Brain Candy #19 - Odds and Ends Again

Catherine came up with the idea. One of the interesting sites she's found lately include "The Apple Munchers of France" at www.mairsy.fr/croquers-de-pommes, a society for the preservation of old French apple varieties. It's in French of course. From there, we found a link to the National Clonal Germplasm Repository, which has a huge number of fruit pictures, including a number that they classify as 'weird'. It's at www.ars-grin.gov/ars/PacWest/Corvallis/ncgr/. If you want high-resolution pictures of different varieties of pear leaves, or giant hairy raspberries, this is your site. Another site that Catherine likes showed pictures of CAT-scanned mummies. We couldn't find the URL, so we searched MetaCrawler and found a different site at hermes.richmond.edu/tiameny. In the process, we also found that there are also web sites devoted to cat mummies, but we didn't visit any of those.

I made several trips to Albuquerque last year and tried a dish called Carne Adovada. I wanted to know how to make it, so I checked our library of cookbooks, but couldn't find a recipe. There were many variations on the web. I had the same luck when I wanted to find a recipe for Vindaloo, a fiery-hot Indian curry. If you want specific recipes, it's best to use a search engine. If your needs are more general, you might want to look at www.epicurious.com.

How is this for obscure? I am a homebrewer and wanted to know what the mineral profile of water would be after filtration through a Brita water filter. I thought that I wouldn't find anything, but I did a search anyway, and found a page devoted to exactly what I was after; the mineral content of Brita-filtered water for homebrewers. It's at www.brewery.org/brewery/library/FiltBrita0596.html, but if you want the Readers' Digest condensed version, treat it as distilled water and add back any minerals you want.

Interested in travel? Catherine and I like the Gaspe peninsula in Quebec. If you can read French (again), there is www.gaspesie.qc.ca. They've been promising an English version for quite some time, but no luck yet. At least in the Western world, many tourist sites now field excellent promotional web pages. Pick a place and start searching.

How would you like to know about Stonehenge clones? Visit www.luckymojo.com/stonehenge.html. The site is called Stonehenge Clones and Metaphorms. Most of the clone sites are whimsical, but there are some serious attempts to replicate Stonehenge in varying degrees. Mankind's fascination with Stonehenge is itself fascinating.

One last site: this is less an obscure site than a resource if you're building your own site. Check out the Cooltext website at www.cooltext.com. It's the best online graphics generator I've yet visited. Our banner for our mainpage is now a Cooltext product. Even if you're not developing a web page, go there and play around. It's astounding what you can do. The most interesting stuff is in the Logos section.

In a previous Brain Candy, I made some recommendations on how to make sure your site is attractive to the maximum number of visitors. That isn't the only motivation for publishing on the web, however, and I'm glad of it. In this column, I wanted to celebrate something different; some pages that aren't very useful to many people at all, but of great interest to a few. Some are weird, some are obscure, but I've found some real gems in this kind of material. There is no information too obscure to be found on the web. All you have to do is look.