How to raise kids, and other wastes of time

Allison Kaplan Sommer
Jerusalem Post
05-31-1996
After the heavy-duty, political week we've had, we all deserve some fun. And there is no shortage of pure silliness on the Internet. In fact, there are so many wacky sites on the World Wide Web, that people have created special pages simply to act as a guide to the ridiculous.

One such site is called "The Center for the Easily Amused," located at (http://www.amused.com), which brags that their experts comb the Net "in their search for the Ultimate Guide to Wasting Time." One of its weekly features is a site singled out for its amusingness. I particularly liked this week's choice at the Center, a really funny site called, "So You Want to Be a Parent??" (http://lake.sowashco.k12.mn.us/pk/html/pfp.html).

THE WEB site bills itself as a prep course for parenthood, and its suggestions have proved so popular that it has been passed around the Internet via e-mail. It contains series of exercises that are supposed to test whether one is really ready to have kids. For example, here's how it says a man on the brink of paternity should prepare himself: "Go to the local drugstore, tip the contents of your wallet on the counter. Tell the pharmacist to help himself. Then go to the supermarket. Arrange to have your salary paid directly to their head office. Then pick up the paper. Read it for the last time."

Here's the suggested method for experiencing what it is like feeding a toddler: "Hollow out a melon. Make a small hole in the side. Suspend it from the ceiling and swing it from side to side. Now get a bowl of soggy cereal and attempt to spoon it into the swaying melon by pretending to be an airplane. Continue until half the Cheerios are gone. Tip half into your lap... The other half just throw up in the air."

It also recommends a trial run to the supermarket: "Take with you the nearest thing you can find to a preschool child... A full-grown goat is excellent. If you intend to have more than one child, take more than one goat. Buy your week's groceries without letting the goats out of your sight. Pay for everything the goats eat or destroy."

The guide cautions that "until you can easily accomplish this, do not even contemplate having children."

THE PARENTING site was clearly built for laughs. But with others, it's hard to decide whether you're supposed to laugh or take them seriously. If the Web pages represent a glimpse into human nature, there are some really weird people out there.

Take the site called "The Tombstone Tourist" (http://www.teleport.com/~stanton/), which is a gathering place for a number of sites. It is maintained by a person named Scott Stanton, who brags (?) that he is the ultimate tombstone tourist. That means he gets his jollies from visiting the graves of famous people. This site features the "Gravesite of the Month" pictures included, of course with special attention to multi-celebrity graveyards, like the Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise in Paris, which "houses" the remains of Frederick Chopin, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and believe it or not canine film star Rin Tin Tin.

There is also a "Today's Obituaries" section, promising to let us in on who's dead before CNN knows oh, goody! and a chart of famous people and their DOD (date of death). This Stanton guy has got to be a lot of fun to hang out with.

AND HE'S not alone. From the "Tombstone Tourist" page, I linked up with the "Dead Presidents" Web site (http://www.csn.net/~mhand/Presidents/). It is maintained by another unusual character named Manus Hand. His affinity for graves is a bit more intellectually focused.

Manus travels the US, visiting the graves of deceased former occupants of the White House. Then he uploads photographs of himself visiting the cemeteries, tombs, crypts and mausoleums, together with nice little biographies of the presidents in question onto his Web site.

He's managed to visit all of the the graves except for four. And to think, I've told people who made it their goal to visit every baseball park in the US that they were nuts.

NOTHING IS too obscure to put on a Web page. One couple in Northern California was cleaning out the old house they bought and came across an obscure collection: two dozen boxes of Band-Aids dating back to 1950. Unable to let this collection fade into obscurity, he put their images onto the Internet at (http://www.northcoast.com/savetz/bandaid) for all of us to enjoy. It would be a shame for this bit of history to fade into obscurity, wouldn't it?

Although this column has been devoted to silliness, I can't let myself end it without mentioning at least one vaguely useful place on the Net. Last week, Channel 2 News weatherman and heartthrob Danny Roup announced his very own World Wide Web site (http://weather.macom.co.il), where he forecasts the weather both locally and around the world.

Roup is still basking in the glory of his first-place award in the Fifth International Television Weather Forecasters' Festival. (There is just a festival for everything these days.) If your computer can receive video, you can check out his award-winning performances on the site.

And then, you can learn about Roup, fellow forecaster Heli Slutzky and their producers, the people who make our weather forecasts fun. The best thing about the site are the clever illustrations by graphic artist Igal Baum, including cartoons that illustrate fun facts about world weather.

We learn, for instance, that Hawaiian mountain Wai-ale-ale is the wettest place in the world. It rains there about 335 days of the year, and its annual rainfall is 11,684 millimeters; that's enough rain to cover six people standing on each other's shoulders. As the sweltering days of summer descend upon us, we can take comfort in that we don't live there.

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