Given the weird predilections of the Magellan's Log staff, it's no surprise that their Favorites and Bookmarks lists fill up to overflowing with unusual sites, from the extremely useful to the total-waste-of-time.

Every once and a while we do a staff poll and collect the latest faves:

Chicken Hawks
http://www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html
The New Hampshire Gazette is keeping a very revealing list of our leaders who now scream loudest for war but who during their careers avoided serving in the military.

Cyber-serendipity
http://www.fark.com/
If you're not already a farker, you probably should be. Just the fact that you're here in Magellan's Log, way out on the fringe of the Internet, indicates in interest in, well, fringe stuff. The staff at fark.com spends the day every day scouring the Internet for the off-beat. A lot of what they find is stilly, a lot is sexy, and some of it is indispensable serious culture data. (The blurbs are often better than the links themselves.)

Great Buildings
http://www.greatbuildings.com/
Just what the title says, with lots of good photos and virtual (3-D) tours of some famous structures (you have to download 7 megabytes of free software to take the virtual tours).

Manuscript Images
http://www.byu.edu/~hurlbut/dscriptorium/
Medieval eye-candy. A list of sites around the world which have often stunningly beautiful reproductions of manuscript art.

The Wayback Machine
http://www.archive.org
They're storing the Internet. Every two months they retrieve every public page. Currently at 100 terabytes of information (four times the size of the Library of Congress) and counting.

Color Matters
http://www.colormatters.com/entercolormatters.html
If it relates to color, you'll find something about it here.

Project Gutenberg
http://promo.net/pg/
Most of the world's great public-domain literature in simple text-file form, free for the downloading and reading.

Android World
http://www.androidworld.com/
All the latest news and products from the wacky world of robotic creatures.

Axogon Meditator Screensaver
http://www.axogon.com/meditate/meditator.html
Those Ukrainians. Now they've given the world an exquisite FREE screensaver that puts slowly shifting gauzy patterns of color on your desktop. Free and small (only 100k).

Geisswerks
http://www.geisswerks.com/
On the subject of screensavers: We've plugged the creations of Ryan Geiss before, but they're so good we're doing it again. His Drempels screensaver takes any image and, well, morphs it slowly and infinitely for your retinal amusement. Plus he's made several of the best visual plug-ins for Winamp. All free.

History of Pong
http://www.pong-story.com/

Illustrated Guide to Breaking Your Computer
http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/
Gruesome photos with commentary of what happened to one PC when a computer buff experienced one crash too many.

Winamp
http://www.winamp.com
The Winamp music player is one of the great freeware programs of all time. Plus if you like to look at crazy colorful stuff while you listen to music, Winamp users have created thousands of plug-ins that function as light organs. Avoid the recently released   Winamp 3 until they've got the bugs out. If you're gonna download, download Winamp 2.

Webby Award Winners List
http://www.webbyawards.com/main/webby_awards/winner_list.html
You won't agree with all the choices but chances are you'll find some worthwhile sites you didn't know about listed here.

Dead Media Project
http://www.deadmedia.org/
R.I.P. reel-to-reel, 8-track, floppy disks, etc. A techno-cemetery.

Alternet
http://www.alternet.org/index.html
Tired of superficial media coverage of important issues? Alternet provides thoughtful additional viewpoints.

Cagle’s Professional Cartoonists Index
http://cagle.slate.msn.com/
One of the great Web resources. Daryl Cagle, a cartoonist himself, daily collects political cartoons from around the world and presents them by category.

Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/
More good political commentary.

Molly Ivins
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/
Ivins's twice-weekly column is the Texas yang for the Bushies' yin.

Times of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
Keep up with what a fifth of the world is doing and thinking.

Crayola
http://www.crayola.com/
Sometimes nostalgia IS what it used to be...

Truth or Fiction
http://www.truthorfiction.com/
Gossip and legends fly on the internet. This site sorts 'em out and decides which are true and which are not.

I Ching
http://www.facade.com/iching/
Free readings.

Asian Cock Warehouse
http://www.asiancockwarehouse.com/index.htm
The late Boyd McDonald, founder of the "Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts" (also known as "Straight to Hell), wrote brilliantly about his obsession with (gay) sex, and filled the pages of his journal with unedited contributions from other obsessives. The anonymous creator of this site, who appears to be an American living in Japan, is similarly obsessive. Instead of words, he collects photos. But he contributes an occasional verbal essay of his own which, together, are equal to the best of Boyd McDonald's writing. Note: this is XXX all-gay stuff.

Audio Japanese
http://kiaa.net/onani/voice/voice.cgi
While we're on sex, and Japan: This site asks Japanese youth to send in audio recordings of themselves masturbating. The recordings are posted here and visitors to the site are asked to submit written critiques of the performances. We can't read the critiques (the entire page is in Japanese), but we can LISTEN. Just click on the lips (you'll see).

Are You Ready for the Rapture
http://www.raptureready.com/
Saving the best for last... We've done hard-core sex. Now we do hard-core fundamentalist Christian. This large site is intended as a comfort for those who believe they (and their Christian friends) are going to disappear (read: be taken to Heaven as a group) one day soon and the rest of us will be left here to suffer through Armageddon. Be sure to check out the Rapture Index, which show how close we are to the End. And don't miss the lengthy (and chilling) readers' responses to the site.

And if all that's not enough:

Links for the Misbegotten (1999)
Hot Links (2001)
New Hot Links (2001)
More Hot Links (2002)
Still More Hot Links (2003)
Hot Links 62
Hot Links 63
Hot Links 64

END

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