Weird Wednesday - a random assortment of weird

Everyone knows you can't swing a dead lolcat without finding weird stuff on the internet. Before the web, the internet was a haven for all sorts of crazy "underground" information that was difficult to get published and distributed.

Fast-forward to the present day and you can indulge your weirdness with the push of maybe 5 or 6 buttons, tops. You don't need a real name, address, phone number or functional frontal lobe -- you too can pollute the mindscape of hundreds with a janky little free site dedicated to whatever weird crap you're into.

But how to find the weird stuff? Digg, BoingBoing, Fark, and many, many sites are dedicated to culling the "best" of the oddball sites out there (although more often than not the sites themselves are merely bad, not "weird"). But what about those rarely-curated Frontpage-compliant hyper-niche zany sites out there?

There's no way for us to find them all (DARPA cancelled funding for that project long ago), but here's a sampling of what we could find in about 30 minutes of searching. Something you'll notice: most of these sites also fall under the "fugly" category. Most haven't been updated in years, either.

As always, leave your own in the comments. PG-13 please, we know there are plenty of adult and "other" sites that indulge strange stuff -- and there are plenty of sites covering those, so no need for us to do the same.

History of Public Toilets. Joe the Plumber would be proud. The content is actually fascinating, even if the presentation leaves something to be desired. But there's no good way to dress up poop, really.


Web weirdness. Nothing looks like anything I would want to click on, which is weird, because everything clearly wants to be clicked... but don't. I checked a handful of sites, and let's say the web weirdness site itself was the best of the bunch. Sad, because the site is a total waste of a domain name.

Doogie Howser vs. Niles Crane. A narrative smackdown for the so-called WWWF... I only hope the WWE's lawyers serve some smackdown to this site. Why does it exist?

Fugly.net, a site after my own heart. Despite no updates in years, this site is blessed with a) a great domain, and b) ugly pictures of people with hilarious descriptions. Consider it the anti-Hot-or-Not.

The Semi-Official Small Wonder Home Page. Because, you know, an official one would have cost thousands in franchise fees, clearly. For anyone unfortunate enough to have seen this saccharine-sweet show from the 80's, you will know why Surfbest.net must answer for their crimes.

My personal favorite: Zombo.com. At the end of a long night of teaching adult education I would sometimes leave a lone computer up and running with Zombo's gentle voice coaxing the ceiling rats to "be anything they want" at Zombo.com... To my knowledge the site hasn't changed in years, offering the same advice and salutations in one of the web's numerous grottos of strange.

Tags: oddball, strange, weird, weirdwednesday