TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC: A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME

I found my old Centre For The Easily Amused t-shirt in a drawer today and remembered with a twinge of sadness that this site has forever vanished from cyberspace. But a little research on the web quickly revealed that there are still plenty of sites that have ABSOLUTELY NO REDEEMING VALUE. Whew!

Before we visit those utterly useless websites, I urge you to visit our wonderful TOURBUS sponsors. Jeffrey Mayer, author of the "Winning the Fight" book (see above), is a renowned time management expert and we're proud to have him as a regular TOURBUS sponsor. And I'm sure you'll find Sperry Software's handy Outlook tools very useFUL. Please visit and say THANKS for keeping the Bus rolling!

Useless Information

Steve Silverman seems to have too much time on his hands. This science teacher who lives near Albany, New York has spent several years putting together a collection of pages he calls "Useless Information - Stuff you never needed to know but your life would be incomplete without." Actually, it's a fascinating journey through history, science and trivia that has attracted thousands of readers and won a boatload of awards.

* Read the true story of the Flubber Fiasco, in which some of the fictional properties of Hasbro's movie tie-in Flubber toy appeared to become reality. In 1963 the product was selling by the millions, but after a recall Hasbro found that getting rid of the stuff was no easy task!

* Learn about Mike the Headless Chicken, who lived for 18 months after his head was chopped off by Farmer Olsen.

Visit the Useless Information page at the address below. I found the Site Index page to be very helpful in navigating.

http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless

How Much Inside?

How many square feet of floor space can be covered by your basic bag of Doritos Nacho chips? How much foam is really inside those cans of expanding foam? And exactly how much white sugary goo is there in a 20-ounce package of Oreo cookies? Rob Cockerham, creator of the Cockeyed Laboratory, has answers to these and other questions that have troubled humankind for days.

http://cockeyed.com/inside/howmuchinside.html

Bad Literature

Do you think you're a really bad writer? Take heart, you could win a prestigious award for your drivel. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has challenged entrants for almost 20 years to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory of novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), who began his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com

Worst of the Web

Each weekday, your guides Buzz, Melvin and Chip feature a really awful site, and tell you why it stinks. You can even vote on how bad the featured site is each day!

A word of caution... if you are easily offended, you may want to skip this site. On the other hand, if you have an off-beat sense of humor and can tolerate the occasional rude, crude or politically incorrect remark, you'll enjoy this site.

http://www.worstoftheweb.com

SuperCharge Windows Without Spending A Dime

Optimize! Customize! Clean Up! The Internet is overflowing with companies advertising software to make Windows look prettier, and function better than it already does. But you don't need most of those products, nor do you necessarily have to spend much money to make your own system perform better.

There are all sorts of inexpensive or zero-cost ways to improve Windows, if you know what to do or know where to look. Each month in PC Today you'll find several ways to improve your PC. Discover how today -- get your free trial issue of PC Today now.

http://tourbus.com/pctoday.htm

That's all for now. See you next time! -- Bob Rankin