Note: The older the entry, the unlikelier outside links are to work.

I wasted one evening recently looking for amusing sound clips. Rather than find out whether there are some hilarious comedians that I haven't even heard of, I should've just gone directly to the source: Monty Python. So do yourself a favor and just listen to some of those songs. I especially recommend Finland (for obvious reasons), and the Penis Song (for not so obvious reasons). You will also enjoy the Monty Python .wav files.

Pro: With the help of the Hubble telescope up in orbit, space provides us with some totally awesome and amazing background wallpapers for our desktops. So forget that Anna Kournikova and enlighten your day with an image of a galaxy far, far away. Your chances of getting to either of them are approximately the same anyway.

Con: It might just be that space will bring us the destruction of our civilization, in the form of an asteroid, in less than 20 years. But hey, you gotta be ready to forfeit something if you want to have such nice images on your desktop.

Many people are of the opinion that modern computer games just don't have the same feel to them than earlier ones. Much of this is nostalgia, of course, and there are lots of games out there that are just excellent (Civilization III being my favorite). But even though old games can't compete in the graphics department, in good plots they definitely can. Especially if the plots are directly ripped off from a book. So if you have some time to spare (no save-option in this game), see how well you remember the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And if you get frustrated wondering how to get out from the house, just look at the hints. Cheater.

I did post this link on kekkuli already once before, but as our archives are as popular as Mariah Carey, I thought it would be better to re-post it, as the topic seems to be a popular one again. It is a simple site that gives a brief clarification to many urban tales, or conspiracy theories if you prefer that wording. Now, whether this site is just another tale in itself remains to be solved...

Staying on the subject, here is another very interesting theory for you all. The Italian, Mr. Felici Vinci (who kindly sent me his book, thanks again!), claims that the Homeric Odessey did not actually take place around the Aegean sea at all, but instead it all happened in Scandinavia. Troy itself is placed in Finland! Not that me being Finnish would have anything to do with the fact that I find this theory so righteous, but I do. Read some of it and let us know on the kekkuli discussion board what your opinion is on the matter.

And while the hot, sunny summer carries on in the above-mentioned Scandinavia, here are some computer features that all you people sitting in your offices would sure want to have access to right now. But do enjoy summer everybody, any way you can. Friends in the southern hemisphere, ignore me.

In my last post there was a link recommended by a reader to a conspiracy theory about the plane that hit Pentagon. Here's a response I got to it from another:

Jani,
Recently I was looking at your web site. And there was a reference to a French web site - www.asile.org - which was taking some issue about just what happened to the Boeing airplane which struck the Pentagon on Septemeber 11th. After reviewing the site, I sent the reference to associates of mine who are engineers at Boeing. I enclose the following response..... Larry

I read through the entire site and showed it to several other designers and structural engineers here at Boeing. Everyone's response was the same.........all thought it humorous and deemed it tabloid journalism best suited for the National Enquirer.
The fact that there is no physical evidence of the plane that hit the Pentagon shouldn't be a surprise. When you have that much energy being release at once.........things just disintegrate. From what I recall, the plane that hit the Pentagon was loaded with jet fuel. The fire was so intense that no attempts could be made to put it out. You can see the large charred regions on the exterior of the building. The fire was no doubt so extreme that no one could get anywhere near it. Also, remember how the planes that hit the World Trade Center sheared through the steel I-beams and the plane just lodged itself in the building? Well, the same thing happened at the Pentagon. This isn't like cars banging into each other and parts ricocheting all over the place. Also, the Pentagon had just undergone a structural renovation that significantly strengthened the building. So the relatively small region of structural damage to the Pentagon is to be expected.
In addition, there were countless eyewitness who saw the impact......many of whom were on network TV and nobody is going to tell me that those people were lying about what they saw. The best way to put this conspiracy theorist to bed is to ask the following: "If the plane didn't hit the Pentagon, then where is it and where are the passengers?!?" I'm sure the family members of those on the plane would like to know.

So there. I'm glad that I was able to get an expert response to the link. The very reason why conspiracy theories like this live and prosper on the internet is that too seldom there's any possibility of getting someone in the know to put them down. Of course, if you believed in the theory in the first place, then a message posted on Kekkuli claiming that it's from a Boeing engineer is not going to turn your head, but for the rest of us it's more than satisfactory.

Amazingly, my suggestion that you out there that have to spend time in front of a computer, even over the summer when the sun's shining and all you'd really want to do is just drink beer outside, send me anything you might find on the internet has been taken seriously. So here are the first batch of readers' contributions, which hopefully keep coming in later on, since it makes updating this page a whole lot easier and time-efficient.

Viro Pietari sends us yet-another conspiracy theory that have found so much breeding ground on the internet. According to this one it wasn't really an airplane that hit the Pentagon. Sure, their pictures are convincing, but what would anyone gain by having the building be blown up by something else, and then claiming it was an airplane that hit it? And what happened to the airplane if it didn't hit Pentagon? Oh, wait, don't tell me: alien abduction, right?

And a hard-working employee of Nokia shows us how productivity at Nokia is kept up: Once in a while, you just have to take a brake and go fishing with Muumipappa. The game's in Finnish, but I can let you know that it's not that complex that you couldn't figure it out. If you don't understand Finnish, take it as a computer-game-literacy-test: see if you can catch fish with the help of the illustrations provided. Besides, a lot of people say that Finnish is hugely amusing to read or hear when you can't understand it.

As promised, the second "funny" file I've had on my desktop for years: Frogblender.zip. Right-click bla bla bla.

For some reason, the desktop on my Windows has had two somewhat-humorous shortcuts on it for about three years now. The number of times I've clicked on them over that three years has been negligent, but rather than finally just tossing them into the recycle bin, I figured I'd share them on kekkuli for general amusement. They're not that great, but you might find yourself three years later wondering why you still have that stupid icon on your desktop. Provided you for some stupid reason even put them on the desktop, rather than just running them once and then totally forgetting about them, which would be the proper thing to do.

Today's "treat" comes from a time when Viagra was the newest invention of the day. I give you: ViagraMouse. (Zip file: right-click, save target as, or any other way you get it to work).

For those of you with slow connections, apologies for the length of this page. It's just that moving something over to the archives is a hassle I haven't been able to bother with for months. Besides, when you have a cable-modem, slow pages aren't that much of a problem. So get yourself a decent internet-connection rather than complain to me, will you?

In the modern world, you need to be careful not to get ripped off. Sometimes it's easier, like when you get notified that someone likes you, but before you know who, you need to sign up and expect to receive tons of spam. But sometimes it's trickier. Like this one debacle I was involved in, in which a car was sold in Africa, the money came via a check, money was transferred to a bank account, and three months later the bank says the check is counterfeit and wants its money back. Someone really needs to know the banking system to be able to pull off a trick like that. Hats off to them: despite our precautions they still managed to pull it off. Luckily the bank was ready to take some of the blame and covered half of the costs, so it didn't turn out horribly bad.
But the truly classic rip-off are the "Nigerian letters", in which some well-positioned Nigerian (usually, the trick has been so successful that it's been spreading to other countries) needs an international partner to transfer some ridicilously huge amount of money abroad and will give a share to whoever helps him. The downside is that once you go into cooperation, the other side comes up with new and inventive costs that need to be covered (by you, of course) before the money can be sent, which of course never happens. Apparently some businessmen have managed to throw tens of thousands of dollars into pits like these. People you would normally consider clever, I'd assume. With modern technology, the letters have become ever more prevalent, as this letter proves. Sounds like quite the proposition, doesn't it? Unfortunately, the email that was provided with it didn't work...