Net surf
Breaking with Convention: Political Wonkery on the Web
Call me a wonkhead, but I love presidential politics. In 1992, I finagled press passes for two hot July nights at the Democratic National Convention. Best show I'd seen at Madison Square Garden since The Who in '79. Not because I'm particularly partisan. It was the celebrity frenzy that got me juiced. Camera in hand, I staked out close-ups in the crowd Larry King to my left, Timothy Hutton to my right, even a shot of Buck Henry with his arm around me. I got a wicked body check from Maria Shriver as she thrust a giant penis of a microphone into the face of some poor superdelegate. The best was when two bodyguards escorted Jackie O. right past my lens. "Save that photo," a relative of mine later told me. "You were the last person in the family to see her alive."
This time around, I probably won't get a chance to mingle in San Diego or Chicago. But that's OK the Web's here now. At last count, the Alta Vista search engine turned up a few hundred sites that contained the keywords "presidential campaign." Most of them are real dogs, of course, appealing only to those who harbor a fetish for propaganda pamphlets.
The true political junkie will want to visit PoliticsUSA (politicsusa.com/), a site run by the National Journal and the American Political Network an Alexandria, Virginia-based publishing company that's been compiling the inside poop on campaigns since 1988. (See "Ad Nauseam," Wired 4.05, page 67.) My favorite feature is the continually updated, color-coded electoral college map. The folks who run this site collect poll data from local media outlets and universities in each state to produce a running tally of which electoral votes are solidly and narrowly in the Dole or Clinton column. In one glance, all the endless online analysis and spinmeistering is rendered superfluous.
For a fascinating diversion, check out the Web sites run by the third, fringe, and nonparties that are becoming increasingly important in the patchwork quilt of '90s politics. The Christian Coalition site is brilliant, if only for the brevity of its URL (www.cc.org/). My personal pick is the site run by the Reform Party (www.reformparty.org/), which is waging a yeoman's effort to get on the ballot in all 50 states. Before I paid a visit, I had no idea this group had a set of guiding principles that all its members allegedly hold dear. These mandates seem to consist of half baked, homespun remedies for things like the budget deficit ("The Tax System Must Be Paperless") and the corrupt culture of Washington ("No More Free Meals"). It doesn't say who exactly came up with these sacred principles, but I could wager a pretty good guess.
A surprisingly interesting site comes from the New York software company Crossover Technologies and the nonprofit Markle Foundation. Its President '96 election simulation game (www.pres96.com/) is centered around 10 fictional candidates who bear a striking resemblance to real life politicians. (A Senator William Dickey stars in the Dole-like role.) Players act as supporters who decide on which side of the issues their chosen candidate comes down. The entire 1996 election process has a parallel universe here only it's more suspenseful. "No one will likely clinch the nomination before the conventions," says Crossover president Eric Goldberg. The game uses a strictly proportional delegate system, as opposed to the winner-take-all rules of many real state primaries. With sites like these, the Web may be the one place in American politics in which fiction is once again stranger than truth. As it should be.
Evan I. Schwartz (evan@cis.compuserve.com)
Getting Malled
The difference between the average cybermall and the Violet boutique (violet.com/) is like the difference between pink liquid gas-station soap and creamy, French-milled bars that smell of pears and buttermilk. Designed with the sparse luxury of a Comme des Garçons shop, Violet is the spa of online retail: high-end, high touch. Catalog junkies: Enter at your own risk.
A Bohemia of the Mind
Bust out the bongos and light up a cig it's time to dig the beat generation! The Literary Kicks page is a beautifully assembled shrine dedicated to all people, places, and things beat. Lit Kicks will give you the complete lowdown on the life, work, and travels of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Cassady, Corso, and a host of other hep cats. You'll also find rare photos, original fiction, and extensive lists of beat references in music, movies, and modern culture. Or, you can dig the starry dynamo of the night, listening to Kerouac recite selections from his novels and poems. Hop aboard the Nova Express and ride that train to www.charm.net /~brooklyn/LitKicks.html.
Big Is Beautiful
You've spotted it at 20 paces. You've seen it frighten small children. You've yearned for some of your own. Pine no more: big hair is here! The panacea for those of us doomed to dismal dos, Texas Hair and Style provides step-by-step instruction on how to make your hair huge. There are tips on teasing and spraying as well as pictures to prove that hair in Texas is as big as it gets. Links unveil such magical techniques as prevolumizing and back-combing. If the technical gymnastics of it all seems a bit overwhelming, you can see yourself Texas-style by simply taking big hair GIFs and pasting them onto your own image. Witness the spectacle at www.dallas.net/~styletx/home.html, and make it your own.
Bacon: The Other White Meat
If you've ever played the Kevin Bacon game, you know that something very frightening is happening. The challenge: link any actor to our footloose friend within five steps. For example, try Debra Winger. She was in Terms of Endearment with Jack Nicholson, who was in A Few Good Men Š with Kevin Bacon. Easy, see?
The more you play this game, the more you realize just how eerie it is. But now, some good people at the University of Virginia have taken this parlor game to an entirely different level by creating The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia (www.cs.virginia.edu /~bct7m/bacon.html). By running a massive database through their mainframe, they have proved the Law of Bacon. According to their calculations, no actor has a BF (Bacon Factor) higher than 5. And the law doesn't just apply to contemporary actors: I had successful hits with Humphrey Bogart, Bela Lugosi, and Greta Garbo.
Inform philosophers and film theorists immediately! Organize task forces! The Oracle has spoken this can't be good news for civilization.
Shared Boundaries
If a pack of hip hop skateboarders, hardcore DJs, poetry slammers, hard bitten noir writers, and art critics threw a warehouse party in tribute to graphic-design guru David Carson, the result would feel something like Common Boundaries (www.commonb.com/index.html), the latest dark 'n' gritty Web mag to seethe out of New York. Hard edges and outsider art put this joint beyond the media empire mainstream, while its design and RealAudio chops would make even Hearst and Time Warner cry.
Cleaning Up the Web
Let's face it: cyberspace, despite its egalitarian pretenses, is still very much a man's world. Enter Brillo, a hard-hitting online zine challenging the patriarchy that reigns supreme on the Net. A lively mix of interviews, essays, and rants, Brillo kicks down the doors of the electronic boy's club, giving voice to women and people of color. More than just an online soapbox, the publication offers practical tools and information to empower people online and off. The premier issue, "Armed and Dangerous," features an interview with an instructor at Plugged In, a community training center that helps low-income families leverage new technologies. Also noteworthy is a talk with the Barbie Liberation Organization those wacky social guerrillas who made headlines by switching the voice boxes in hundreds of talking Barbies and G.I. Joes a few years back. Set your browser to www.virago-net.com/brillo/ and find out why a woman's place is on the Web!
Putting the "Ick" in "Critic"
If you're tired of watching the bald guy and the fat guy carp at each other, check out the Web's own cinematic malcontent, Mr. Cranky. His bitter tour of Hollywood's latest awaits you at Mr. Cranky Rates the Movies (internet plaza.net/zone/mrcranky/).
But you won't learn much about the films. Mr. Cranky hates them all and dishes it out like a prison-cafeteria worker. His rating scale fairly well defines his outlook, ranging from "Almost tolerable" to "So godawful that it ruptured the very fabric of space and time with the sheer overpowering force of its mediocrity."
Special features include Mr. Cranky's Rental Guide and a movie-by-movie forum that lets readers chime in on their own. If you feel the need to complain, you can always fill in the box labeled "Your pathetic, insignificant comments for Mr. CrankyŠ."
Tricky Dick Snared in the Web
You may not have liked the idea of Richard Nixon in the White House, but how about in your computer? The people at Webcorp have digitized Tricky Dick's voice and put it in the Richard Nixon Audio Archive (www.webcorp .com/sounds/nixon.htm). A must-listen is the 8-Kbyte sample of Nixon's immortalized sound bite: "I am not a crook." His entire resignation speech takes up 7.4 Megs, but if that's more Nixon than you'd like, it's also available in byte-sized chunks. The famous Checkers speech is here, too. Would Nixon have appreciated the irony of his voice booming over Web browsers, decades after secret tape recordings of Oval Office conversations wound up disgracing him? Probably not.
They Got Squid
Seems the deep-sea slithery ink-jets are all over the Internet a fact brought to light by In Search of Giant Squid, an online exhibit erected by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/squid.html). Though the site's text level is elementary for the field-trip set, Giant Squid nevertheless offers a plethora of information for both the ignorant and the brainy. The fun includes a 3-D wireframe model of a giant squid, old drawings of squid, the scientific names of different types of squid, myths about squid, details about squid sex, links to other squid sites (including Squid Recipes and EuroSquid), and such squid literary references as Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. OK, so the coolest thing about this is being able to tell your friends, "I've been on the Giant Squid Web site." If that doesn't get you laid, nothing will.
Random ASCII Art o' the Month
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Thanks to the Wired 4.07 Surf Team
Jeff Baskin jbaskin@cruzio.com
Dave Cravotta cravotta@kaiwan.com
J. C. Herz mischief@phantom.com
Colin J. Lingle cjlingle@seanet.com
Hayley Nelson hayley@wired.com
Paul Semel beerhound@aol.com
