Jim Murphy's Web Page
A Selection of Links
In the early days of the Internet it was obligatory for a personal page has to have a links section. I am maintaining that custom, but at least I have refrained from using the word "c-ol".
Just as books beget books, so links lead to more links. Just as no book can be completely original, so no list of links can avoid links taken from other lists of links.
I enjoy reading personal web pages and have found some of my favorite links from them. However, I do not admire those authors who seemingly attempt to list links to every site they have ever visited.
Here then is a short list of links to sites that, I hope, you have not already encountered and will find interesting. To provide a focus, I've organized this selection according the themes represented on this Web page: a few for each topic and a sort of self-referential miscellaneous links section.
If you are interested in learning about Massachusetts, the state Office of Travel and Tourism has a web page.
Of interest to walkers and others is Massachusetts Trails.
Walking Connection, though somewhat on the commercial side, has some good articles.
KIPnotes is a business site, but it has good bibliography on walking.
A very famous walker is the Doris Haddock, better known as Granny D, a crusader for campaign reform.
Check out GPS Drawing for an artistic endeavor that involves walking and other activities.
If you are interested in that area, Walking Britain is an excellent resource.
Those who like company on their walks should investigate volkswalking, for which there is the American Volksport Association.
A special kind of walking is narrated on Andre Tolme's Golf Mongolia.
Another excellent report on walking-related activity is the Field Journal of Daniel V. Boudillion.
A very useful aid for those geographically minded is the University of Iowa’s Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research map links page.
The Jean Vigo Website is fairly brief and unattractive visually, but it does have some information.
Dan's Movie Shrine has an entry on L'Atalante and some stills.
Even if the author is not too big on this particular movie, French Films of the 1930's is a good web site.
I am sadly monolingual, but one facet of the Internet that I like is that it allows one to try to figure out foreign languages. If these have Latin roots, I can sometimes imagine that I am reading them. With these limitations, I can recommend a French movie page about Vigo's films and another one on the restoration of this film.
Those with even stronger language skills might want to try a Norwegian page on Vigo or one from Hungary.
I shun commercialism on this page, but here is a
link to allow you to buy the video.
Any search engine will find more pages about beer than anyone will ever read. Most of those are of course corporate, but even those sometimes have interesting information. In doing research, I have found many informative sites simply by searching on such phrases as "Estonian beer" or (via "African beer") the Global Beer Network.
An extremely good individual page (much better than mine!) is Josh Oakes' Beer Manifesto, though he appears to have stopped maintaining it. The Opionated Beer Page also has reviews of many beers, plus beer humor
All About Beer is an excellent Internet journal. The Real Beer Page, from which some links have been made in my section, has an awesome amount of information.
You can talk about and rate beers at sites such as BeerPal and at RateBeer. The best of these is probably Beer Advocate. I find the registration process and the rating system on these too cumbersome, but I have posted a few reviews at the much simpler to use (and aptly titled) My Life Is Beer page. This site seems to have caused Beer Is My Life to become Beer Me, which has a very large number of reviews and much information.
Especially with so many of the beers reported there now finding their way to the United States, the British Campaign for Real Ale is worth visiting. There is also a good page on British beer history maintained by the Brewery History Society.
The American Brewery History page is informative and entertaining. You can find more beer sites from the Beer Webring.
Apple Journal has a short history of cider. An English cider maker, Andrew Lee, has an interesting page with some historical data and links. UK Cider also has lots of information on British ciders.
There is a Usenet group alt.beer, the discussion in which is not too high level but appears to exceed that of. rec.food.drink.beer (which also has lots of spam posts). Locally, there are sometimes comments on beer and brewpubs in ne.food, though is not very active. The eGullet Society has a discussion forum on cider that seems rather pedestrian.
No Religion/No Philosophy/No Ideology
My favorite religion, Internet or otherwise, is the Church of Euthanasia. This Somerville-based group has received some attention in the Boston Phoenix and even made the national news, particularly for its 1996 Unabomber for President campaign. Their occasional citation of the word Dada gives some of their game away. You may find their theology outrageously funny (or just outrageous), but personally I admire their very original and penetrating point of view. They have some excellent links, too.
If you prefer a more explicitly comic religion, try the Church of the Subgenius. Theologically, I much prefer the Church of Euthanasia, but the Subgenius cult does has a lot of entertainment value as well as substantive thought. Comparatively, you will probably find it a more uplifting creed.
For a more typical example of the religious mind, try the Believers Page. Unbelievers have an excellent Web resource at the Secular Web. Another good page is American Atheists.
The Cockroach Home Page is very informative. David George Gordon's book The Compleat Cockroach promotes a more positive view of these creatures. The most famous cockroach of all, Archy, is now on the Internet. The Ross Park Zoo in Binghamton offered cockroach adoptions for ten dollars for Valentine's Day 2004. More generally advocating on behalf of small creatures is the Insect Rights Association.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a short entry on Xenophanes. All that survives of his works are are fragments that now can be read on the Internet. A good essay about Xenophanes and the gods appears at the Classics Technology Center.
For just some of the story of human beings' destruction of other human beings, see the Web Genocide Documentation Centre. More updated information is available at Prevent Genocide International. Human destructiveness with regard to other species can be followed at the Current Mass Extinction web site. For a solution to the problem of human beings, see VHEMT. For another view, see the Alien Report of Human Earth.
Miscellaneous 
There are many excellent pages about animal life on the Web. Bird Links to the World is aptly titled and fascinating. Struggling to get human beings to take a more positive outlook toward little creatures is BugBios. AntWeb is another page redressing human discrimination again nonvertebrates. The University of California Museum of Paleontology is an excellent place for learning about all zoological subjects.
A wonderful feature of the Internet is that it allows you to travel all over the world. For an excellent list of sites in every country that is on the Internet and about every country that is not, see Global Web Explorer. If you have a fondness for out of the way places, visit the Global Islands Network. You can see what is going on in many places right now at EarthCam.
The Internet has given rise to new forms of art, especially of the conceptual variety. Jodi was the most famous of these; it is pretty east to get lost there! Other examples are Potatoland. and www.0100101110101101.org. For traditional art, the virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel (even though it is presented by the most repressive organization of all time), is another traditional best of the Web selections.
Many of the best pages on the Web are, like this one, personal pages. It is too bad that the increasing size of the Internet has caused search engines to de-emphasize such pages, because they frequently have information available nowhere else. Certainly this bias only adds to the commercialization that blights the Web and life generally. For an example of a personal page with an incredible amount of information (some of which is linked from my Walking page) see the Gregsite.
Another kind of sites that I relish are strange pages that I have spent time on simply trying to figure out if they are a joke or not. I used to think that Dan Winter's Sacred Geometry web site was meant as a parody; however, its latest manifestation may prove to the contrary. Though it is pretty flaky, Spiral Dynamics is evidently serious. There are several Flat Earth Society web pages; unfortunately, all of these are humorous, and some not so funny, though the one cited is pretty good. The Gallery of the Absurd page perhaps falls in the in between category. For unintentional humor, nothing beats the Enron 2000 Annual Report Values Statement.
Of course the "new thing" on the Internet is blogs. Blogs seem to be even worse than web pages in terms of the average level of information and discourse. For examples of good ones, see Bruce Hoppe's Connectedness and Mal Watlington's "Online Conversation & Beyond". I have no more than weak intentions to get a blog on my business site, but I do contribute to the blog of the Massachusetts Bay Organizational Development Learning Group.
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(c) James Murphy, 1997-2007
Last updated February 7, 2007