A Brief Distraction in Dark Days

Some Websites to Amuse You and Take Your Mind of the Fact That You're Living Among Demons

Demons walks among us. Some of them have high-powered rifles. None of them like Jesus and they sure don’t like people who love Jesus. But you knew all that. So while we wait for the FBI to find the skinny guy in the Antifa-black clothes to be brought to justice, here are some websites that may have some amusement value.

Websites to Amuse You

• SpuriousCorrelations.com. If you’re like me, you are sick of people telling you that correlation is not causation (although, you could point out, causation requires correlation). This website will help you draw correlations between the most random of things, some of which you may foist of on the unsuspecting as bizarre examples of associations. For instance, here’s one from the site:

• HeyJackass.com. I don’t get the title and I’m not even sure of all of the content, but this is a tour of Chicago crime statistics, updated daily. If you’re going to Chicago for business or some other reason, they have handy maps of areas where you are most likely to make it out alive. Besides making relentless fun of hapless Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, it keeps strange statistical counts like how many people per day in Chicago are shot in the butt. They also sell merch, including things with the Chipocalypse Now! logo. It’s strangely interesting and if all crime statistics were done this imaginatively, we might be safer.

• RandomStreetView.com. Set it up to look at “all countries” and you’ll get street images from around the world. This is a calm and strangely soothing website.

• MpalaLive.com is a website that has a cam set up at watering holes in Africa where you can watch the animals. While I’ve seen live cams, they also have distilled some into “best of” videos so you don’t have to watch the screen for hours before you see something.

• Suno.com. If you are one of those people who can’t see anything good in artificial intelligence (AI), take a tour of the site Suno. It will write songs for you. Suno can do the music and it’ll write lyrics. If you want, it will take our lyrics and set them to music. You can specify the type of music and type of vocalist, too. So let Elvis sing you a love song or create a rock anthem with a Freddy Mercury sound-alike to announce dinner. Suno delivers it as a snappy audio file. If you’ve ever thought it was a grave injustice you don’t have your own theme song, here is your chance to rectify that.

• PimEyes.com is for people who think AI is creepy. Based on facial recognition software, PimEyes invites you to upload an image. Then it scans the internet and will retrieve online images of the same face. It’s weird and scary and yet somehow interesting. If you’ve ever wondered if someone is abusing your images, this is the software to try. It’s free.

• Engrish.com lacks political correctness but it makes up for it in laughs. It is a website dedicated to translation errors, some of which are funny.

• TheKiffness.com is a site more about selling tickets for this South African artist, but you have to check out his music videos. Sometimes you’ll see his reels on TikTok or YouTube. The ones with cats are the best, I think. Here’s one. (The cat in “I Go Meow” is his own cat, Cala.)

• LovinasAmishKitchen.com is a website run by an Old Order Amish woman (she doesn’t have email) but she shares Amish lifestyle insights and recipes in an engaging blog. Just the other day she grilled 1,000 pounds of chicken. The Amish are different, I guess. I’ve never even grilled 100 pounds of chicken. She also makes her own V-8 juice, which is something that has never occurred to me to do.

• Columbophile.com is a site full of images and trivia about Columbo, everyone’s favorite detective. The blog has been on hiatus for a while so you won’t get updates but the content that’s there is pretty fun for Columbo fans.

• TheBlackVault.com is a privately run archive of government documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This is no minor operation; they have over 3M documents archived, searchable, and available to unwashed people like us. It takes some getting used to since the FBI is somewhat convoluted in how they document things, but it’s still interesting. You can find out what they had on Marilyn Monroe or Bud Abbott. That’s right, nobody is too obscure for the FBI. (Bud Abbott of Abbott and Costello fame once rented a porno film.)