Trouble at the top
It is surprising that, unlike the Democrats in America, not one of the three mainstream UK political parties has its own official weblog. This failure to embrace new technology has meant that all three parties have been pipped at the post by lone political activists belonging to deadly rivals. All three parties now have unofficial blogs dedicated to their undoing. The latest, Tory Trouble, is a catalogue of Conservative Party infighting, misbehaving local councillors, even more infighting and examples of the frequent vocal lapses of its MPs. You can email the site if you have a bit of dirt to dish, although the bulk of the material originates from the local papers.
A much slicker affair is the blog dedicated to scrutinising the failings of the LibDems. Apart from berating the party for its unpopularity, the site offers similar content to Tory Trouble but with a heavier dose of sarcasm and a few pictures to help digest the floor-to-ceiling bitchiness. The eldest, and least polished, of these "anti-sites" is Labour Watch, which admits to having "not much to smile about here, apart from John Prescott's frequent mishaps". There is no formal blog, but at least it offers an archive of news stories going back to 1997. Get a blog before someone else does it for you, might be the moral of this story. The left is proving better at it, might be another.
www.labour-watch.com
www.libdemwatch.co.uk
www.torytrouble.org.uk/blog
Dream weaver
If you are lucky and you email Berkeley-based artist Jesse Reklaw with a brief description of your latest dream, he might turn it into one of his wonderful four-panel comic strips that appear on the web each week. Reklaw has been illustrating the unconscious states of strangers since 1995, and many of his strips have been published in the US alternative press. His archive of dreams - as well as those of the likeminded Dream Project - are as sublime as they are succinct and are often very funny to boot. If you want to know the meaning of having an armadillo as a best friend, a site such as Sleeps.com might come in handy. www.slowwave.com
www.thedreamproject.org
/www.sleeps.com/dreams.html
Ugandan relations
More than 40 years of Private Eye covers, indexed by date and subject, have been painstakingly assembled and published on a website by an anonymous fan. Ugandan Discussions, which includes more than 1,100 covers from the first issue in 1961 to the present day, is run by someone calling himself "Idi", and he is appealing for help to track down the 117 covers he is missing. The gaps matter little as it is already a fantastic website, although the legality of such an endeavour is surely in doubt.
By the way, the title of the site is a popular Eyeism for illicit sex. Origins of the term are a little vague, with some attributing the coining to the poet James Fenton and hazy tales of how a famous politician was caught - practically in the act - with his secretary; others say the guilty party was a female journalist whose name we can't reveal for legal reasons. Either way, the excuse proffered is that they were upstairs "discussing Ugandan relations". Sheffield Hallum's Phrase Finder offers a more detailed account of the phrase's origins.
www.strobes.uklinux.net
www.private-eye.co.uk
phrases.shu.ac.uk
Onion charges
"For less than a $30 cup of coffee," piped the Onion last week, "America's finest news source is now available in a new, non-free form." In other words, the award-winning satire site now has a premium service offering extra content and no ads. The standard site remains available at no cost. www.theonion.com
Famous wills
William Shakespeare is not the only famous person to have his last will and testament published on the web. The bard's last wishes now rest alongside those of Jane Austen, Captain Cook and Napoleon Bonaparte as part of the government's Documents Online project, the public-access version of the National Archives' collection of digitised public records. Elsewhere, US site Court TV offers a variety of famous wills including John Lennon, Elvis, Princess Diana and the Grateful Dead's Gerry Garcia. www.documentsonline.pro.gov.uk
www.courttv.com/people/wills
New & noted
The art of culinary disaster
www.burntfoodmuseum.com
10th century Japanese blog
blog.simon-cozens.org/shonagon/bryar.cgi
Illustrated history of 4AD records
www.fedge.net/~desiderata/4ad20.html
Six of the best
Music downloads
Seeking submissions
Supermarket sweep
Fizzy contender
Sheet music
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