The Smarmy Carny

This week's site is Worth1000.

Worth1000 (or w1k, as regulars refer to it) is a site that deals with the "photoshopping" (i.e. digital photo editing) of pictures.

While there, you can browse through dozens of contest entries. Contests range from simple tasks like editing a particular picture in any way you'd wish to more difficult tasks like colorizing a black and white photograph to surreal tasks like covering any object with virtual chocolate.

Even if you don't feel like you have the skill to compete, you can still register and vote on the current contest entries. Even more valuable is the Tutorial section, which gives plenty of über-cool advice on how to perform common tasks. Also, for the unskilled, there is a "Training Grounds" section with less difficult tasks.

If Worth1000 was merely a photo editing contest website, it would have been worthy of being Sunday's Site. The quality of most of the entries (and the admission that lousy entries will be tossed out) really allow these contest entries to be breathtaking. Worth1000 goes beyond that, though, by offering a great variety of content for all people.

Leave it to the French.

The cow bra offers support for — what else — the cow's udders.

And all this time, I thought cows just wore muumuus!

Click for full picture

Chris Jordan's "Intolerable Beauty — Portraits of American Mass Consumption" simultaneously shows us both the horror and the beauty of mass consumption. As in "Pallets #2" above, you can see the large amount of waste that goes on in our country, but you can also see the beauty created by it. The thumbnail above really doesn't do the picture justice because it is cropped and resized. You need to head to chrisjordan.com to see the full picture!

Don't stop with this photo, though. Be sure to check out the rest of his work at chrisjordan.com . . . just click on "images" to see the rest.

I StumbledUpon this site a while back and just had to bookmark it and share it. Just this week (July 24), his art was featured on the front page of The New York Times' Art section. The article was titled "A Great Big Beautiful Pile of Junk."

A farmer was milking his cow. He was just starting to get a good rhythm going when a bug flew into the barn and started circling his head. Suddenly, the bug flew into the cow's ear. The farmer didn't think much about it, until the bug squirted out into his bucket.

It went in one ear and out the udder.

Sing along: "Stormy Weather . . . "

My video card bombed out on me earlier this week and I'm currently suffering with a lousy 4MB video card that doesn't even have proper drivers for any current OS. It started storming last night, so I decided I didn't want to lose additional equipment.

Thus, I turned the server off for the morning. Sorry about the downtime. Unless you're a few fries short of a happy meal, you've realized that the site is back up.

Watching the trailer makes me miss all of the "good" war movies of the past, from Stalag 17 to The Bridge on the River Kwai to Apocolypse Now to Glory to Saving Private Ryan.

Judging by the trailer, this movie may fall into the same ranks, pun intended.

The Great Raid follows the story of the 6th Ranger Battalion during World War II. The Rangers take on a mission to free 500 POWs from a Japanese camp in the Philippines. The movie apparently tracks the stories of the Rangers as well as the POWs in the camp, who have been there for three years by the time the Rangers get this mission.

I suggest that this movie may turn out as good as the other classics I mentioned because, rather than an all out bloodbath war movie, the movie also focuses on dramatic storylines as well. I'd rather not recount the details and get it wrong, though. Watch the trailer, and you'll see.

According to IMDB, this movie was one of the near-casualties of the Disney-Miramax split, as it was originally slated for a 2003 release.

According to an article at MosNews, notorious Russian spammer Vardan Kushnir was found dead in his apartment.

Spamming isn't currently illegal in Russia, but apparently the citizens have their own way of preventing spam.