Portent

Sites like the Onion have been around for years but The Spoof is new to me. As something of a writer (not rich or award winning!) I am tempted to have a go myself

The site has a somewhat British flavour albeit with American spellings (e.g. humor) but that may just be the particular writer involved. Both Us and UK headlines get spoofed. And from what i’ve seen no target is immune. So if you’re witty and want to take a literary pot shot, get writing. I don’t think they pay though but at least you are guaranteed a good read.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Now over 21 years old and still standing! This was erected in 1986 as a protest by American born Bill Heine who stayed in Oxford after his postgraduate degree at Balliol College. It’s 25 foot long and Bill successfully overcame the ire of local town planners to keep it up. You can read how on the linked site.

Bill is now a presenter for Radio Oxford. I think for this one act with the shark, never mind his cinema naming end-run around the planners (read that on the linked site as well) he should be made an honorary Englishman.
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Popularity: 16% [?]

This is very well done by artist Alan Becker. He draws a small figure in photoshop (I think) named Victim and proceeds to torment the little stick figure. Then the stick figure escapes and engages in a full battle onscreen, mostly within Photoshop against the animator using the features of Photoshop.

This is very nicely done and highly recommended to fill in a dull moment or two!
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Popularity: 17% [?]

Sol it’s just another boring online product store? Not quite! Just watch it for a few seconds…

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Popularity: 26% [?]

The name of this site says it all. IsItChristmas.com. All it has is a big fat No! I guess for one day a year it will say something different! I can see this starting a whole bandwagon. IsitEaster etc and then the protesters- IsWarOver … For all I know they might already exist!

Of course the really clever web gurus might be working on AreWeThereYet…

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Popularity: 11% [?]

I’d seen these kicking around the web for some years but this is an expanded list, up to 100 and I think they’re just great. Things like hackers being able to crack passwords in a few seconds (as if!) or chase scenes on foot in the road where a car screeches to a halt as people run in front  and the driver leans out the window and shouts at them.

Film and TV cliches occur because Directors generally like to avoid the minutiae of real life. If the hero can’t park his car straight away (#17 in the list) it will detract from the plot or make it less action filled. It’s hard to avoid doing things the same way which is why we the film viewing public are starting to notice them.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Occasionally in my travels across the 987 corners of the web I encounter something a bit different and this one comes under the title of sustainable cliches. Old cliches are overused, hackneyed, weary and just deserve their final moment in an electric box or car crusher.

The people at the defectiveyeti website decided to get new versions of old well loved cliches. So instead of “Made a mountain out of a molehill” they suggest “Saw a duck and shouted “dragon!”‘ (there is something ineffably lame about that I’m afraid… It sounds a bit newage to me). Whereas “Wore his heart on his sleeve” has been taken out and left in the wood and replaced by “Flew his feelings from a flagpole”. That’s much better.

So here’s one I just thought up “Out on a limb” now replaced by “No seat at Stalin’s table.” Well ok, its rubbish albeit true. If you were out of favour with Russia’s favourite man of steel then they’d arrange a meeting early and when you got there there was no seat for you. However the nice soldiers would take you out the back, stand you up against a wall and …

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Given that this occurs on a student humour and pranks website (zug.com), it’s perhaps not meant to be taken too seriously but it certainly looks good.

The idea is that credit cards are boring so why not jazz yours up with a new look. It’s perhaps better to try it first on an expired one (assuming you have one that hasn’t been chopped up for safety). Certainly the examples given look very good, if a trifle NSFW.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

Well there are high-brow websites and cultural ones but then you get something a little less intellectual like this one. The title may be a clue: statue molesters.

It’s a fairly easy concept to explain. Take a statue- the ruder or sillier the better, have somebody pose near it, maybe holding their hands or posture in a rude or naughty way. Take a photo… The gallery screen shot gives you a clue… there are a lot of pages of photos…

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Popularity: 14% [?]

This is interesting. A research project to try and work out jokes that match your sense of humour. As they say “Jester uses a collaborative filtering algorithm called Eigentaste to recommend jokes to you based on your ratings of previous jokes.”

Of course I’m not sure quite how they classify humour or rate a joke for a match but the jokes provided I found above average so they must be doing something right.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

The link on the picture takes you to the UK Talk Like a Pirate Day website, while the bottom link goes to the US one. Maybe we’ll see other national sites some time eg “Parlez comme un Corsair?”

This annual event exhorts people to talk in the present tense, drop the gs off the end of words endin in ing and double up vowels- ie ee gettin’ that?

Both sites are interesting though the UK one looks better. Yaar!

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Popularity: 14% [?]

This site consists of several thousand techy quotes, mainly i guess taken from Internet Relay chat so they’re shown as dialogues. As examples of idiocy and meanness but often very funny (and sometimes bad language) . For example, this is typical of programmers.

<k2xl> in 1998, i made a C++ program to calculate pi to a billion digits.
<k2xl> i coded it on my laptop (pentium 2 i think) and then ran the program.
<k2xl> the next day i got a new laptop but decided to keep the program running.
<k2xl> it’s been over seven years now since i ran it. and this morning it finished calculating.
<k2xl> the output:
<k2xl> “THE VALUE OF PI TO THE BILLIONTH DIGIT IS = ”
<k2xl> mindblowing eh?
<k2xl> i looked in the code of my program, and i found out that i forgot to output the value :(.
Comment: true story, i fixed the code and am running it again

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Popularity: 9% [?]

These are quite cute. They say things like “Note to security- I picked this bag all by myself” and “Have fun rifing through my underwear”.

I’m not sure if I’d have the courage to use them though!

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Popularity: 17% [?]

Imagine a flash animation that combined Star Trek with the Flintstones with characters such as Captain James T Kirkstone, First Officer Sprock, Leonard RcKoy- you get the idea. The characters look like the Flintstones in Star Trek uniforms and there’s a running gag about red shirts who keep getting bumped off.

This is an excellent series with terrific cartoon animation and some mad plots- for example Pod racing on Tatooine- it’s clearly not afraid to take from other sci fi (e.g. Star Wars). My only hate- the canned laughter track, otherwise this is fantastic. And check out the animation to go with the Firm’s 1987 hit “Star Trekkin”.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Makeovers of celebrities is commonplace. The airbrush or more likely Photoshop these days turns great into gorgeous.

But it can be a two edged sword. On this site the makeovers make celebs look ordinary or ugly. The photo is of Johnny Depp. Just for fun!

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Popularity: 14% [?]