Lindsay Pereira
If you think your neighbour’s weird just because he collects potato peels, any surfer
worth his bandwidth will tell you that you ain’t seen the half of it.
Ask the people at Di Stefano (http://www.distefano.com/), for example. What they offer
is – hang on to that chair, and don’t let your mom see this —corpses for sale. Yup.
Visa, Mastercard or American Express, if you’ve got money, they’ve got personalised
bodies to keep you company on those lonely Saturday nights at home.
How do you like your corpse? Each is hand crafted, they tell you, and durable in
construction. Choose the degree of decay, skin or hair colour. Pick Pamela Andersen’s
hair colour, Michael Jackson’s skin, and maybe a two-week level of decay. Buy and
place in your bedroom. Guaranteed to keep pesky relatives (and just about anyone else
on the planet) away for a long time.
Dead bodies not up your alley? How about something on the spiritual side? Like
ghosts. And who better to turn to then Rent-A-Ghost (http://www.rent-a-ghost.co.uk/),
the world's first and only Ghost Installation Company. Headless monks, moaning chain
rattlers, grey ladies, or historical beasts -- you demand, they supply. Simply become a
member, pay two months in advance, and start picking. Best of all, there’s a free trial
offer. What more could anyone ask for, right?
And hey, we’ve only just begun here. There’s also a place online where people who
hate rotten bananas can unite (http://members.tripod.com/~rottenbananas/). "How can
you eat a banana that squishes when you look at it?" asks the creator of the site,
voicing a common grievance across the planet. What he did to tackle this important
issue was set up the page in order to "abolish the world of rotten bananas, and let
fresh bananas rule like they were meant to." Visitors and members get a ‘Rotten Banana
Site of the Week,’ a discussion forum (no kidding), a section offering alternatives to
wasting rotten bananas, and even rotten banana stories. Salman Rushdie, eat your
heart out.
Leaving those trivialities aside, it’s time to turn to more important topics. Like missing
socks. The Bureau of Missing Socks (http://www.funbureau.com/) is the first
organization of its kind devoted solely to solving the question of what happens to
missing single socks. It ‘explores all aspects of the phenomena including the occult,
conspiracy theories, and extraterrestrial.’
There’s the latest on what’s happening in the world of socks, a monthly cartoon, tales
involving single socks, and even Doctor Coconuts new hit single ‘I lost my sock’.
Remember what we said about your neighbour’s potato peel fixation being pretty
normal? Ditto.
When things start getting really warped, you run to normal, rational people like
doctors, scientists and researchers, right? Wrong. The National Library of Medicine's
Visible Human Project (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html)
proves why. It spends all its time on the creation of complete, anatomically detailed,
three-dimensional representations of the normal male and female human bodies. Its
long-term goal (yes, it has one) is producing a system of knowledge structures that will
transparently link visual knowledge forms to symbolic knowledge formats such as the
names of body parts. Leaving us all with the simple question, “Huh?”
Deathclock (http://www.deathclock.com/) is another site that fits under the ‘Nice
interface, but still scares me to death’ category. It was created merely to remind us just
how short life is. Enter your day, month and year of birth, sex, and mode (normal,
pessimistic, or sadistic). Click the ‘Check your Death Clock’ icon, and get your
personal ‘day of death’ on a pop-up screen, along with the amount of seconds you
have to live. Makes you rethink whether or not you ought to waste any more time on
Baywatch.
Sites like these could really make someone want to break their computer. Voila! The
Illustrated Guide to Breaking your Computer
(http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/index.html). From using a power drill
meticulously on your keyboard, to squeezing the life out of your diskettes, hammers on
monitors to a compressed electronic duster on your circuit board. All good, clean fun
for kids everywhere, and fully illustrated!
Finally, if you really don’t fit in with us normal folk, try The Weird Site
(http://www.theweirdsite.com/). It's home to strange world news, bizarre facts, e-zines,
weird downloads, unusual art, books, videos, etc. Where else can you find links to
sites like The Mother of All Excuses Place (http://madtbone.tripod.com/), U and UR
Toaster Collection (http://www.berksys.com/cafeslack/unur/index.html), The First
Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine
(http://chelsea.ios.com/~hkarlin1/welcome.html), and Home Appliance Shooting
(http://www.csn.net/~dcbenton/has.html)?
There’s loads more out there in cyberspace, waiting for the unwary to log in. If I were
you, I’d start up a friendship with that neighbour as quickly as possible. He may soon,
in all probability, be the only sane guy left around these parts.'
