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CULTURE
www.aldaily.com
Its motto is Veritas odit moras (Truth hates delay), and Arts
& Letters Daily satisfies your intellectual cravings like an expert
sommelier at the swankiest restaurant in town. The site draws on an
esoteric selection of sources, such as The New Yorker and The Times of
India, picking daily the cultural commentary that is most articulate,
provocative and blessed with insight. From Woody Allen on the genius of
Ingmar Bergman to David Mamet’s musings on a recent visit to
Jerusalem, quality vintages are always on the menu, and the Nota bene
section leavens the feast. Stimulation guaranteed.
www.artcyclopedia.com
The fussy culture vulture will not be picking at scraps with this
exceptionally powerful search engine, which scans 1,200 cultural
institutions to find the world’s finest artworks. Enter artist, title
or museum and arrive at the exact page of the online collection that
houses your chosen piece. If next month’s Titian exhibition at the
National Gallery sparks an interest, roam from Nebraska to St Petersburg
to track down the work of the High Renaissance master, such as Sacred
and Profane Love (c1515) and view more pictures than London can
accommodate. There is also a directory of Movements, Media and Subjects
to throw up intriguing comparisons.
daphne.palomar.edu/shakespeare
Once upon a time, the internet was about altruism — knowledge was not
a commodity to be traded, but a resource to be shared. Terry A Gray, of
Palomar College’s library-technology team in California, remains
wedded to that ideal with his “complete annotated guide” to
Shakespeare online. Now in its fourth edition, the site links to
individual and collected plays, the bard’s life and times, Elizabethan
theatre and link upon link of criticism. Meticulous organisation and a
librarian’s eye for detail have created a site that is accessible and
ordered, and a tranche of “Other” sites even reveals a sense of
humour — witness Hamlet in the manner of Raymond Chandler: “My name’s
Horatio, Hamlet’s gumshoe buddy, trying to stay clean in a dirty
castle.”
www.gospelcom.net/bible
This magisterial collection of 15 online versions of the Bible (ranging
from the eloquent 1611 King James version to the New American Standard),
rendered in 28 languages (including Haitian and Maori), puts even the
weightiest printed volume into the shade. Rather than merely dumping the
text online, the good souls at Gospelcom have created a facility for
looking up chapter and verse, and whenever the engine cannot understand
a search request, it charmingly helps by displaying all the books of the
Bible. Being able to search for particular words transforms the database
into a powerful concordance. Verily, manna from heaven.
www.metafilter.com
In its own words, Metafilter is “weblog as conversation”. Erstwhile
web excavators draw our attention to interesting links they have dug up,
accompanied by commentaries (known as threads) that aim to provoke a
reaction. Contributors value the thoughtful over the novel, and so
attract opinion on topics as varied as Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang
and Samuel Pepys’s diary. Its ethical openness, reflected in
navigation, design and voice, provides a warm welcome to the net
wanderer in search of like-minded souls.
www.nobel.se
This informative e-museum, which honours the recipients of Alfred Nobel’s
awards for human endeavour, is a feat in its own right. More than a mere
list of winners, it is a collection of speeches, lectures and judges’
summations since the prize began in 1901, and gives a fascinating
insight into the issues that shaped the 20th century, reflected in
awards to luminaries such as Marie Curie, WB Yeats and Henry Kissinger.
All 736 recipients are featured on the site in some capacity, and many
of the most recent have received the full multimedia treatment,
including Sir John Sulston, who was interviewed with his fellow winners
in last year’s medicine category about his work on the human genome
project.
TRAVEL
www.africam.com
The world’s first virtual game reserve brings the glories of the
savanna straight to your desktop, and the excitement is palpable as you
watch life unfold at watering holes across southern Africa. The site’s
global network of game-spotters can even save lives — once, vigilant
viewers reported a lion with a snare round its neck in the Kruger
National Park, South Africa; a vet was called out to save the beast.
Sadly, AfriCam is closer to extinction than many of the species it was
set up to cherish — without donations from members, it will have to
start charging.
www.sleepinginairports.net
After bedding down in Belfast’s bus terminus, the Canadian Donna
McSherry realised that no self-respecting traveller would swap a nasty
but free night in a departure hall for a nasty, paid-for night in a
hotel bed unless they had to. She started rating the world’s airports
(a smiley face for good, skull and crossbones for bad) and, by
encouraging other travellers to submit their reviews, a web phenomenon
was born. Singapore’s Changi airport was voted the best in the world
last year, while the worst cover an entire country — India, where the
traveller is advised to “go to the nearest bar and drink the pain away”.
You have been warned.
www.travelhealth.co.uk
Even mentioning some of the health risks — malaria, deep-vein
thrombosis, ebola, diarrhoea — involved in leaving for exotic climes
can be enough to induce nausea. Credit, then, to TravelHealth, set up by
a British nurse, Liz Rosies, which deals with these horrors and much
more, providing detailed information in a nonhysterical and highly
informative manner. Welcome features include World Health Organisation
disease maps, a vaccination chart, to ensure that you are up to date,
and advice tailored to diabetics, parents travelling with children and
the habitually underprepared gap-year explorer.
www.travelintelligence.net
The vivid accounts in this traveller’s almanac bring the world’s
most stunning locations shimmering into view and set your feet itching.
You can search by subject, place and writer, and the knowledge and
insight of authors such as William Dalrymple and Henry Shukman add to
the anticipation of destinations planned or proposed. The Before You Die
section sets down essential adventures — meeting mountain gorillas in
Uganda, for instance, or enjoying a sunset from the rooftops of
Jaisalmer Fort in India.
www.travlang.com
Given the ubiquity of english, it is worth remembering how far a few
native words can go while abroad. Travlang provides a staggering array
of handy phrases, including those simple essentials, “Please”, “Thank
you” and “I don’t understand a word you are saying”, in 80
languages. Most vocabulary comes with an audio file, so asking for
prices in Estonian (“Kui palju see maksab?”) or for the bill in
Swahili (“Tafadhali, letee checki”) should sound perfect. The site
also hosts a formidable currency converter with a four-month
exchange-rate history.
SPORT
www.cricinfo.com
Billing itself as the “home of cricket on the internet”, CricInfo
plays Michael Vaughan to www.wisden.com's
Don Bradman. It is not only a matter of style, however, because the
young upstart is unmatched for coverage, offering live news feeds for
all 10 Test-playing nations, so english cricket fans can be informed of
their team’s latest humiliations as they occur. The StatsGuru
encourages even the most pedantic fan to amass facts about players’
records and averages. Such strength in depth makes the site a prime
destination for the Cricket World Cup, which starts next month.
www.kitbag.com
When it comes to proclaiming your sporting loyalties with a team shirt,
the chances are that Kitbag will come up with the goods by catering for
more tribes than an Afghan cabinet meeting. Browse by team, brand and
product on the cleanly laid-out site; football, cricket, rugby and
American football are the main sports here, complemented by an
impressive range of the latest boots and trainers. It is not all fads,
though; football nostalgia is well served by retro shirts such as
replicas of the Celtic Old Bhoys jersey and the England shirts worn by
our lads in the cult film Escape to Victory.
GOSSIP
www.friendsreunited.co.uk
Ever had an irresistible urge to catch up with comrades, antagonists and
crushes from your school days and find out what they have made of the
hand that life dealt them? Curiosity has fed the internet baby of the
London couple Steve and Julie Pankhurst, which now lists 46,000 schools
and universities, and has 8m members. Voyeurism is part of the
attraction (a simple registration and navigation process means that you
can peek without giving away too much) as is surprise: the bully of 4B
who became an aid worker, spotty weeds who are now champion racing-car
drivers. The site also brings long-lost souls together — Gemma Dudas,
22, was reunited with her father at Christmas after finding his entry on
the site.
www.hintmag.com
Imagine an episode of Sex and the City scripted by the editor of Private
Eye and you have Hint magazine — a fashion e-zine that manages to look
cool while sniggering behind its hand at the soap opera of fashion and
celebrity. It is best known for its gossip column, Chic Happens, and an
irreverent roundup of the month’s parties, Jetsetera, that reports on
a recent awards night: “J.Lo’s misguided attempt at 1920s sportif
chic ... prompted one attendee to refer to her as the Great Fatsby.”
The mag has a serious side, too, championing up-and-coming designers
such as People Used to Dream About the Future and interrogating fashion
royalty such as Marc Jacobs.
www.peoplenews.com
This favourite is effectively a newswire that is dedicated to the
carryings-on of the rich and famous. With the former Tatler editor Jane
Procter as its creator, one would expect its ear to be close to the
hallowed ground that celebrities tread. The immediacy of the internet
and some bulging contacts books mean it can break big stories, such as
Victoria Beckham’s new recording contract with Telstar late last year,
before print outlets. Its e-mail bulletin, the Daily Fix, provides a
stream of water-cooler chitchat to lighten the working day, and the
Small Bites section conveniently rounds up the main entertainment
stories.
www.thesmokinggun.com
While many gossip sites rely on hints and winks to avoid libel writs,
The Smoking Gun has the advantage of authenticity. By obtaining material
from US government and law-enforcement sources, through Freedom of
Information requests, its editors can reveal real skeletons in rich and
famous cupboards. The Mug Shots section shows stars such as Yasmine
Bleeth, Robert Downey Jr, Eminem and Carmen Electra under arrest. It is
not all schadenfreude — a declassified psychological profile
of Adolf Hitler makes riveting reading.
FOOD AND DRINK
www.epicurious.com
A gourmet’s dream, this site exudes a genuine love of the rituals of
preparing and consuming food and drink. Add spice to dinner parties for
years to come using the staggering collection of 14,000 recipes, and
stave off kitchen disasters by watching the face-saving series of
tutorial videos, which clarify techniques that are not easily explained,
such as filleting fish and folding napkins into attractive shapes.
Finally, avoid foodie faux pas with the Etiquette Guide, in the Learn
section: “Don’t drink from a mug with a spoon in it, not least
because you run the risk of poking yourself in the eye.”
easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~gcaselton/chile/chile.html
This long-winded address leads to a destination as unlikely as its
spelling: Chile Head and “all things Chile pepper-related”. The
red-hot capiscum occupies a small but significant place in the pantheon
of culinary ingredients, but rarely has it found such a zealous devotee
as Graeme Caselton. He lavishes attention on every aspect of the
fearsome pepper, ranging from the first recorded finding (by Colombus,
on the island of Hispaniola in 1492) to its chemical composition. The
Scoville Organoleptic Test, which measures chilli strength, puts the red
savina habanero at more than 577,000 Scoville units, so watch out if you
use it to prepare one of the site’s hundreds of recipes.
www.worldsbestbars.com
The discerning drinker can enjoy a sniff of the finest watering holes on
the planet at World’s Best Bars, which reaches the parts that other
sites cannot thanks to its reviews of the hippest nightspots in almost
every international city worth visiting. The site’s team has sampled
the flirty frisson of the Happy Cock in Fukuoka, Japan, the fashionista
swank of Mexico City’s Cosmo and the classical opulence of Birmingham’s
Bacchus, all in the line of duty. The Cocktail Mixer is great for
whipping up creations at home from whatever ingredients you have to
hand.
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