web sites

The Sweeney

http://www.thesweeney.com/

This tribute to the detective series, now re-running on Channel 5, opens with a flying squad Ford charging towards the viewer from upper screen left. Specifically, a Consul GT V6 3.0 litre in Arizona Gold - lots of the true fan's obession with detail here, usually doubling as another Seventies retro-feast. Click on the items in Regan's bedroom for an infallible style guide: wide collars, kipper ties, Trimphones, nail-and-string pictures. Best of all, Sweeney Pong, a Shockwave version of the very first ping- pong video game, in which the cursor is used to control Regan & Carter as they interrogate a suspect (sorry, invite him for a friendly chat). One of several offical Pearson Television fan sites - others include Baywatch and The Bill - these pages also offer Sweeney wallpaper and screensaver, a glimpse of the Sweeney board game circa 1975, audience counts for each episode and a swearing count for a select few, and much classic invective. So, sunshine, pour yourself a scotch, tell yer bird to shut it and log on.

Alex's Box of Crayons

http://www.kidalex.com/home.html

Nothing new about online paintboxes, but this really is state of the kiddy art. Once you get over the basic contradiction of all this high- powered Java to help a five-year-old colour in a dinosaur (or a spaceship, or Little Bo Peep, or Pirate With Parrot), there's much instructive fun to be had here. Traditional crayons, after all, won't teach anyone to cut-and-paste, and kids and other visitors can transmit their masterpieces to friends by e-mail, print out hard copies, experiment with different colour palettes and finally post them on a virtual fridge for the world to see.

Why? Questioning the failed marriages of Generation X

http://members.aol.com/WhyPage/

A work in progress in which Nick tries to work out why his wife, Sarah, left him, and if this is symptomatic of larger social changes. This unique mix of soul-baring and sociology consists of four sections - love, marriage, expectations and divorce - each with a lengthy musing on the nature of romantic relationships in the Nineties. It's no doubt therapeutic, at least, to work things through in this way, though the social model - "boomers" versus "Gen-Xers" - seems rather limited and it's difficult to sort the personal experience from the booklist. Often, however, the agonised personal investment is clear: "How much conditional love has to be recalled, and disappointment has to occur, before love withers?" Cindy, Phil, Darlene and other site visitors mail in their own contributions, and, if it all adds up to a rather abstract group therapy session, there's enough insight here to prompt an unironic "thanks for sharing".

Max's Kansas City

http://www.maxskansascity.com/

An official site for the now-defunct rock venue, its structure reflecting the front and back room hierarchies of the original joint. As a monument to this spawning ground for the Velvets, New York Dolls, Patti Smith and others, it's compromised, presumably for copyright reasons: no music, not even from the famous live album Reed & Co recorded there. Interesting recollections, though, from less well-known habitues - here's an audio clip of Warhol's superstar Viva talking of her Andy-powered ascension to the back room, downright scary compared with the relatively normal crew of "abstract expressionist heterosexual alcoholics" in the front. The site is put together by Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin, former waitress at Max's, who was founder Mickey Ruskin's partner till his death in 1983 and whose oral history of the club is in the pipeline.

Centre for Alternative Technology

http://www.cat.org.uk/

"From the Polytunnel you can go down into the Mole-Hole." Virtual thrills for the ecologically virtuous at this redesigned site. The centre was created in the Seventies in the grounds of an old slate quarry in Wales, with the aim of showing how people, nature and technology can live together. This tour of the seven acres open to the public takes in water and solar power, environmentally sound buildings, organic farming and alternative sewage systems, as well as the water-balanced cliff railway used to enter the park and a display of straw bale building. Leaflets offer the downloadable lowdown on composting secrets, yurt-building, and "Buying a Green Fridge".

Bill Pannifer