Simian Substitute Sites Of The Month - 2004 Archive

January 2004 - Desperado
Johnny Cash's splendid rendition of the old Eagles tune, turned into an animated tribute shortly after his death in 2003. There's no logic whatsoever in the design decision to make the title character a monkey, but it's surprising just how effective it is.

February 2004 - Chinese New Year 2004
It was the Year Of The Monkey, of course, so simian-based greetings were all over the internet at this time. This one is quite exquisitely done.

March 2004 - The Wrong Bananas
Another triumph by Joel Veitch of rathergood.com, who's moved over the years from animated renditions of other people's songs to his own material. This one features the plaintive - plantainive? - lament of a monkey caught in a food-based dilemma.

April 2004 - Froogle search for 'monkey'
Yes, yes, I'm just as nervous about Google becoming the gatekeepers of all knowledge on the web as you are. But you've got to admit, they do it rather well. Froogle is their shopping site search: enter an item, and it'll run through a selection of online vendors to display products you can purchase right now. You probably never realised before now just how many varieties of toy monkey there are.

May 2004 - Theatremonkey
Not just the usual fluff and silliness, this is actually a seriously useful site - at least, it is if you frequent London theatre as much as I do. Theatremonkey tells you all the practical stuff about the West End experience you won't get anywhere else: how the ticket agencies compare, where the best and worst seats are in particular theatres, as well as more traditional opinions about which shows are worth seeing.

June 2004 - Supergrass: Children Of The Monkey Basket
Always had a lot of time for The 'Grass in this neck of the woods. While their official site supergrass.com is the sort of record company-endorsed affair you'd expect, this alternative one is run by the band themselves. It's pleasingly ramshackle, while providing lots of news and downloadable goodies for the fans.

July 2004 - Trunk Monkey
An archive of commercials for Suburban, featuring the ultimate in car accessories - a monkey that can be released from your trunk to solve your motoring problems. The sluggish Shockwave interface is a bit painful, particularly over a dialup line, but the ads are worth waiting for.

August 2004 - Brass Monkey, Edinburgh
It's Edinburgh Festival time, and so the Simian Substitute slot did its bit for the kids by telling them about the best pub in Edinburgh with the word 'monkey' in its name. Shamefully, I've passed this several times on the way to the Pleasance, and still never got around to looking inside. Maybe next time.

September 2004 - Ain't No Monkey Business... Just Gorilla
Andrew Tkaczyk works for Viz Comic, and in September he did the Great Gorilla Run to raise money for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. It seemed like a good cause, so I put up a link to his donation page for the whole of September in the hope that all my readers would give him lots of money. You'll notice that he had two anonymous donations in that month: one was from The Belated Birthday Girl, the other was from me. No contributions from anyone else. You stingy gets.

October 2004 - Food-Eating Battle Monkeys!
Simple, really: it's just a variation on one of those sites that takes your name, and does a calculation based on the letters in it to allocate you some particular attribute. In this case, a particular type of Food-Eating Battle Monkey with a numerical rating. Enter two people's names, and you can see who'd win in a fight. Sadly, it would appear that The Belated Birthday Girl is a Toast-Eating Surrender Monkey with a rating of zero.

November 2004 - Monkey Portraits, Jill Greenberg Studio
The exhibition being plugged here is long gone, but the site is still there to make you wish you'd been in San Francisco at the time. Jill Greenberg takes a simple idea - photographic portraits of monkeys which treat them as if they were human subjects - and executes it wonderfully. "Jill is exploring options for a book," says the news page: well, I'd buy it.

December 2004 - Chunky Monkey's Excellent Christmas Adventure
Pauline Comanor's cartoon character has a fairly humongous website dedicated to him, of which this festive tale is only a small part.