Simian Substitute Sites Of The Month - 2002 Archive

January 2002 - Stone Monkey Sword Dancers
Possibly named after a brand of rude medical cream manufactured in Taiwan (one of a number of dubious explanations given on the site), the Stone Monkey Sword Dancers do traditional English dancing with edged weaponry in and around the East Midlands area of England.

February 2002 - ITV Digital Monkey Knitting Pattern
A fond reminder of those heady days in 2002 when ITV Digital still existed. Sure, they couldn't actually sustain a TV service or anything like that, but by God their adverts were popular. (Though not successful - every so often I get hits on my site from people searching for information on "Sky TV monkey".) The double act of Johnny Vegas and Monkey captured the hearts of the nation, but not so much that people were willing to fork out the cash for a digibox to get their free stuffed monkey with it: hence the popularity of this knitting pattern.

March 2002 - Iron Monkey
I actually caught Yuen Woo-Ping's classic kung fu movie on its first cinema release when I visited Hong Kong for the first time in 1993. It's been available in the UK for some time now thanks to the wonderful people at Hong Kong Legends, but it didn't appear in the US until this DVD release on Buena Vista. BV have a bad reputation for recutting and redubbing their imported Hong Kong flicks, but at least here you've still got the option to hear the original Chinese soundtrack. There's not too much on the site now: still, the trailer should give you a fair idea of the fun to be had.

April 2002 - Snow Monkey's World
This one was discovered by The Belated Birthday Girl during her research in preparation for our visit to Japan, which you must all be sick of hearing about by now. Hosted by the Jigokudani Monkey Park, the site's got lots of info and pictures on Japanese monkeys, including a live webcam so you can see them at play.

May 2002 - Home Monkey Trainer
Ricky Marshall's somewhat dubious instructional site shows you how to train your monkey. Apparently monkeys are fans of Sky TV (which may account for some of the confusion already discussed above in the entry for February 2002), will invade your kitchen appliances at a moment's notice, and can be made to perform all manner of useful tasks if you beat them frequently enough. Hmmm.

June 2002 - Dan The Automator: Wanna Buy A Monkey?
A promo site for a mix album by legendary DJ/producer Dan Nakamura: to keep the simian theme going, you may know him best as one of the backroom team behind Gorillaz. Follow the 'Dan live' link and you'll be taken to an audio stream hosted by a Dutch website which splendidly promises "koele set van superhippe producer".

July 2002 - Monkey Birthday Tee Shirt
A wee present to celebrate the fourth birthday of this site. Assuming you've got Adobe Acrobat, you can download this page, trace round the outline onto a blank teeshirt, get out your fabric markers and colour it in. Anyone out there tried this yet, by the way?

August 2002 - Monkey Skidoo
Except it's now called Ureshii..., though the URL betrays its simian origins. To quote the writer of this weblog, "Dani Alex is some girl who lives somewhere. She likes some stuff. She doesn't like some other stuff. She really likes Spirited Away." Which is fair enough. Be warned that her language has got a bit less family-friendly since I originally recommended the site, though.

September 2002 - Monkey Business
Well, it's a homepage that mentions me on its links page. So I can't really be too rude about it. But that song makes you want to bite your own head off, doesn't it?

October 2002 - Daniel Jackson, Our Space Monkey
A Stargate SG-1 fan page, specially dedicated to the character Daniel Jackson. Not sure why Kyp and Dee think of him as Their Space Monkey, but hey, at least it fills up another month.

November 2002 - Rally Monkey
Okay, as a Brit I have no blummen idea what's going on here. But as far as I can make out, Rally Monkey is the mascot of the Anaheim Angels baseball team, and helped them win something or other late in 2002, thus propelling him to national stardom. Now I know how you Americans feel when I've been going on about Johnny Vegas and ITV Digital. Still, if you wanna buy a monkey, you can do it here.

December 2002 - Monkey Steals The Drum
It's surprising how many bands have the word 'monkey' in their name, particularly when you consider how none of them ever seem to make it out of the back rooms of pubs. This English outfit hasn't updated its site since June 2002, which is probably a bad sign.