I'll start out with Dan's Wide World of Stuff at www.cybercomm.net/~dano/. It's a personal page, but a very good one. It's an eclectic collection with hundreds of interesting links on many subjects. I may cover it in some detail in a future article, but I think it's too good to keep under wraps. I've spent most of my time at "The Cyber-Spaceport", but the other sections are interesting, too. Give it a try.
I'm fascinated by best and worst lists. You have to consider the sources of such lists, but when you get a good one (or a bad one), it can be a lot of fun, an educational experience, or both. Last year, National Public Radio selected the most important 100 American musical works of the 20th Century. The site includes audio files with the original NPR stories and the music. You can find it at www.npr.org/programs/specials/vote/list100.html. You can also find their top 300 list at www.npr.org/programs/specials/vote/300.html from which they selected the top 100. I found some very interesting alternate choices there. Another interesting NPR musical site is "All Songs Considered," a web page at www.npr.org/programs/asc/ which covers some of the unusual music that separates the stories of NPR's evening news program "All Things Considered."
Coming at quality from the other direction, I found a pair of lists of the 100 and 300 worst films of the 20th century at www.thestinkers.com/100stinkers.html and www.thestinkers.com/300list.html. I've always been partial to worst films lists. The films in these lists were selected and voted on by visitors to the site - the vote ended in early 2001. As might be expected, it's heavily skewed to recent films. According to the poll, the worst movie of all time is "Battlefield Earth," followed by "Wild Wild West" and "Batman and Robin." My choice for all-time worst film, "Americathon," made their bottom 300 list but not the bottom 100. Some of the films in the bottom 100 I actually like, but of course badness is in the eye of the beholder. By the way, there are a lot of other bad film resources out on the web if you like this site.
Would you be interested in a site that catalogues symbols? I found one - it's at www.symbols.com. To use the graphic search capability, you answer four simple questions relating to the symmetry and line properties of your symbol. Symbols.com then generates a list of possibilites from which you can select. The descriptions provided of the meanings and history of each symbol are often very detailed. This is a very curious site, but if you're interested in symbols, I think you'll like it.
The musical "The Fantasticks" ended its Broadway run recently. It made me wonder if there were web sites dedicated to musicals so I looked and found "Musical Heaven" at www.musicalheaven.com. It explores all types of musicals, including movie musicals, opera, Broadway and off-Broadway musicals. I'm not too well-versed in musicals, but it looks like a pretty good site to find out about them.
CEOExpress.com advertises itself as a business portal designed by a busy executive for busy executives. It's an effective resource for the rest of us, too - it's not just about business. There are links to all sorts of resources: news, search engines, health and lifestyle information, magazines, government agencies, speech and writing resources and tons of other stuff. If I didn't already have my own personal portal, I might use CEOExpress as my home page. As I look today (2/4/02), I see in the upper right corner of the page that I can download the 218 page report commissioned by the Enron Board of Directors on the abuses at Enron (it's actually a link to the Washington Post, which seems to be doing superb Enron coverage). Business news is often dull, but not lately. This is a good place to start a rainy day browsing session.
Finally, there is www.brainyquote.com. I like quotes by famous people and there are a lot of them at BrainyQuote. Sadly, this site is also loaded with obnoxious popup windows - among the worst I've ever seen and I've seen a lot. But I still like to go there occasionally - it's that good.
I have an addendum to last month's article on Emacsen (the official plural of Emacs). I forgot to mention that there is actually a "lite" version of Emacs for Windows systems called NotGNU that you can find at www.notgnu.org. I used it for a while in the period when the bigger Emacs systems didn't work so well in Windowsland. I would miss features if I went back to it, but if you're just starting out, it's a gentler path to a better text editor. It's free, too.
Another addendum to a previous article: in Brain Candy #47 (July, 2001), I talked about the underground rock show "Beaker Street". Last week, the site resumed streaming audio on the web. On Sunday nights from 8 pm to 1 am Eastern time, you can listen to the shows live. It's at www.beakerstreet.com.
CATBAR - Brain Candy #55 - Fun with Lists, Part I / Brian Rock / Feb 5 2002