Is art in the eye of the beholder, an objective representation of reality according to the artist’s metaphysical value-judgements, or slime trails left by maggots? Who can ever really know, eh?

I wouldn’t be caught dead doing this. How morbid!

Glossary of Help Desk Terms: this is what they’re calling you when you call them.

Apparently, the previously-linked-to BraBall has spawned a lawsuit. I’m not sure what’s at stake here, but I wish they come together to make the one big-ass sphere of brassieres. Won’t somebody think of the children?

But is it art?

Challenge: read this in its entirety. Oh, betcha give up right after the Mae Jemison link.

Weird Flash, but you can roll-your-own trance music. Just click on the buttons.

The Blur Building is a building encased in fog. Literally.

For those of you who think that skyscrapers are phallic symbols, there are far more penile buildings out there.

ASCII rocks! No, really.

When guests at a wedding kept coming to a LAN party across the hall, Ross didn’t get mad, he got even. He shook his groove thing, got jiggy wit’ it, and partied like it was $19.99. Great video!

Looking for some Saturday afternoon fun that doesn’t involve being surrounded by blue skies and the loveliness of nature? Want a cool science experiment that doesn’t require more than half of a grape? And produces flames? Of course you do! With that, I present grape plasmification and disclaim any responsibility for half-a-grape induced microwave destruction.

If you don’t feel right in anything but red, you might be a Santa. If you’ve ever had milk and cookies withdrawals, you might be a Santa. If you’ve ever wished that chimneys were bigger, you might be a Santa.

I see why Jeff Foxworthy has latched onto this formula. The stuff practically writes itself. I had a point to this. Oh yeah, Santa School. Become a Santa.

Awful Plastic Surgery is a blog dedicated to exposing celebrities’ plastic surgery missteps.

I wonder what would happen if George Bush’s head was put on some beautiful women’s bodies. Oh. Never mind.

The Warrior Diet: Intriguing.

Word Pirates is a site dedicated to taking back the English language from piratical imprecision. Verbiage is the one that I think needs to walk the plank. Arrr!

Alaska Air has created a competitor that makes it look incredible. From its “Super Scrimper Fares” (“You’ll be whisked away in intermittent air-conditioned comfort at an altitude of eight feet and speeds approaching 60 miles per hour in one of our diesel ‘Flightless Eagle Coaches.'”) to its tips page for overnight stays at the airport, this is high parody.

If you thought dog and cat shows were bad, what sort of people show rats?

Beauty doesn’t have to stop at the grave: Zombie Pinups (SFW).

DonateMoney2Me.com wants to be your ePanHandling one-stop provider. Oops, they link to competitor (and originator) SaveKaryn.com, who now apparently has a book out and has transformed her Web site from online begging to … an unfocused miasma of book promotion, trivia, and blather. The whole industry sickens me.

[UPDATE: Checking out the book at Amazon reveals that it’s 464 pages long. I cannot fathom people buying it and reading her dreck (unless her writing has improved considerably since she wrote things on her site, dreck is being generous).]

Mark your calendars and order your plane tickets because the World Beard and Moustache Championships are coming to facial hair capital of America—Carson City, Nevada! It’s only $10 for spectators!

If you had 10,103 bras, what would you do with them? It certainly outstrips a woman’s capacity to wear them. Why not make them into a huge 1,000 pound ball? Natch.

Enh, it’s fun shooting lightning down at stick figures at the very least.

Apparently, there is a way to create more time! Here I was being duped by academia and my Greenwich masters like a sucker. All we have to do is change our clocks. Counterpoint.

On the Internet, no one has to know you’re a lunatic. [more details]

Homestar Runner on web design and the result.

So you wanna be a pimp?

How To: By You is an interesting idea where people ask questions and the readers supply the answers. I contributed my wisdom on the subject of shaving, an activity that I abhor.

I’ve grown these bonsai potatoes myself inadvertently. I thought that this was a joke until I saw the FAQs and then I knew it was a joke.

Amazon has a great selection of odd books, horrifying books, classics revisited, anachronisms, hilarity, and disembodied legs. It’s got it all! [via mefi]

Interesting details about the plans for the WTC site.

project #53: Sell project-a-week book idea to a publisher.

With a title like human chess and the fact that it took place across many city blocks, I was imagining Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman that would show up to passing airplanes. Instead, it’s conducted via cell phone and costumes.

Car mods occasionally take on lives of their own. Sometimes those lives should be summarily ended.

Good selection of nursery rhymes

A modern-day version of the classic Abbott and Costello routine. Very funny!

The truth about those infernal star registries is exactly what I expected: they’re not official, they mean nothing, and they’re a waste of money. You may as well tell someone that you’ve made a donation to The Human Fund and save yourself some money.

The Founders’ Constitution: 3200 pages of constitutional goodness with commentary and supporting documents. Mmmmm, liberty.

Mild-mannered government employee Dick Splash has transformed himself into Angle Grinder Man after he “found Excalibur, the Golden Angle-Grinder and gained his weapons of Laser Cod-Piece and Radio-Active Colostomy-Squirt Bag.” For those of you not versed in superhero-speak, he’s established a business that cuts off boots that parking authorities put on delinquent parking miscreants. And he wears a cape. You just can’t make this stuff up!

Please say that this isn’t really frequently asked. Pretty please.

Top Ten Star Wars Fan Euphemisms For Not Having A Girlfriend: favorite “Shaking hands with the wookie.”

Supply-side Jesus from Al Franken

OurDocuments.gov highlights the top 100 documents in American history. It has an amazing interface: the scrolling Flash header is beautiful for browsing, the zooming way in which documents are shown, the text-only version, and the availability of high-resolution PDFs make this a very accessible site for our textual heritage.

Sofa Garden makes pillows in interesting shapes. That’s neat, but what is really cool is the name and the imagery it evokes.

If you’re too busy to watch TV or don’t have cable or satellite, TVTattle is the blog for you. The site has links to articles about people messing with David Blaine, thoughts on the Conan decennial celebration (I didn’t know he wrote for HBO’s Not Necessarily the News. Cool!), and the lack of content on Ellen and Sharon’s talk shows. Looks like a good blog to follow.

Go visit a very interesting and thorough site about the ancient city of Athens

I’ve been trying to hold out, but I can’t resist posting a link to this article in Popular Science on the worst jobs in science. I’m not a big fan of bandwagons but this one’s too funny to pass up.

Dark Tower is some electronic board game that was pretty popular among future lawyers in San Diego in the 80s. It was way before my time, but you might remember it and welcome such a site. Or not.

For any Lord of the Rings fans out there, here’s some map thingy. I’ve never seen the movies, read the books, or even cared to but Larry seemed to think you guys would like it.

Of course, he won’t actually become a member of the Found on the Web crew because he thinks he’s better than me. So I have to be your Larry Salzman conduit. Luckily, I only select the really good stuff: I passed on his suggestion that I post a link to this article about how Canada’s health care system is pushing subpar ganja. So maybe it’s better that he not get involved. Heh.

It’s like SimCity on the Web, though I’m not really sure about the point of it all.

We Want Your Soul: get some money for selling your soul.

What if Jesus were a cat? Or an OG?

How many CDs can one Sharpie label? If you really, really want to know, surf over to the How Much Is Inside crew’s Sharpie experiment page or go to eBay to bid on them. Said crew has been absent for awhile and I’m glad to see that they’ve been hard at work in the interim.

My friend found this funny, but I’m not sure why. I’ve seen footage of a moose stuck in an empty pool and heard about elk going down bobsled tracks, but this is a bear being shot out of a tree. The others I mentioned were so incongruous that you could empathize with the homeowner or track maintenance.

Cool discussion about logos. A follow-up quickly ensued with some guidelines and looser rules. I love logos, but I’m not very good at them. I’ve had countless business ideas, but designing logos for them seemed a little cart-before-the-horse though that might have inspired me to work more on them.

I have never seen sharks do this before. Amazing!

Nice Flash, takes forever to load, though.

Home and Gardens magazine circa 1938 features Hitler’s mountain home. It’s good to know that Hitler knew how to relax.

[UPDATE (9/20/03): The magazine forced the site to take down the pages. Here’s a Wired article about the matter.]

But those directional arrows in malls are actually pointing to processing centers for the government’s subjugation of everyone. And there’s helicopters involved. Now you know.

The much-loved five-second rule is scientifically unsound.

Look at how great computers are:

• Email allows us to contact anyone anywhere in the world for free and them to read it whenever it’s convenient
• Word processors allow us to type and edit documents at speeds unimaginable in the typewriter age.
• Stair dismount allows us to see what sort of damage we might incur if we throw ourselves down the stairs.

There’s probably some more stuff that computers are good for, but that’s just off the top of my head. Seriously, I got 48,965 points worth of damage without knowing what I was doing. But maybe that’s the best way to fall down stairs; you know, don’t overthink it. Unfortunately, Stair Dismount is only for Windows and a good graphics card really speeds things along.

Law and Order Coloring Book, part of the larger Law and Order: Artistic Intent site.

100 years of design, note the Tucker and the gorgeous S-1 locomotive. On a related note, be sure to comb through the design awards for 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003—though the student design awards are sometimes more interesting.

Picture gallery of important figures in computing history. I’m not on here, in case you were curious.

Good parodies of those insipid email disclaimers.

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet and writer who created more than seventy alternate literary personas, each incredibly prolific. I think I’ll develop this one first and then branch out.

Read all about a time traveller from the future. He could have made a mint selling dot-coms short. Idiot.

The Smoking Gun has obtained a number of letters from media personalities to Ted Kaczynski aka the Unabomber. Favorite quote: “If you know anything about Roseanne, you must know that she is a non-conformist and rarely does what society expects of her. I believe that you and her would definitely ‘hit it off’ and the conversation would definitely be interesting and fulfilling for the both of you.” Uh huh, they’re two peas in a pod.

I thought this guy was talking about OS 9, but then he started in on the dock. I think he just doesn’t know what he’s doing or isn’t comfortable outside of his editing software.

Warning: gratuitous iMac violence!

My favorite is French Lick, Indiana.

What he’s describing sounds more like a trademark, but that’s clearly a legal distinction beyond my limited comprehension. The page suggests that you hurry to buy the ebook at the sale price of $34.99 (normally $49.99) but since the sale ends on September 31st, I’d say there’s no particular rush.

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog now has an official site. There’s some great insult comic material on the front page, stuff that didn’t make it to the MTV Video Music Awards, Hollywood Squares, and the Muppet Christmas special. It’s a funny site… argh, must resist urges… can’t stop, giving in…aaggghh, for me… okay, it passed.

The winners of the 2003 worst manual awards are out and they’re doozies!

Think of it as research for are they real or not. (PNSFW)

I thought their unscripted nature was what made them fun and endearing. I guess not.

There’s six billion people in the world. Here’s what they would look like if they were all grains of salt. But they’re not grains of salt and you can’t use them to flavor your food. Is that the point? I don’t know: it’s “high art” and therefore both stupid and pointless. Bleh.

Forget milk shakes, meat shakes are the way to go! I hope they come to Arizona soon. If you’re wondering whether or not they’re for real, do a Google search against one of the addresses listed and you’ll have your answer. Very convincingly done, though.

This article about a very weird phenomenon just got mentioned on Slashdot.

I saw this underground bomb shelter/fortress/paranoid-induced obsession on the History Channel. Apparently, it’s available for $259,000, which is quite a bargain to my mind. If you’re familiar with panic rooms, this is like a panic house underneath the main house. Take some time to look around and you’ll be amazed that this was all constructed by one man over 14 years without letting anyone else know!

Stealth Disco is a site dedicated to the act of dancing behind people who are not aware of the fact that you’re dancing behind them. While I suspect that some of these clips might be staged, I can’t imagine that they all are. It’s a great idea and one that I might work on once I get my camcorder (mere days away)!

Skittlebrau: the mixing of Skittles and alcohol.

Among the many items at the ASCII homepage, you can find an ASCII version of a classic Jackass sketch. Awesome! I know he doesn’t do this himself and that a program does, but it doesn’t make it any less interesting.

MR1!1!! OMG WATSON-COME H3RE-I WANT 2 SE U11!!!1!! OMG LOL

It’s too bad it’s only one way and not available built-in to AIM.

Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” done up real nice like with Flash.

This site shows off a new form of cubism. Wow!

MC Hawking puts his thing down. I suppose you need to have something to fall back on if you’re a cosmologist. Here’s a picture of him dropping the beats. Unfortunately, bandwidth problems forced the removal of the mp3s, but you can still get a couple elsewhere. (NOTE: this is explicit stuff, but hilarious.)

Rants from Dennis Miller: there’s probably a lot more out there, but that’ll whet your appetite. Speaking of appetite whetting, is there anything else you can whet besides your appetite?

Interesting table on the top 50 classics—some of which I question describing as classics—with indications of when they’ll enter the public domain. Barring extensions of copyright law, of course.

Greg Knauss’ take on The Devil’s Dictionary.

This law firm has a serious attitude problem.

How computer virii get their names

Wow! This makes trekkies seem sane… Just kidding, nothing could do that.

Luckily, my wife teaches a younger, more respectful grade than Ms. Gonick but I’ve certainly seen my share of degraded youth.

For future reading and possibly writing, dialogue between Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker on the subject of “Is Science Killing the Soul?” Initial reaction: looks intriguing. We’ll see.

More Dawkins stuff online: interview, on the wonders of science, on memes.

If you’re a fan of Seinfeld, the show about nothing, then you’ve got to check out the Seinfeld blog. The site has 179 full episodes online and over 100 video clips. As George once said, “People who do that should be arrested.”

Anyone who’s browsed an Ikea store is instantly taken by the weirdness of the names they use for their items. It’s close enough to familiar that you think it might just be a bunch of fun, but it’s Scandinavian enough that you think it might actually mean something. It turns out that it does: Ikea nomenclature. Thanks, Larry!

TV Shows on DVD

Gallery of photographs of Communist store windows during the final years of the Iron Curtain.

At-a-Glance Movie Reviews: Jackie Chan films

September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The day’s home page has a how-to and a English-to-Pirate translator. Click smartly, me reader!