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Languages and Games
Kick off your day with a
little free entertainment -
paste some text into one of the "dialectizers" from
Rinkworks. The
application translates your input into a variety of dialects,
resulting in barely recognizable gibberish. Caution: the
humorless will not be amused (particularly if it's their text or
their dialect).
See
www.rinkworks.com/dialect/
Also entertaining: copy some text and paste it into a translator. Output miraculously
 appears
in the language selected (generally German, French, Spanish, Italian,
and Portuguese). Results may be entertaining, even bizarre. Here
are a few translator sites to try (even though each is powered by the
same software, they yield slightly different results):
Confident you can trust the
translation? Try running your results back through the translator, i.e., from
Language X into English.
Reference
www.refdesk.com
It's got everything.
Cliché Finder
 Have
a feeling that words or phrases you've seen (or use yourself)
are redundant, or are used so often that they've lost all meaning? They may have
been purged already and demoted to the banished words list at
http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current/default.html
Info Alternatives -
excellent and not so excellent
 Top:
www.aldaily.com
Linked to scores of top sites, as
good as ever. Brief disappearance in October 2002 due to the
bankruptcy of parent company made us realize what a gem this site is.
Bottom: www.drudgereport.com
Online tab with "Extra! Extra!"
national focus reminiscent of the New York Post
(erratic, unreliable). Drudge has the dubious distinction of having
broken the Lewinsky story, which has almost disappeared into the obscurity it
deserves. Lots of links. Gave rise to an opposition site, "Drudge
Retort" which has plenty of entertaining links, too, at
www.drudge.com
Search Options
Still
the best:
www.google.com
Moving
up, but also-rans nevertheless:
http://search.msn.com/; also
http://search.yahoo.com/
More Research
When it's necessary to view elusive
official documents and photos (e.g., celebrity mug shots) you've
heard about in the news, check 'em out at the Smoking Gun:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com
Inspiration
Alternatives
 Publicly
embrace this site at your own risk
(society's cheer police may track you
down and punish you).
www.despair.com
Mission
Statements
 If
inspiration fails you, and you've got to come up with a mission for
your company (i.e., "buy low, sell high" or "increase your commissions
by increasing your sales" won't cut it), save yourself some trouble -
visit Dilbert and let Catbert's mission statement generator take care of it for you.
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms_verb.cgi
Movies
The source.
www.us.imdb.com
Supplements imdb with appalling
celebrity details.
http://www.hollywood.com
For current movies, an excellent source
for info and reviews.
www.rottentomatoes.com
Alternative Cooking/Food Sites
 Gallery of Regrettable Food (linked to
the authoritative "Institute of Official Cheer")
www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html
For insights into baking and fashion
www.martinhowardcakes.bigstep.com/homepage.html
Convert most Measures to most
other measures
Want to try some recipes from cookbooks written by, er, aliens (we
won't attempt to define that word.) with those pesky metric measures -
and you've got a scale? Well, here are some conversions you'll
find useful:
Cooking: www.onlineconversion.com/cooking.htm
Temperature: www.onlineconversion.com/temperature.htm
Volume: www.onlineconversion.com/volume.htm
Weight: www.onlineconversion.com/weight.htm
Noted in Passing 1.0
About
design and other oaqs.
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