Everywhere You Go, There You Are--in a Photo

At least the location is in a photo. That's in the U.S. only at this time. At TerraServer-USA all you need do is type any street address in the U.S. and several photos, from above, become available. The detail is absolutely amazing. Try it and I think you'll be amazed as me.

Top 100 TV Toys

A list, with box and description, of the top 100 "most well remembered'' for better or worse--toys that turned up in the stockings of yesteryear." How many of these toys do you remember? How many did you have?

Red or White?

Nat Decants is a website for the wine connoisseur. The site has links to other wine sites, recent articles, list of upcoming events in Canada, United States, and International arenas. There's also a search engine for looking for information about your favorite vintage. Sign up for the free, award winning newsletter as well.

North, East, West, South Spells NEWS

Get news from papers all over the world. Maybe you are a recent immigrant and want to see what's happening in the homeland. Or perhaps you just came back from a foreign land and would like to follow up a local story from the area. Whatever the reason, you can find newspaper links from around the world at the Newspaperindex. Over 150 countries are represented.

Almanac

When I was a young boy, a local radio program had a host that always spouted wisdom, weather and other trivia from the Old Farmer's Almanac. You can purchase it at your local bookstore or just go out to the website. It will provide you with predictions of the weather for the coming year, folk remedies (tape a penny to your navel to cure seasickness), astronomy, gardening advice, and much more. How much of the info is accurate? Good question.

Polish Holiday Traditions

Easter and Christmas as celebrated by the Polish can be found at the sites below. Yes, the sites is housed at Columbia College but I didn't have anything to do with its creation or content.

POLISH EASTER TRADITIONS
Begin with the celebration of Fat Tuesday/Paczki (pronounced punch-key) Day, move to St. Joseph's Day, Polish Easter Eggs and Blessings of the Basket. The site is in English except for Polish terms, which have pronunciations included.

POLISH CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS
At this site you can discover winter celebrations such as St. Nicholas Day, the Christmas Wafer (oplatek), Feast of Three Kings, and Midnight Mass celebration. Once again the site is in English with pronunciation guide for Polish terms.

Old Time Radio

RadioLovers describes itself better than I ever could.

"We offer hundreds of vintage radio shows for you to listen to online in mp3 format, all for free. Before the days of video games, shopping malls, MTV, and the Internet, families used to sit in their living room each night to listen to radio shows such as Abbott and Costello, Superman, Groucho Marx, The Avenger, Gunsmoke, Sherlock Homes, and many others. When TV become popular in the 1950's, most of these shows went off the air, but they now live on at websites such as this one and on weekly nostalgia radio broadcasts worldwide."

Where's the Fire?

The Wire-Fire that is. The JiWire database contains information on nearly 25,000 Wi-Fi connections in the United States alone. It has thousands more listed from around the world. You can search by street address, city, state, country, connection type, fee/free and more.

Where's My Seat?

If you're a frequent traveler or infrequent traveler SeatGuru may be for you. Commercial airlines fly several different models of planes. Even when they fly the same model plane their seat numbering systems may vary. If you would like to avoid the "bad" seats (I don't know which ones they might be as I don't travel a lot by plane), the SeatGuru has the seating configuration for various airplane models and the seating system of the many different airlines so you can be assured of at least knowing where the best seats are. Whether you can get the seat you wish is up to you.

Skeptic's Annotated Bible

This unique presentation of the bible for the skeptical. Analyzes many of the passages line by line, verse by verse. The Skeptic's Annotated Bible is presented here as another data base with a different approach. It speaks for itself, not the blogger.

Soup's On!

Over 700 soup recipes can be found at the Epicurious Soup section. Whatever your taste may be in soups you'll find a recipe for it here.

Spies are Everywhere

Two sites for tracking the latest on spyware and adware and the anti software to protect your system.

The Spyware Guide is an online guide to spy and anti-spyware software. It contains product reviews, lists of spyware, and articles to help you prevent cyber criminals from victimizing you.

Spywarrior is similar to the Spyware Guide. It's not as pretty but seems to provide the same types of access.

Industry Analyst Reporter

"Tekrati Inc. is the leading news source covering high tech industry analysts and firms. Tekrati enables IT, telecom and semiconductor professionals to connect in meaningful ways with the global industry analyst community. Tekrati monitors, profiles and reports on over 325 industry analyst firms worldwide. Through its Web sites and events, Tekrati helps analyst relations specialists, technology users and technology product and service providers to gather actionable information for their jobs."

It's About Time

Time Magazine covers that is. And the insides as well. The home page provides access to such things as the first time various historical individuals appeared in Time, special collections, cover quiz and more. Great historical site.

Folk Medicine Data Base

The Folk Medicine Data Base of UCLA has over 1,000 medical conditions and 80 kinds of traditional healers are represented. This is a most interesting site with various folk remedies for a multitude of conditions. The search engine leaves something to be desired in that there does not seem to be no true Boolean search capability. There are two levels of search "or" and "and." This means that if you type "head ache" you will find all sites that contain "head" and "ache" or you will find all sites with "head" or "ache" anywhere in the description or explanation.

A Historical Perspective

Truth in Advertising takes us back to the 1940s and 1950s. In the words of this site:

"Once upon a time, the rich, sweetly pungent smoke of tobacco offered more than dreary old diseases like emphysema and lung cancer. It promised sophistication, sex appeal, even longevity itself."

After looking at these old cigarette advertisements, stop and think how the future will look at our advertising 60 years from now. Will they marvel at our ads for gas-guzzling, poison-spewing automobiles? What will they think of our selling of the latest and greatest artery clogging fast food? Only time will tell. Until then, take a nostalgic trip back to a time when soldiers wearing gas masks took time out to have a smoke.

Decisions About Higher Education

U.S. News and World Reports has America's Best Colleges 2005 available for viewing. This is not just a site that lists the top 50 schools. There are dozens of articles and links to help you or your child in making that important decision of just the right college or university.

Is There a Doctor on the Web?

WebMD is a great site and those with health concerns and interests should learn to use this site. The WebMD Physician's Directory is only one of many features. In this section you can find the address, specialties, hospital and insurance associations, and even maps to that new doctor's office. But don't stop there. Go to the home page and explore this terrific medical site.

15 Minutes

That's the amount of time some of these folks were famous. Some for an even shorter time. This is a data base of those celebrities who were "there" and then they weren't anymore. To give you an idea of the type of people I'll list the 5 most recent entries into What Ever Happened To... (WHET.net): Dayle Haddon, Gil Gerard, Elmo & Patsy, Afghan Girl, and Pam Dawber. I recognized three by name/description. How about you. Unfortunately for them, the celebrity did not last.

The Clock is Ticking and the Counter is Counting

I love statistics and numeric factoids. That's why I can spend hours sitting and staring at Worldometer. Using various averaging techniques it keeps running counters of deaths, births, movie attendance, government spending, environment, food and more. The site requires JavaScript.

Is it Yahoo! Mobile? Or Mobile Yahoo!?

I'm not a mobile type guy but I came across this and thought some of you might find it of interest. Apparently Yahoo! now has a mobile service (Yahoo! Mobile)that will allow you to upload your phone photos into a Yahoo! account. There are also additional services such as downloadable phone games, slide shows, and more. A warning however. Make sure you know the capabilities of your phone. Also not all the services are free so read everything carefully.