Site of the Week -- Oct. 23, 2000
onor. Courage. Dignity. The ability to crush opponents with a mere thought. These are the qualities that Americans have looked for--and failed to find--among this year's presidential candidates. Until now.
Forget Bush and Gore. Forget Nader and Buchanan and all the others running for the role of your leader. There is only one candidate with the Force to do the job. Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith, is running for president, and promises to bring order to the planet (and the galaxy).
Through his campaign headquarters' web site, he offers a multi-pronged platform designed to end all destructive conflict on Earth.
Want family values? Lord Vader loved his son so much he dedicated the entire fleet to finding him, just so he could convince him to join the family business. Want zero tolerance for terrorists? The Empire reluctantly destroyed an entire world to show it would not negotiate with the so-called "Rebel Alliance". Hate the IRS? Lord Vader would force-strangle everyone in charge of the tax agency.
These and other stances are detailed on the campaign site, which also includes "alignment" tests to see if you should vote for the Sith Lord, campaign press releases, news articles, photos and a few audio files.
-- Kenneth Newquist
Site of the Week -- October 16, 2000
ell hath no fury like an engineer scorned. Mars fanatics furious at NASA for canning the almost-ready-to-fly Mars 2001 Surveyor Lander are rallying to save the mothballed craft with a site chronicling every aspect of its development.
The space agency scrapped the $150 million Mars Lander mission after back-to-back foul-ups with Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander. The first allegedly failed because of faulty measurement conversions; the second apparently crashed because of buggy software. Not eager to lose yet another spacecraft, NASA grounded the Lander and intends to fly two rovers instead. The rovers will use airbag systems to cushion their landing on the Red Planet, the same technique used by the wildly successful Mars Pathfinder mission.
Not so fast, the Save the Mars Lander organizers shout. In summaries filled with equal parts jargon and passion, they argue that Mars Lander is a fundamentally different spacecraft from the earlier Polar Lander, that any problems the two spacecraft shared have been fixed, and that not launching the remaining lander would be a near-criminal waste of taxpayer dollars. The site's petition urges NASA to reconsider the mission, and it has already been signed by dozens, if not hundreds, of NASA employees, industry workers and regular fans.
-- Kenneth Newquist
Site of the Week -- Oct. 9, 2000
on't have time to read an entire series? There's always CliffsNotes.
Don't even have time for the CliffsNotes? Try Book-a-Minute, which ironically "ultra-condenses" over a hundred novels, series and even entire lifetime bodies of work down to their core content--sometimes no more than a sentence or two of wry dialogue or description. For instance, the entire collected writing of Raymond E. Feist is summed up thus: "Character #1:: I'm goodhearted and honest. Character #2: I'm goodhearted and sneaky. (They save the world six times.)" Frank Herbert's God Emperor of Dune is reduced even further: "Leto II: Infinity.
Reader: Ouch, my head just exploded."
The page design is as simple as the sardonic humor--no images, no animation, no bells and whistles, just a list of titles organized by author and links to other rinkworks.com sites. The whole family of sites (including Classics, Bedtime Stories, and Movies as well as SF/F) are cynical, snide and often right on target. They mercilessly skewer authors' pretensions and obfuscations by cutting to the heart of each work and exposing its barest bones. It's cruel and sometimes juvenile satire, but it's still strikingly effective and remarkably funny.
-- Tasha Robinson
