| Cross Circuit (R.I.P.) Besides having a fantastic name, Gypsy Smith is a talented Flash animator with a penchant for political humor. While it's a safe bet that Mr. Smith punched his card for Dubya last November, he's an equal opportunity satirist -- check out his clever take on the election debates. Gypsy also skewers Bill Clinton's last-minute pardons with a game show called Jailbreak, where Mark Rich makes an appearance via a satellite connection from Switzerland. And while John Ashcroft may not approve of the public dancing, you might appreciate this senate musical number. |
| The Real Thirteen Days "At midday, and again in the early evening of October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy called together a group of his closest advisers at the White House. Late the night before, the CIA had produced detailed photo intelligence identifying Soviet nuclear missile installations under construction on the island of Cuba, some ninety miles off the Florida coast...." The National Security Archive (home to a library of declassified documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act) examines the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis through an impressive array of original documents. Included here are frenzied cables between Kennedy and Khrushchev, black and white photographs of tense-looking groups of men in suits, and actual recordings of White House intelligence briefings. You'll also find a pointed response to the recent Kevin Costner vehicle. |
| California History Online The California Historical Society uses the annotated, scrolling timeline format to teach the history of the Golden State. The journey begins with a look at the physical landscape: drill down to learn more about mountains, deserts, valleys, climate zones, flora and fauna. The next chapter explores the cultures of the first Californians, from the Colorado River to the Oregon border. The site's thoughtful designers have made it easy to locate and print specific pages along the chronological trail. Some of the periods explored in depth include Spanish colonial, the Gold Rush, the railroad era, and the Great Depression. |
| 100 Lives Past: An Oxfordshire Who's Who (R.I.P.) Local girls and boys make good! A certain county paper decided to round up a 100 potted biographies of deceased local folks "who have made a difference." The county happened to be Oxfordshire, England. As a result, the list of hometown heroes includes the likes of Sir Winston Churchill, Dame Agatha Christie, Dr. Samuel Johnson, C.S. Lewis, W.B. Yeats, Cardinal Wolsey, W.H. Auden, and Richard I. You're also invited to learn about currently living local celebrities like Rowan Atkinson, Yasmin Le Bon, Richard Branson, and Thom Yorke. And there's a nice gallery of Oxfordshire watercolors by someone named Turner. |
| The National Archives of Scotland Some of the things you won't find in the National Archives of Scotland: Tartan kilts and sporrans, haggis, and bagpipes. However, you will find a vast treasurehouse of historical documents touching on all aspects of Scottish life and culture, from the 12th century to the present. View a sampling of court records, public registers, private papers, church records, maps, and more. Genealogical researchers can consult the Family History FAQ before embarking on a search for ancestors. There's also a library of PDF fact sheets on diverse topics such as crafts, lighthouses, and wills and testaments. |
| DreamBank This searchable collection of dream reports from UC Santa Cruz lets you peer inside the head of a bright seven-year-old boy, a natural scientist born in a small Midwest farming town in 1893, a sixty-year-old blind cook, or an eight-year-old girl ("many animal characters and relatively few aggressions"). For sheer novelistic intrigue, don't miss the dream diaries of Prudence, an English woman born in 1912 with a strong passion for literature: "Real buildings and landscapes known to me seldom appear in my dreams, which inhabit a country of their own, mostly of rocky sea-coasts on which tidal waves often descend, and wild empty countrysides sparsely scattered with castles and churches, across which pass pilgrimages, processions, and man-hunts." |
| The Official Roald Dahl Web Site Created by Dahl's literary estate and illustrated by the inimitable Quentin Blake, here's the official homepage of the quirky and imaginative Welsh-born writer, once described by a schoolmaster as "quite incapable at marshalling his thoughts on paper." In the early sixties, with children of his own, Dahl wrote James and the Giant Peach; it was followed by many more bestsellers, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Mathilda. Don't miss the audio interview with Dahl describing how he writes -- very slowly, with a pencil, in a wing chair in a garden hut. There are special treats here just for kids, and tips for the frequently clueless grownups in their lives. |
| Burma: Grace Under Pressure Photojournalist-turned web designer Geoffrey Hiller presents this moving pictorial odyssey through Burma, a war-torn country described by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as "Fascist Disneyland." The slowly-streaming slide show, accompanied by haunting Burmese music, chronicles poverty, hunger, oppression, fear, and hope. Burma, renamed Myanmar by the military dictatorship in 1989, was once known as the rice basket of Asia, but today, rice is rationed and Burma has become the world's opium bowl. Hiller's high-bandwidth exhibit juxtaposes luminous beauty with tragic injustice and human misery. |
|
|
|
| · | Daily - a fresh pick, every day. |
| · | Weekly - a seven-day roundup. |
|
|
