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Women's History Here's an almost inexhaustible resource for Women's History studies - lots of biographies, pictures and even primary sources material. Incredible!

Memoirs of an Anti-Geisha This woman's website is hilarious, and quite serious as well. She's gone the distance at dispelling the popular myths about Asians, Asian culture, especially with respect to their women. If she wasn't using a baseball bat, I'd say she was feminist. Just the domain name is great: 'www.BigBadChineseMana.com.' I love it!

The Lizardman Another bizzare person. Check out this ongoing weirdness of a guy transforming himself into a reptile. His skin is slowly turning blue, his tongue is forked, his teeth sharpened, and on, and on. Why? And what does this guy do for a day job that has allowed him to afford the weirdness?

Animal Exploitation Photo Gallery Disturbing: Don't click unless you have an extremely strong stomach! If you're an avid meat eater, you may wish to go to this site. If you have a strong stomach, you will continue eating meat. Again: WARNING - DISTURBING PICTURES AHEAD!

Virgin Me It's a bizarre world - and this site makes it even more bizarre. For $199US a female can waste her money on this guy's magic formula that will restore her virginity. Yes, he learned this all from a native in Peru, where he and a friend went to pick up virgin prostitutes. OK ... number 1, would you buy anything from a guy who went to Peru to find a virgin? (And I wonder what age group he was seeking?) #2. The site is registered to a guy in Punjab, yet claims to have its office in Florida. Who's who? #3. Restore your virginity? Why? If you want to know the reasons why, check out the site - it's all so you could prove to your husband that you're a virgin so he won't divorce you. Yes indeed, seriously messed up. Makes me want to setup a similar site offerring a secret formula cream that will make you smarter is you shave your head and rub a little on her head every night. The scary part is, people will send me money for it.

Sam Spade.org This is one amazing site. It hosts a bunch of online tools, such as whois, traceroute, reverse DNS lookup, etc. to help you locate exactly who's site you've been visiting, or who has been spamming you.

The Ultimate Secure Home Someone actually built this thing - neat! Now someone is actually selling it - I don't get it. It looks like a Hobbit's hole, more than a home, but it's actually fully functional, looks comfortable, and is located around great scenery. The home was built to withstand disasters, and has a store of supplies that seems geared towards holding up for a while. Check it out!

This Hour Has 22 Minutes One of the few CBC shows I will allow myself to sit through. Check out their site and the video archive section - classics! I caught tonight's show (may have been a repeat), and the ending punch-line was (to paraphrase): 'Just a reminder to George W., who has in the last few months, managed to antagonize Russia, dismiss Kyoto, and carpet bomb Iraq - pace yourself. Rome was not burned to the ground in a day.'

Digital Millennium Copyright Act Again, our friends down south are doing it. The DMCA didn't get too far federally in the US, but it looks like the entertainment industry is trying state by state to get the legislation enacted, and they've been successful in a few states already. What this could basically do is render it illegal to possess certain devices, because it could be used illicit purposes. Government in the US serve big business, and not necessarily the public. This would basically limit the development and proliferation of new technology - in the US. Think this is going to stop what's happening in the Asian countries? Ha! So again, the US is putting itself behind. Glad I live in Canada.

New Nuclear Weapons From Wired Online: the US has opened production of new nuclear warheads to add to its already formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Have they gone nuts down south? Apparently. It doesn't seem enough that the US already has conventional capacity to blow up just about any country in the world, they also seem to need the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons at an increased capacity. The last US nuclear warhead producing plant was closed back in the late 1980s by the FBI due to environmental concerns. Since then, the US has had only it's current capacity of nuclear weapons, as wells as 5,000 warheads in reserve. Enough firepower to blowup the planet.

Bulletproof Monk Took my daughters to see this last week. It should have been called Bulletproof Skunk. Firstly - why did the movie have to be American? Why did a monk, with a life time of training, hand over the reins to two Americans? Both unqualified, both not deserving? The supposedly mystical speech did not come off as serious, but laughable. The action was OK, but nothing exceptional. It's the same stuff you'll find in most Hong Kong action movies, that was popularized in the west by the Matrix. I had high hopes for the movie - it was a disappointment.

The Iraqi Information Minister Fan Site You've got to see this. The face of Iraq during the war has been that of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information. No matter what evidence appeared to the contrary, he insisted that the US/British troops were losing. Check it out - the Iraqi government does have a sense of humour.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger I picked up this book last year at a UofT book sale. Finally got the chance to get to it. It was a confusing book, but it kept me interested, so I saw it through to the end. I'm not compelled to pick up the rest of the series (if King has actually finished the series that is), but I may pick up the other novels if I see it at another book sale. It's typical of King's writing, but the story is original, and not typical of a western. It's a fantasy-horror.

Tears of the Sun Went out with my wife to see Tears of the Sun last night. I wasn't expecting what I got. I fully expected another US-soldier-hero movie, with all the bravado and bullet-dodging effects that usually show up in such movies. Instead, Tears of the Sun proved to be a horrifying portral of a civil war in Nigeria. Hearing about it in the news, and seeing it in this movie is probably nothing in comparison to what the people of Rwana (yes, I know the film is set in Nigeria) lived through during their civil war. The brutality of ethnic cleansing was hard to watch. The one line that I liked that Bruce Willis delivered was, "For our sins." He said it when his Navy Seal team had resigned themselves to risk their lives to save a group of Nigerian civilians. The movie was a hero movie. I think it did set out to portray Americans as heroes, and there is nothing wrong with that. The movie was about people make the right choice, the good choice, knowing the ris...

Blog, blog, baby ... and don't plagiarize! Here's a Wired.com article about the rise, but not fall (yet) of a blogger who plagiarize. Well, not just plagiarize. This guy copied word for word, the reports from an intelligence company for his blog on the US-Iraq war. He was so successful, that he got interviews by major publications, and managed to pass himself off as a resourcful reporter. Read - you're not going to believe!

The Falkirk Boatlift ! It's huge! It's impressive! It's nickname is "The Machine!" It's the world's first rotating boatlift, and the British are building it.

Biofuel Cell Researchers at Saint Louis University have developed a fuel cell that uses enzymes rather than metal to produce electricity, and can be recharged by adding a few mL of alcohol. Everywhere you devices that require long battery life could benefit from this - including laptops, cell phones, etc. Just think about it: that 16-oz. in your desk drawer could finally have a good excuse to explain it away - your laptop needs a drink! What's really interesting though, is what is a Jesuit college doing running experiments with alcohol ... ;-)

Dreamwave Productions I don't collect comics anymore, but I still read them - sporadically. (You'd be amaze what's available on the net.) Dreamwave Productions are right in my backyard. They're out of Markham, and they're producing some of the works I know as a kid - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers. Check out the art - amazing!

Optical Camouflage Yes, you too can become invisible Gracie! Check out the work being done at the University of Tokyo around making things disappear. It's years away before this even starts becoming practical, but the ground work has already started. Think about it - one day, you'll be able to walk down the street, and no one will see you. You'll probably also see no one! Now all they have to do is work on keeping the noise down a little.

The Animatrix - preview! The Animatrix short - 'Final Flight of the Osiris' premiered at the Dreamcatcher movie ( read review here ). This was the other reason I wanted to see the movie. FFOTO was amazing! The entire movie was down in computer animation by the folks who did the Final Fantasy movie. It was probably about 5-10 minutes long, but seemed like 30-mins. I didn't want it to end. It was an excellent appetizer for the Matrix movies this summer and fall. Take special note: I want the Animatrix DVD when it's released on June 3rd!

Dreamcatcher - the movie Went out with the guys last night to see Dreamcatcher. I wasn't really that excited about the movie to begin with, until I heard about it being a movie with aliens in it. It's been a while since I saw some aliens in a movie! ;-) It turned out to be a pretty good movie, great story, and a little Stephen King gore thrown in the mix. The action, the directing, and pace of the movie - everything was done exceptionally well.

al-Jazeera While hackers have successfully taken down the English version of al-Jazeera, the Arabic site continue to function. Word is that the English site will be back up sometime soon. Makes you wonder why the pro-US hackers would want to keep the English world from reading about the Gulf War from an Arabic perspective? Yes, they were pissed at al-Jazeera airing footage of US POWs ... but CNN, NBC, ABC and FOX have been airing footage of Iraqi POWs and no one lost their temper. If you can't get through to al-Jazeera's English site, check out what was captured by the Memory Hole before the site went offline.

Shock and Awe Gulf War Part Deux, from a technology perspective. Interesting read. The top technologies in use: GPS, Facial recognition, and a host of other technological advancements that were not present during the first Gulf War.