry: Tuesday, 10:15; Man reports wallet
stolen from car, later finds in jacket pocket.) Thanks to the internet,
you can now read the police
blotter of the town of Moab, Utah from anywhere in the world! But this
is not your typical blotter: the police chief often editorializes with his
wry and sage commentary. (Typical entry: A family fight was refereed.
The fight occurred in a downtown intersection. The couple, from Colorado,
advised that they were having a rough day on their way to Lake Powell. The
male half of the couple was in the process of throwing all of the female
half's belongings from their vehicle into the street. At this point the
couple is not married, but I'm sure they soon will be and will provide job
security to a Colorado law enforcement agency.) (Addendum: the Chief
who maintained this site has retired, but you can still read his old entries.
By the way, buried in the links section of his site is a link to this site!)
If you're a David Barry fan (and who isn't), be sure to check out his homepage.
In the grand tradition of the "Mr. T Ate My Balls" page comes
Michael Tyson Ate My Ears.
If you crave escape from your mundane existence, you can "live"
the mundane existence of someone else at the Real
Life Simulator page.
You'll be the life of every party when you learn
to draw U.S. Secretary of Commerce Mickey Cantor.
HOT! 49,682,923 stories about...
is like an online experimental film festival. It's bizarre, but very well
done. Although I'm usually a Netscape user, this one looks better using
MSIE.
A real
live Lara Croft? Although lacking Lara's gravity-defying chest, there
is a strong resemblence.
In the mood to read the
funnies?
Wanna play some useless
and stupid games?
Those interested in a true multicultural experience should be sure
to check out these Insect
Recipes from those enlightened folks at Orkin. Example: Chocolate Chirpie
Chip Cookies, which include ½ cup of dry roasted crickets.
I've only checked out a few of these
jokes, but my guess is that most of them are in horrible taste.
Speaking of horrible taste, how about a web site dedicated to bus plunges? You'll find news stories
about bus plunges, as well as a scientific categorization of bus plunge
types: for example, Bridgus Slipperius and Driver Inebrious.
The infamous Heaven's Gate web site can still be seen at Yahoo's Heaven's
Gate Mirror Site. Or, if you prefer, you can view my tasteless April Fool's Day Site.
(While we're on the subject of the Heaven's Gate cult, anyone wondering
what was going on in the heads of those lunatics might want to read a fascinating
1988 novel by Stephen Wright called M31: A Family Romance. It's about
a UFO cult lead by husband and wife team Dot and Dash.... )
There are a lot of sites on the web that try and fail to be funny.
Here's one that genuinely is: And
The Bride Wore.... It's a compendium of outrageous wedding outfits.
Which is scarier: that someone would create a page that creates Computer generated haiku,
or the fact that some of the haiku is actually pretty good? Example:
almost, not quite, pure
the myriad beating wings
trees longing for leaves
Speaking of scary things, how about a page dedicated to The
Wonderful Art of Contortion? With photos....
I was recently shocked (shocked!) to discover a web site that I can
only describe as the Valley
of the Supermodels. Good Lord -- don't even think about looking at the
photo of Daniela
Pestova! What is mankind coming to?
Speaking of supermodels, how would you like to play a game of Concentration
with Cindy Crawford?
Norm Weldon's Home Page
once was awarded the most offensive web site design award. Believe
me, you don't want to visit this site to find out why.
The Really
Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything is a really big button that doesn't
do anything. Really. Except that it might change your life. But don't say
I didn't warn you.
If you think the Really Big Button is weird, check out the Jodi.org site for something really weird. And
if you figure out what's going on here, please let me
know!
Should you or shouldn't you? Take a visit to the Psychic
Ant Farm for a yes/no answer.
Bitter because your roommate is getting great job offers and you aren't?
Then check out the Student.Net
Reject O Matic! You get to preview the letter before sending it.
Want to go somewhere you've never been before? Ride The
Yahoo Random Web Page Generator to a random web site. (And if you find
yourself doing this one alot, my advice to you is: get a life!)
Yet another oddity: Heather
and her two mommies take a trip to the Rain Forest Education Center.
Offbeat humor and some great animal pics.
Every time you reload the Surrealist
Compliment Generator, you'll get something like this: Your sunburnt
skin is as beautiful as gangrenous flesh peeled from an amputated limb..
Dare you visit the Heartless
Bitches International web page?
Boo hoo! The
Walter Cronkite Spit In My Food Home Page is now history!
....and if you want to know why, read Dr.
Donnelly's Interview with Walter Cronkite.
Cronkite's success appears to have been short live, as evidenced by
the Walter Cronkite Pissed
in My Beer page.
David Letterman's top ten lists pop up all over the place, but for
a searchable archive, check out the Late Show web
site. (E.g.... Ten ways you know that Bill Clinton is vacationing next
door: [#7] What you thought was a new lawn gnome turns out to be Warren
Christopher....)
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