Logrolling

No names, no smashed kneecaps: but one of the people I'm about to mention in this piece was complaining recently that I don't have a links page.

This struck me as a slightly confusing comment to make. After all, they're all links pages to some degree or other. But of course, there was an ulterior motive behind this person's complaint: what they actually meant was "you don't have a links page where you can plug your mates' web sites to that enormous global audience of yours. Specifically, my web site, bitch".

Fair point. So here, without any apology or shame, are ten sites whose sole connection is that I know their owners personally. Other than that, they're all over the place, ranging from personal photo albums to fully fledged business ventures. Pay them a visit and tell them I sent you.

Dave & Shona's Page
Rummage through the archives of the Unpleasant Lair and have a look at the old letters pages. You'll find that within 24 hours of me publishing on line for the first time, Dave had sent me my first ever bit of fan mail. From Singapore, no less, the globe-trotting bugger: he was working there at the time. So it seems only fitting that his own site is the first one we discuss here. Dave's done quite a bit of travelling over the last few years, in the company of the lovely Shona, and this site is basically a great big online photo album documenting their exploits. Pictures from a whole variety of annoyingly gorgeous locations - Goa, Thailand, Singapore, Glasgow - culminate in the epic collection of shots from their wedding in Zimbabwe. Even if peering at other people's holiday snaps sounds like your idea of hell, there's a lot of very nice pictures to look at here.

The Ross Leopard
But there's more! Not only does Dave go shooting off around the world to make us all jealous, he also co-owns one of the most impossibly funky venues in London. The Ross Leopard is a 1957 fishing trawler which he acquired with some mates a few years ago. They moored it on the Thames next to Chelsea Bridge and opened it up as a floating bar and music venue: I namechecked it briefly back in 1998 when Dave held a party on it prior to his world tour. Its fortunes have gone up and down over the years, and it's currently looking for a new mooring site. Anyone who owns a bit of riverbank between Putney and Greenwich and would like a 40M floating cafe/bar in front of it should get in touch with Dave. Contact details are available on the site, along with some pictures of the trawler itself.

Bar Foo
Tsk. Young people, eh? What with their twin-step garage music and their temazepam jelly babies, it's almost impossible to keep track of what they're "into" these days. But don't let that put you off Bar Foo, "your premier source for broken links, bad HTML, over-used backgrounds and a New Sydneyan Sydneian Sydneiyan Sydneyish bartender by the name of Voodoo Fysh". Voodoo regularly hangs out in a role-playing chatroom-style doofer-thing known as The Keep, and the Bar is basically a place which some of the regular chatters can repair to in order to get out of their virtual boxes. Read their increasingly deranged entries in the guestbook, follow the links to their personal sites, and have a giggle at Mr Fysh's own amusing scribbles in the Randomness section. But don't tell him that you were referred to his page by someone who used to go to school with his mum, or else he'll be mortified.

Stamp
Stamp is hosted by Demon Internet, which is the sexiest ISP on the planet, of course. (And once they get their Surftime low-cost offering off the ground, I'll be positively moist with affection for it.) But sometimes the prospect of having to fill that 20Mb of webspace they give you can be a little daunting. Personally, it's not a problem for me, as all the image files I created in the first 18 months of this site are so ridiculously oversized (but I'm working on that). For others, it can mean that a site which was originally focussed on one single topic ends up diversifying wildly just to make up the megabytes. Andy's page is a case in point: as the name implies, it started out as a site dedicated to stamp collecting in general, and Victorian protective overprints and underprints in particular. But the site's brief subsequently broadened to include an online photo album (which is where Andy lets Louise take over) and, more excitingly for a general audience such as yourselves, the home page of our company deadpool. At the start of the year, 15 of us placed bets on which celebrities they expected to die during 2000, and Andy updates this page regularly to document recent snuffees and rank our successes. Have a look at the list of predictions and see if you can work out which ones are sure-fire bets, long shots or simply wishful thinking.

Vignette
Another Demon site, this one courtesy of occasional letters page correspondent Uncle Tony, and it's a similar story to Stamp. The main thrust of the site is Uncle Tony's World Tour Of Beer, in which he documents and rates all of the myriad varieties of ale he's quaffed over the years in various countries. But aside from that, we also have a couple of pages dedicated to some bands that Tony's been tangentially involved with, notably Intelligent Seaweed ("Their name derives from an episode of Dr. Who - you know, the one featuring the intelligent seaweed") and Slithy Toves (see if you can spot Uncle Tony himself in the photos). He also includes a few of his own poems, in an act of supreme bravery and/or foolishness. And there's a reasonably lively letters page, where you can spot yours truly trying to stir up a bit of a heated debate over whether Stepping Stone or Randy Scouse Git is the best Monkees song. Place your votes with Tony now! (And I don't have to tell you which way to vote, do I?)

Voluntary London Photography
Who says you can't get something for nothing? Mike is a fairly keen amateur photographer, and is offering his services to you for sweet FA just so he can keep in practice. Obviously, it's a little more complicated than that. He's mainly looking to help out non-profit organisations working within the London area, and doesn't take responsibility if you don't particularly like the end results: but it's free, so what are you complaining about? He'll even deliver the finished pictures to your door, providing your door lies within the operating boundaries of a London Transport Travelcard. The site includes numerous samples of his work to look at before you take the plunge. Check out the links section, which gives you an insight into Mike's non-photographic obsessions, and see if you can work out where you've seen him before.

Soul2Sole
Sallyanne is a certified reflexologist, and has studied Reiki massage as well: so if you're looking for someone to fiddle with your feet in the nicest possible way ("she don't tickle or nothin'"), talk to her. The site goes into a reasonable amount of detail about the techniques and benefits of reflexology, including links to sites with additional information, before getting down to the nitty gritty of how you can get in touch with Sal for a personal consultation. Sorry, but once I got the Pulp Fiction reference out of the way, that kind of used up all of my reflexology jokes, so I'd better move on now.

London Theatre & Restaurant Club
The work of another occasional contributor to the letters page. Phil has already mentioned in these pages how he's been acting as a patron to some of London's smaller theatres for the last few years: the newly-created LTRC is how he plans to extend this even further. For an annual membership fee, you can join a club which organises regular visits to theatres, restaurants and other social events, taking advantage of group discounts where possible. There are other organisations that do this sort of thing, but where LTRC differs is in Phil's plan to plough some of the membership money back into the theatres he's patron to, such as the Almeida and the Royal Court. And there was me accusing him of just wanting to hang out with Emperor Palpatine. Sorry, Phil. Anyway, at the time of writing he'd only just started this venture up, so visit the site and find out more.

DVDiskovery
DVDiskovery is the greatest source of DVD reviews available on the Internet today. I have to say this, as its owner Patch sits next to me at work, and he's a big psychopathic get from Sheffield who'll rip your head off at the slightest provocation. (See, he twitched even as I was writing that bit.) Patch's reviews are pretty comprehensive as these things go: most DVD review sites and magazines concentrate on the special features and technical aspects while pretty much ignoring the quality of the film itself, but he's quite careful to devote equal space to both. The discs reviewed are mainly mainstream blockbuster affairs, although occasional swaps with highlights from my own collection mean that there's a quota of what he quaintly refers to as "weird depressing shit" on there too. (I await the review of Happiness with some interest.) Other sections (including a password-only area dedicated to pictures of his son Jaden, whom the URL's named after) are listed in the menu but still under construction at the time of writing: at some point in the future Patch hopes to split the site into two, keeping the family stuff here and moving the DVD reviews to a dedicated DVDiskovery address. Feel free to keep checking back to see if he's done it yet.

Mabel Klies
To be brutally honest - and brutal honesty is compulsory at this point - I didn't really know Mabel that well. I met her fairly regularly at parties and dance performances, but she was more on the periphery of Spank's Pals rather than a fully-fledged member. Just one of those people who you see around now and again, and happily accept as part of the surroundings: and then they die, at a ludicrously early age, and you realise for the first time that you maybe should have spent more time with them while you could. Mabel left behind a homepage that documents a lot of the work she did in her specialised fields of computers and dance, which aren't as diverse as you may think. It shows off some of the web design and graphics commissions she worked on (including a charmingly bonkers Shockwave game featuring a magic squirrel), has stills and video from dance pieces she choreographed, and documents her Gallery Of Memories project which attempted to marry the two disciplines. Obviously it's difficult to say how much longer this site will stay up, but for now it's nice to know that Mabel's still out there in cyberspace. (In fact, it looks like the site was taken down a week or two after this page was originally published - just over a month after Mabel's death - but an incomplete archive remains here.)

So if you're looking for some sort of insight into what makes Spank's assorted Pals tick, those ten sites should be a good place to start. And if you're really stuck for something to do, maybe you could try and guess which one of them it was that whined about the absence of a links page where they could advertise their site. But don't tell him if you work it out: after all, I'd prefer it if those blackmail photos didn't make it into the public domain. Being a monkey, and all.

Links

Oh, don't bloody start that again. In case the title got you confused, this page from xrefer may help. Alternatively, other sites are available if you really want to delve into the dubious-sounding world of Lumberjack Water Sports.

October 14th 2000