Web sites

Blurred Racial Lines

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous

The little-known African heritage of the Royal Family, among others, is explored in this site. The Queen is in fact the great-great-great-great- granddaughter of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III and member of a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. Implications (if any) for her multicultural subjects are not specified, though it is interesting that this blood-line was stressed at the time of the Coronation, to justify her position as Head of the Commonwealth. It's delicately done overall, though it's sometimes hard to escape a rather gleeful sense of "outing".

Mutant Screenwriting Contest

http://www.troma.com/contest.html

Few film scripts these days are the work of a single mind, but the property being assembled here will be credited to no less than 50 writers. Troma Films, perpetrators of self-conscious Z-movies like Toxic Avenger, The Last Temptation of Toxie, and Class of Nuke `Em High, are inviting visitors to submit their own two-page episodes towards the latest work-in-progress, Battle of the Bikini Subhumanoids. Winners are posted on site, where 14 fans have so far created 27 pages of dialogue: on the evidence so far, Troma's product actually seems to overestimate its audience.

Pirate Radio of the Offshore Kind

http://www.guernsey.net/bebridel/

With the Web now hosting Internet "radio stations", here's a chance to remember the original swashbuckling sounds from the Sixties, phasing in and out in fuzzy AM from locations in the North Sea. At the time, one survey found 45 per cent of the population tuning in to Radios Caroline, London, Veronica, and the rest, before economics, bad weather, jamming and the boarding parties of the Postmaster General put paid to them. This Anglo-Dutch site celebrates the telecommunications free-for-all that spawned John Peel, Dave Lee Travis and the rest.

The Spleen

http://www.mcad.edu/home/faculty/szyhalski/Piotr

"Humour" is a matter of antique medical theory at this site, bizarrely structured on the pattern of one of our most mysterious internal organs. The metaphoric role of the spleen would seem to be that no one knows what it really does, but if the intention is sometimes obscure, the execution is a spectacular series of animated posters and mind games. A fascinating site which is at once ironic, sardonic and (of course) splenetic.

Cool Site in A Day

http://webreview.com/universal/web97.html

Yesterday two teams of Web designers, one from San Francisco and one from New York, were given eight hours to create the "coolest" site on behalf of a favourite non-profit organisation. Traditional US intercoastal rivalry - Silicon Valley versus Silicon Alley - has here been harnessed for a good cause, and details and location of the site deemed to possess maximal froideur will be posted here today.