***

“What’s for dinner?” is a question whose answer can inspire joy, dread, or simply ennui. We all have our favorite recipes, and a few that are far from our favorites. But we get tired of even our favorite things if we get them night after night. And we get tired of our least-favorite things even faster.

What to do? Why, turn to the Internet, of course.

Back when home computers were first being talked about, it was always said you could keep your recipes on them. Now we’ve come full circle with recipes on the World Wide Web…and then some. After all, with a Commodore 64 or TRS-80 you might have been able to keep a few dozen of your own recipes on your computer, but with access to the Web, you’ve got millions at your fingertips.

I always head first to a site called Epicurious, which is run by the folks that bring you Gourmet and bon appétit magazines. It’s subtitled “for people who love to eat,” and that’s a pretty good description.

There’s a lot more than just recipes here, of course. There are articles on cooking techniques, dining and travel, kitchen equipment and much more.

But even if it’s just recipes you’re after, you won’t be disappointed.

Since the next holiday of note is St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to see what I could turn up on Epicurious with a recipe search for “green,” and was rewarded with 4,798 results, beginning with “Green Bean, Orange and Green Olive Salad.”

That seemed a bit overwhelming, so I narrowed the search to “green” and “Irish,” and ended up with a more manageable list: Irish Stew, Irish “Bacon” and Cabbage, Irish Pub Salad, Spinach Soup with Green Onions, Venison Medallions with Juniper and Orange, Beef and Guinness Pie, Potato and Cabbage Bundles, Easy Split Pea Soup. I’m sure you could put together a fine, fine St. Paddy’s day feast with that selection.

Just for fun, I also searched the drink recipes, and was rewarded with “Green Tea and Citrus Whiskey Punch,” which at least would be nice change from beer with food coloring in it.

Among the other useful features my wife and I have found at Epicurious is a food dictionary, so if, for example, you run across a recipe calling for harusame, you will know that you need to go buy some Japanese noodles made from soybean, rice or potato flour.

If the recipes at Epicurious sound a bit…adventurous…you might prefer to look at some older-fashioned recipes from, say, fifty years ago.

Or a thousand.

Or two thousand, for that matter.

Oldfashionedcooking.com offers “old-fashioned recipes from vintage cookbooks.” Their recent additions, when I visited, included corn bread, egg salad, and various cakes and cookies.

A search “Irish” here got me Irish Apple Pie, Grated Irish Potato, Chocolate Blancmange (which involves something called Irish moss, which, a quick visit back to Epicurious’s food dictionary informed me, is carrageen, “a stubby, purplish seaweed found along the west coast of Ireland, as well as America’s Atlantic coast,” that, dried, is used as a thickening agent), and, of course, Irish Stew.

If the recipes from vintage cookbooks aren’t old enough for you, you might want to visit Medieval Cookery, which is just what it sounds like: a site devoted to medieval cooking, complete with recipes, links to online medieval cookbooks, a dictionary of Middle-English cooking terms, and even a selection of food related paintings. Here you can find recipes for everything from “Gyngerbrede” to Candied Horseradish, Parsnip Pie, Rique-Manger (eggs and apples), Cinnamon Soup and Pochee (poached eggs with custard sauce).

Or you can go even further back and try some of the handful of authentic ancient Roman recipes posted at NOVA Online, the website for the popular PBS science program. Seasoned Mussels, Boiled Eggs in Pine Nut Sauce, Lucanian Sausages, Mulsum (honeyed wine), Garum Fish Sauce, Pear Patina and Libum (sweet cheesecake) are all on the menu.

As you can probably tell, if you go old-fashioned enough, your recipes start getting adventurous again. But what about those occasions when adventurous is exactly what you’re looking for?

Then you might try Nick Paine’s Exotic Kitchen. Nick Paine calls himself “The World’s Only Culinary Archaeologist,”and in his pictures he looks like a cross between an aging rock star and a Hell’s Angel. He likes to travel the world and try some of humanity’s more exotic fare right where it originates. So, on his list of “Top Ten Expedition Meals” you can find Armadillo Ranchera, Cretan Snails, Iguana and Sarapatera (freshwater turtle stew cooked in the turtle’s own cleaned shell). You might have trouble getting the ingredients—Superstore doesn’t carry Armadillo, as far as I know—but it’s interesting to read the recipes.

Of course, lots of people have their own favorite recipes (though perhaps not for Iguana) they’d love to share with others—and there are plenty of places to do that online, too.

One I came across is called the GardenWeb Recipe Exchange, part of GardenWeb, “The Internet’s Garden & Home Community,” and it’s essentially a message board where people both post recipes and post requests for recipes. When I visited this week, the most recent message was a recipe for Pancake Sandwiches. A couple of messages down, someone was looking for cooked salsa recipes; someone else was looking for an authentic chow mein recipe. And they found them, too!

Now, I enjoy cooking, and I’m not ashamed to say so. But if you have a masculine self-image you’d like to bolster while you’re wearing a frilly apron in the kitchen, you can always remind yourself that cooking is a very scientific endeavour. And if anyone questions that, point them to The Science of Cooking, a site created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium, the original science museum. There are sections on eggs, pickles, candy, bread, spices, seasoning and meat, webcasts on topics like the science of bread, answers to weekly questions (This week’s: “What can I do about bitter eggplant?”) and, yes, recipes.

So: if you don’t like the answer to the question, “What’s for dinner?”, surf the Web, and change it.

Just don’t blame me if your kids don’t eat your Armadillo Ranchera.

***

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” author L.P. Hartley famously wrote to begin his 1953 novel The Go-Between. And like most foreign countries, while we might not want to live there, we often enjoy visiting it.

And where better to visit it than on the World Wide Web, which, I’ve decided for the sake of a metaphor, is rapidly becoming the world’s attic. It’s the place where you put old things you don’t quite know what to do with but aren’t willing to get rid of, with the big difference that, unlike your attic, the whole world is free to rummage around in the stuff you put there.

Of course, there are millions of sites devoted to the past in some form, but I decided to focus on a few that bolster my “Internet/attic” theme. They also happen to be personal favorites.

I’ll start with the more distant past. There are thousands of sites devoted to various historical eras, but one site I’ve really been enjoying isn’t about the usual sort of history. Rather than being focused on text, it’s focused on images. It’s called BiblioOdyssey. A fellow named Paul, who lives in Sydney, runs the site—blog, really—and he describes it as “wonderful things made by other people.”

It’s an excellent description. Paul scours the net for fantastic images from old documents and posts his finds.

When I visited the site, for example, the top post was from Wolfenbüttel Digital Library, and displayed a fascinating series of illustrations of the rulers of Hungary from the 10th century up until 1664, which is when the book they’re taken from was published. (It’s extremely long Latin name translates as Mausoleum of the Most Powerful Kings and Dukes of Hungary.)

Below that, Paul had posted some gorgeous examples of ornamental typography from the 16th, 17th and 18th century; below that, beautiful colored images from a 15th century edition of the famous maps drawn by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy around 160 A.D. And so on, and so on.

There are ample links to the original sources of all this material, so that a visit to BibliOdyssey can quickly draw you into some of the oldest and most intriguing sections of the Internet attic.

Of course, not very many people have stuff from the 15th century in their attics, so I may be undercutting my thesis here. Let’s look at some sites focusing on the more recent past, shall we?

One of my interests, of course, is science and technology, and as it happens, there are some terrific sites that focus on old technology: inventions that never took off, early versions of the things we take for granted today, all that kind of stuff.

One I found is The Museum of Retro Technology, which has pretty awful page design but lots of interesting information.

Where else can you find out about the the Leyland Steam lawnmower, one of the first power mowers, produced for just a few years at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries? Oil-fired, about six feet tall, and requiring careful maintenance to ensure that it didn’t rupture and maim or kill its operator, it was not built in large numbers.

At the same site, you’ll discover that James Bond was not the first to carry lethal gadgets: there are images of a knife, spoon and fork set, each of which has a built-in flintlock pistol, dating back to 1715. (Oddly, the barrels point at the user, not other guests, so it’s hard to imagine exactly how they would have been used, unless one was literally interested in shooting off one’s mouth.)

Another retro-tech site I’ve been enjoying is another blog. It’s called Modern Mechanix, and it consists entirely of photos and articles scanned out of old copies of Modern Mechanix, Mechanics Illustrated, Popular Science and similar magazines.

The most recent offerings when I last dropped by included an article from the July, 1940, issue of Popular Science about one George Spiegel of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who liked to attach special lightweight reed pipes to the tail feathers of his pigeons so that “when they fly, a musical whistling flows from their feathers,” and, from the August, 1934, issue of Modern Mechanix, an item on the fascinating invention of Paul H. Rowe, a Los Angeles sound engineer: an automatic device that would answer his phone and record a message when he was out.

Yeah, like that would ever catch on.

One thing lots of people have in their attics are old photographs, and, yes, there are sites devoted to them.

My favorite goes by the unusual name of Shorpy. I’ll let it describe itself: “Shorpy.com is the 100-year-old photography blog that brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a boy who worked in an Alabama coal mine near the turn of the century.”

The photos on Shorpy are high-resolution, and range in time from the dawn of photography up until about the 1940s. Recent photos have included images of the damage caused to southern towns by cannon fire during the Civil War, sharecroppers living in poverty in the Deep South, child workers in early 20th century textile mills, incredibly vibrant color images of women working in airplane factories during the Second World War, and a picture taken from a New York skyscraper very early in the last century.

One of the most interesting things about Shorpy: anyone can join and upload their own vintage photographs—whether found in the attic or not.

Of course, we don’t just rummage in the attic to be educated or wax nostalgic. Sometimes we like to point and laugh at stuff from old fads. Are, yes, there sites that get a lot of fun out the past.

One of the best, is The Institute of Official Cheer, which is a section of the website run by James Lileks, a former columnist and now a daily blogger for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. He’s also the author of several books that poke fun at the recent past, including The Gallery of Regrettable Food and Gastroanomalies, both of which offer up awful-sounding (and looking) recipes from the past, and my favorite, Interior Desecrations, which pokes fun at 1970s interior design. Online, you can find outtakes from some of those books, plus lots of other stuff: he pokes fun at bad comic books, old ads, postcards of motels from all over North America, and…well, just about anything he can find and scan.

After all, while the past is a different country, it’s unlike a real country in one important aspect: you can point your finger at all the funny things its residents did and laugh all you want without offending anyone.

Just remember, in fifty year’s time, our descendants will be pointing and laughing at us, too.

***

The gala opening of the new Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon last week had Saskatchewan people thinking about live theatre.

Of course, I think about live theatre all the time, since I’m often involved in one production or another as an actor or director, so this week I compiled a collection of links to sites on the Internet you can go to when you, too, want to know more about theatre.

I started right here in Saskatchewan with our two premiere professional companies, Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon and Globe Theatre in Regina.

At both sites, as you would expect, you can read about current and upcoming productions, buy tickets, see photographs, and more. There’s a bit of information about the history of the new theatre, and some photographs from the early days of construction, that might be of particular interest on the Persephone site right now.

One thing you can’t do at the Persephone site that you can do at Globe’s site is buy tickets online. In fact, if there were some sort of competition for Best Website by a Saskatchewan Theatre Company, which there isn’t, I’d have to give it to Globe Theatre. Its site was recently redesigned and is very slick and easy to use, but then, I suspect Persephone Theatre’s been more focused on its building than its website recently.

Both sites also offer information about their history, their children’s and educational programs, and so on.

Of course, many other Saskatchewan theatre companies, large and small, also have websites: Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, Regina Little Theatre and Regina Lyric Light Opera and other community companies, Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company, Dancing Sky Theatre, Saskatoon Opera…the list goes on and on.

The best place to start if you’re looking for an overview of Canadian theatre in general is probably Theatre Canada. They describe themselves as “a planning guide for live theatre outings,” and provide links to more than 450 Canadian theatres, arranged by province, area and city. There’s also a kid-friendly section with information about children’s theatre, theatre camps, workshops and schools, a news and reviews section, and even free e-greeting cards with performing arts themes.

A lot of theatres aren’t included in their listings, though (apparently they charge a small one-time fee for a theatre to be listed), so don’t consider the site comprehensive. In Saskatchewan, for instance, they only list Globe, Persephone, and Regina Little Theatre.

A rather different resource is the Canadian Theatre Encylopedia, which began life as “The Encyclopedia of Canadian Theatre on the WWW,” back in 1993. Started by Gaetan Charlebois, a theatre editor with Montreal’s Hour Magazine, it’s goal is to create and maintain online a highly accessible database of information about Canadian actors, playwrights, directors, producers, designers, theatre organizations and institutions, composers and plays. It’s currently hosted and maintained by Athabasca University.

Moving beyond Canada’s borders, the premiere theatre site of all would have to be the online home of Playbill magazine. Here you’ll find the latest news about new productions of plays and musicals, and not just in New York: there’s news from Toronto, the U.K., all over. There are photographs, quotes, video clips and, of course, the latest Broadway grosses: I can tell you, for example, that last week, the musical Wicked was the top-grossing show on Broadway, bringing in $1,373,768 from 13,888 paying customers, for an average ticket price of $98.77. It’s playing in the 1,809-seat Gershwin Theatre, which was 96 percent full.

I also enjoy Broadway World, with a similar mix of information but presented with a bit more multimedia flash: you can watch good-resolution clips of Broadway World TV here, for example, which features backstage interviews (and a look at performances) of new shows, such as The Little Mermaid, which just opened. Broadway World also posts lots of photographs from opening night parties, just to emphasize the fact that you are not the kind of person who gets invited to the opening parties of Broadway shows.

Well, at least I’m not.

Less glitzy is Curtain Up, “The Internet Theater Magazine of Reviews, Features, Annotated Listings,” founded in 1996 by Elyse Sommer and (I’m guessing from the look of it) not significantly redesigned since then. Still, it’s an active site that solicits reviews and news from…well, you, if you want to try your hand writing for them. It covers New York, London, Berkshires, Philadelphia, California, New Jersey and “Elsewhere.” It even reviews a few restaurants.

So if you’re seeking theatre information, you’ll find a ton of it online. Just don’t lose track of time while you’re looking at all this stuff.

You wouldn’t want to miss the curtain of the live, not-on-the-computer theatre that’s probably happening somewhere near you tonight.

***

Over the past few years the growing use of computers and the Internet has contributed a lot of weird new words to our language. People talk about ROM and RAM and “megs of memory,” Googling and websurfing and more. But one of the weirdest words of all is blog, which sounds more like something you have to clean up—“Dear, the dog left a big blog on the sidewalk, can you take care of it?”—than anything to do with computers.

But, in fact, blogging is big—and you can try it yourself for free.

A blog is simply a series of posts that are displayed on a web page in reverse chronological order: in other words, the freshest post is at the top, and as you scroll down, you move back in time.

The word blog—which I agree is ugly, but we seem to be stuck with it—is short for Web log.

Exactly who invented the Web log is amatter of intense debate, at least among the kind of people who intensely debate things like this.

According to an article on CNET News.com last year celebrating the 10th anniversary of blogging, Dave Winer, who launched Scripting News on April 1, 1997, claims it as the longest currently running Web log on the Internet: but he didn’t originally call it a Web log.

The term appears to have been invented by Jorn Barger, a programmer, futurist, and James Joyce scholar to describe his site RobotWisdom.com, which he started in December, 1997. It was essentially a day-by-day log of what he was reading and thinking about. He needed something to call it, and came up with WebLog. He also says Winer’s site wasn’t really a blog because “he mixed up the reverse-chronological ordering too much,” and that RobotWisdom.com was the first blog.

Peter Merholz of Peterme.com shortened WebLog to “blog,” and since people always prefer short words, a new four-letter word (albeit not a swear word, except perhaps for the occasional old-media news reporter who finds him or herself scooped by one) entered the vernacular.

As of last April, Technorati was tracking more than 70 million blogs worldwide—and at the time was seeing about 120,000 being created every day, or about 1.4 per second.

Of course, not all of those are active: a lot of people start blogs and then let them fall by the wayside when they discover it’s actually quite a bit of work keeping one going. In any event, the odds are hardly anybody is going to read them: most blogs get only a handful of readers, or none at all, on any given day.

Some, however, get more. A lot more. As of this morning, the truth laid bear, which tracks these things, had the gadget blog Gizmodo at the top of the list, with 2,466,128 visits per day. But the 5,000th most popular blog was only getting around 200 visitors a day. Most get far, far fewer.

If you’d like to try blogging, there are several places that host blogs for free. The biggest is probably Blogger, which is owned by Google. It’s easy to get started: you go to the main page, create an account, give your blog a name, choose a template (which determines the look of the blog) and you’re off and running.

You can post either by visiting the website or simply by emailing a special address.

Blogger makes it easy not only to post text, but to upload pictures and video. And you can jump in and modify the template as much as you like—moving things around, changing the look of your posts, changing the background, whatever—all for free.

One of the nicest bits of blogging software is WordPress. Normally you install WordPress on your own webhost, but that can be a bit of a hassle and isn’t something a novice is going to want to mess with. If you’d like, you can instead get an account at WordPress.com and create your blog there. WordPress.com provides statistics, so you can see ho many visitors you are (or aren’t) getting and which pages they visit. WordPress also lets you create regular Web pages as well as blog posts, so you could use it to host a complete website with a blog component.

A couple of other free blog hosts are BlogText.org, although it doesn’t let you modify your page as much as some of the others, eBloggy, BlogDrive and tBlog. Be aware that some of these free sites place advertisements on your blog which you’ll probably have no control over.

Big sites like MySpace and LiveJournal host blogs, to. One of the interesting things about MySpace and LiveJournal is that you can make “friends” out of other people on the service, who will then automatically be notified on one of their pages of any new posts you put up (and vice versa).

But you can achieve that same goal with most blogging software through something called RSS feeds (RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication”). People can subscribe to your feed, and then, rather than have to actually visit your blog, can read your posts using a something called a feed reader, which presents everything in a uniform format on a single page. My favorite is Google Reader: I subscribe to dozens of blogs using it and can scroll through the posts rapidly to see which ones I actually want to read.

Of course, as well as read blogs, I maintain my own. My main one is called Hassenpfeffer, and is hosted by Blogger; I copy it to LiveJournal and MySpace, as well. I also maintain a blog for SF Canada, the association of professional speculative fiction writers in Canada, which highlights writing-related news from our members, and I’m one of the group bloggers at a site called Futurismic, which focuses on future trends and interesting science trends from a science-fiction lovers’ perspective.

Oh, and then I have a couple of blogs which have gone completely inactive, but we won’t talk about those.

And how many visitors do I get at my blogs every day, you ask?

Oh, will you look at that. I’m out of time.

***

Books make great Christmas presents…at least, the right book does. But with so many books out there, how do you find the good ones?

Well, the World Wide Web is a good place to start. There are hundreds of good book sites on the Web. In fact, there are scads of them. Mountains of them. Cascades of them…(to paraphrase Cogsworth from Beauty and the Beast talking about the Beast’s library).

A good place to start is BookSpot, which is, in its own words, “a free resource center that simplifies the search for the best book-related content on the Web. Featured sites are hand-selected by BookSpot.com editors and organized into intuitive categories, such as bestseller lists, genres, book reviews, electronic texts, book news and more.”

Which means, of course, you could probably just go there and ignore the rest of this column. But I hope you won’t.

One of the basic features of most book sites is book reviews. Since I write science fiction, I spend a lot of time browsing sites that focus exclusively on science fiction and fantasy. Some of the best are individual blogs. One that’s both widely read and Canadian is Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (it gets around 1,300 visitors a day), run by a blogger named Patrick (he doesn’t give his last name on the blog) in Montreal. He’s become widely read enough that publishers send him advance copies, authors provide him with signed copies to give away, and he’s able to get interviews with many of the biggest names in the field.

Interestingly enough, I found it easier to find review sites that focus on so-called “genre fiction” (science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, westerns, horror, historical, romance, etc.) than on so-called “literary fiction” (which is just another genre as far as I’m concerned, but that’s a rant for a different day).

Take, for example, the highly irreverent Bookgasm, whose “About” page begins: “Hey, have you read the new Nora Roberts? Are you a member of Oprah’s Book Club? Do you enjoy stories about the struggles of the disenfranchised in our society? If you answered “no” to all those questions, we’d like to welcome you to Bookgasm, the site dedicated to reading material to get excited out.” They focus on the aforementioned “genre fiction,” plus “graphic novels, trashy paperbacks, cheap magazines and other things that much of America pretends to be ashamed of, for no good reason” and “celebrate these escapist efforts, through daily news, reviews, interviews and other things that don’t end in ‘-ews.’”

Of course, hard though it is for me to fathom, not everyone is interested in genre fiction. Fortunately, there are some sites devoted to literary fiction, too.

I’d recommend Complete Review. Although its primary area of interest is literary fiction, it also covers “non-fiction, biographies, poetry collections, dramas, philosophical tomes, works of literary criticism, and scientific works.” It also has a blog called the Literary Saloon that’s very readable and interesting.

If poetry is your interest, you might want to check out Tower Poetry, which “exists to encourage and challenge everyone who reads or writes poetry.” Funded by a bequest to Christ Church, Oxford, by a man named Christopher Tower, it states very worthwhile aims: “to stimulate an enjoyment and critical appreciation of poetry, particularly among young people in education, and to challenge people to write their own poetry.” Each month the “Poetry Matters” section of its website posts reviews of recent poetry books.

Before there were blogs, there were magazines about books. In fact, there still are–and many of their sites are well worth visiting. Anyone interested in the publishing business in Canada, for example, should be reading the print version of Quill and Quire; but even if you don’t, you’ll find lots of good information at the Quill and Quire site, which includes industry news, a good blog, and, yes, reviews.

The giant among book-related magazines, though, is Publishers Weekly, and it too has an extensive website, with publishing news and reviews, blogs and more.

Many other literary magazines writers’ magazines also have online presences. It should be noted, though, that many print magazines restrict some of their material to their print issues, so occasionally you may find a link to a story that you can’t access without subscribing—or buying the print edition.

There are many other book-related sites. One I like is called Overbooked, which describes itself as “a web site for ravenous and omnivorous readers.” One thing that’s cool about it is that Overbooked is a volunteer project undertaken by a single woman, Ann Chambers Theis, Collection Management Administrator at the Chesterfield County Public Library in Virginia. She’s pulled together a huge collection of resources, including annotated lists of nonfiction, fiction and mystery books which received starred reviews, themed booklists, featured titles lists and hot lists of hard cover US fiction releases. Among other things, the site currently has a list of December notable titles (based on good reviews) in a variety of genres that might give you some gift-giving ideas.

There are two more huge overview sites I want to mention. BookWire offers reviews, booklists, interviews, links to hundreds of other sites, authors’ biographies and more. It should have a good handle on what books are being published, since it’s run by Bowker, the company that manages and assigns ISBN (International Standard Book Number) numbers in the U.S. (When you order a book from a bookstore, it’s the ISBN that makes sure you get the right one.)

And finally, there’s Bookreporter.com, which is just one of several sites run by the Book Report Network, which calls itself “the best place online to talk about your last great read—and find your next one,” and features book reviews, features, author profiles and interviews, excerpts of hot new releases, literary games and contests and more.

In fact, that site alone has so much going on you could probably spend all day on it.

Of course, then you wouldn’t have time to actually, you know, read a book…

Download the audio version.

*****

Orange leaf bags with grinning jack-o’-lantern faces cover the lawns. The drugstore shelves are groaning under the weight of grinning skulls, leering witches, and dancing robot mummies, and you can hardly buy groceries without getting a dangling plastic bat caught in your hair.

That must mean Hallowe’en is just around the corner, and what better time to delve into some of the darker, spookier corners of the World Wide Web?

There are a deluge of devilish delights, a cornucopia of creepy confections and gobs of ghoulish goodness to be found online, if that sort of thing appeals to you. If, on the other hand, you’re put off by the merest mention of magic, monsters, the occult and “otherkin” (vampires, werewolves, the Fair Folk, etc., etc.), you might want to avoid following the links below…all except the very last one.;

Because there are so many sites, I decided to focus on “The Big Three” of Hallowe’en costumes: witches, vampires, and ghosts.

Since witches are probably most associated with Hallowe’en, I went wandering in search of witch websites, beginning with (naturally) http://www.witchcraft.org/. Which, I’m sorry to say, was a bit of a disappointment. It leads to a site called Children of Artemis, but if you’re looking for a bit of cackling and pointy black hats, you’ll be disappointed: aside from the black-and-purple color scheme, it looks like a million other sites you’ve visited.

You can buy T-shirts from “The Children of Artemis Witch Shop,” for instance. “We ship worldwide and accept a wide range of credit/debit cards and Paypal,” they note. You can subscribe to Witchcraft and Wicca Magazine, whose latest issue features articles on a “Cyber Witch,” and news about the 2007 Witchfest. And there’s a nice invitation to celebrate Samhain—the ancient pre-Christian festival which is supposed to have given rise to Hallowe’en–complete with a “fascinating introductory talk,” a Samhain ritual, and a potluck afterwards.

It’s all rather more Presbyterian than pagan in tone, if you ask me, which of course is the point: Wiccans bristle at the traditional associations with green-skinned cackling evil-eye casting broom-riders, and who can blame them?

Still, if you’d prefer to explore the older perceptions of witchcraft, you might want to delve into the Cornell University Library Witchcraft Collection, an online selection of titles from a much larger collection that documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft as well as its geographical boundaries, “and elaborates this history with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives.”

You can also find a collection of “grimoires,” old texts outlining traditional Western ritual magic, at a fascinating site called the Internet Sacred Text Archive, which as you might guess from the name, covers a lot more ground than just manuals of magic. And if you’re curious about spellcasting as those who believe in it practice it today, you might want to check out the Online Spells Wizard: “your guide to magic: Spells, Potions, Charms & Amulets, Love Spells, Money Spells, White Magic, Black Magic, Fortune-telling, Cures & Curses…Spells for everything & everyone, Spells accessible from anywhere, Spells with full, easy to use instructions! Become a Spellcaster: join today…”

Maybe it’s just me, but somehow some of the mystery and appeal of magic seems to be lost with a come-on that sounds like a K-Tel commercial.

Having limited time, I moved on to vampires, which these days has apparently become just another alternative lifestyle. Take The Coven Organization, whose FAQ includes a definition of vampirism (“Vampirism is best described as as a lack of energy or an energy deficiencies”), explains that not all vampires are blood-drinkers (“the major types are: sanguinarian [blood drinking], psi [psychic] vampires, elementals, and hybrids [those who consider themselves to be more than one type]” and explains that “Hollywood has distorted the popular perception of the vampire into something not like us at all.”

At which point, if you’re like me, you think, “Whoa. Us?”

Why, yes: the author of the FAQ, you see, is a vampire: “We are just like you. We are normal people, with families, jobs, bills to pay, and real lives. We live just like you do, and just as long or short.”

Which, again, is about as Hallowe’eney as the witches’ Samhain potluck.

For something a bit creepier and certainly more historic, pay a visit to http://www.shroudeater.com/, where you’ll find a ton of information about the “old traditional undead corpse of the European mainland.”

And if you’re interested in the most famous fictional vampire of them all, Dracula…well, he has his own homepage, run by Dr. Elizabeth Miller from Toronto, a literature professor who is an internationally recognized expert on the book by Bram Stoker.

Dracula probably has a blog, too, and maybe a Facebook page, but I didn’t check.

If witches are having potlucks and vampires are busy paying the bills, what about ghosts? Has ghostliness become an alternative lifestyle, too?

Not yet! Although I suppose you could call it an alternative deathstyle. (Ha! I slay me! Er, so to speak…)

There are lots of ghost-related sites online, most of them focused on attempting to gather evidence for ghosts, a la the popular TV show Ghost Trackers (which my daughter occasionally watches on Discovery Kids, somewhat to my chagrin).

One typical site is Haunted Hamilton, “dedicated to the research and investigation of history and hauntings around the World, based in Hamilton, Ontario,” with the interesting twist that part of their mandate is also to promote the preservation of heritage buildings—the places where, after all, ghosts are often thought to hang out. They have a long list of reports of their investigations of various haunting in the Hamilton area that makes for interesting reading.

Want to do your own investigation? You might want to check out Ghostsamongus, a site that, among other things, hosts eight “ghost cams,” Webcams watching places where ghosts have been reported. Viewers who spot ghostly images can capture them and post them for everyone to see.

Then there are Ghostplace and Ghostsource and…the list goes on and on.

But I did not. See, although I like the idea of ghosts—in fact, I just had short ghost story published in The Book of Dark Wisdom, a horror magazine—I don’t believe in them. Nor do I believe in magic or vampires or werewolves or a bunch of other things I enjoy reading stories and legends about.

In fact, my one big fear in doing this column is that people might visit some of these sites and start taking the existence of ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night a little too seriously, so my last link this week is to a great antidote for all of that: it’s the Skeptic’s Dictionary, which provides “definitions, arguments, and essays on subjects supernatural, occult, paranormal, and pseudoscientific,” and is intended as “a Davidian counterbalance to the Goliath of occult literature.”

You might not want to visit it until after Hallowe’en, though. Nothing spoils good creepy fun like a hard dose of reality.

I love gadgets. I wrote my last novel on a gadget, my Pocket PC cell phone, using a fold-out wireless keyboard. The only thing that keeps me from drowning in gadgets is that I can’t afford them all. But I can do the next best thing, and read about them on the Web.

I think my favorite gadget site would have to be Gizmodo. As of this morning, this site had photos (and in some cases video) of: a Jacuzzi party atop 15,711-foot Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps; outrageous audio equipment (such as a $350,000 amplifier, a $100,000 turntable, a $13,000 power cord, and wooden tweeters—um, that’s a kind of speaker); scary furniture, perfect for your Hallow’en haunted house (if you have the budget and really want an innocent-looking baby crib that a full-sized skeleton erupts out of); a prototype colour-screen ebook reader from Fujitsu; and the very practical “Five ways to extend your gadget’s life.”

Gizmodo, like many of these sites, is in blog format, which just means that as each new item is posted, it moves to the top of the main page, so the freshest thing is always the first thing on there. But it’s fully searchable and also categorizes posts by topic, so you can find whatever has been written on whatever gadget or type of gadget you’re interested in.

I should probably warn you, though, that Gizmodo has a sense of humor that’s…well, “irreverent” would be the nice term, though “sophomoric” is probably more accurate…and just might rub you the wrong way.

If a prefer a more “serious” site, check out Gizmag (full name Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine). It provides more information with less snark than Gizmodo. It covers an enormous range of technology: its sections range from Aero Gizmo (sample post: “Preparations for world’s first human landing WITHOUT a parachute ,” Around The Home (“For the man with everything – the V8 snowblower,”) and Baby Gizmo (“Fold up stroller converts to backpack”) alphabetically down to Spy Gear (“Lipstick Pistol – The Kiss of Death”), Telecommunications (“New data transmission record – 60 DVDs per second”), Urban Transport (“T-Rex three-wheeler superbike”) and Wearable Electronics (“Electric Cinderella Shoes with built-in stun gun”).

As with Gizmodo, the biggest risk is that you’ll end up with a severe case of gadget envy. I mean, who wouldn’t want electric Cinderella Shoes with a built-in stun gun?

Also on the more serious side is the New Scientist Technology Blog. New Scientist is my favorite science magazine, and it has a number of associated blogs. The technology blog focuses on…well, technology. Not just gadgets, but gadgets certainly show up there a lot. The New Scientist Technology Blog usually offers a bit more analysis, and a whole lot of links to related information. A recent post talked about 3D printing: fabricators that can be programmed to make just about anything. That’s the ultimate gadget, in a way, because it can be used to make other gadgets. Engineers, designers and architects are already using fabricators to make scale models, but they’ve also been used to make custom shoes and even flown by the military to sites were spare parts like machine-gun mounts are needed.

Some gadget sites focus on specific types of gadgets. For example, there’s Jalopnik, a sister site to Gizmodo, whose focus is entirely on automobiles. There’s DefenseTech, which talks about military technology. And then there’s one of my favorites, MedGadget, whose focus is entirely on medical gadgets (and, to a certain extent, medical news in general). Recent posts there, for instance, have talked about new discoveries in the mechanism of hearing, new high-tech methods of diagnosing cancer, and exoskeletons developed in Japan that enable an individual to lift a 100-kilogram weight as if it weighed only half as much—which could eventually make it easier for nurses and other caregivers to assist bed-ridden patients.

If you’re thinking a lot of this stuff sounds like science fiction…well, you’re right. And so SciFi.com, the website of the Science Fiction Channel in the U.S. (the equivalent of Space here in Canada), has a blog called SciFi Tech, which points to gadgets that seem particularly science fictional—like an alarm clock that’s a big talking robot head, new car designs, a Japanese robot that massages your face (it only looks like an alien torture device), radio-controlled robotic insects, and a new OnStar feature that will automatically bring a stolen car to a stop and render it inoperative.

Which comes first, the love of gadgets or the love of science fiction? For me, it was definitely the latter: reading science fiction got me interested in science and technology. Which is why I particularly enjoy Technovelgy.com, where a feature called “Science Fiction in the News” links new technological developments to stories by science fiction writers (sometimes decades old) that presaged them.

Thus, new material developed by University Michigan, a kind of plastic that’s as strong as steel, is linked back to “plasteel,” a super-strong substance in Frank Herbert’s Dune novels that made an appearance even earlier in a 1956 story by Harlan Ellison called “Trojan Hearse.” (Apparently plasteel is not just a science-fictional made-up word, either, but a word used in the real world back in the Second World War for steel covered with plastic, used to replace aluminum. Who knew?)

I like to say that we live in the kind of science fictional world I only read about as a kid. All that’s missing is our flying cars…and I read about a new design for one of those on one of these gadget sites just yesterday.

Just give it a couple more years…

Audio version here.

*****

The weather is perennially fascinating. We check the forecast first thing in the morning. We check the weather in cities we might be visiting on business or vacation. And northerners heading south for a bit of sun pay particular attention to the hurricane forecasts.

Once upon a time, the only source of weather information was your neighbour’s big toe that always acted up when it was about to rain. But these days, there’s more weather information than you can shake a rain stick at on…where else?…the World Wide Web.

I have no idea how many sites are devoted to the weather, but simply Googling “weather forecasts” turns up well over a million hits. I confess I didn’t explore them all.

In Canada, of course, there are two main sites for weather information: Environment Canada’s weather site, and The Weather Network. The main U.S. weather site is that of the National Weather Service.

Both Environment Canada and The Weather Network offer forecasts, of course…and since they’re not quite the same, you can pick which one you like better! (It’d be nice if we could just hold a vote on which forecast we preferred and that would be the weather we got, wouldn’t it?) What’s interesting about that is that Environment Canada provides most of the raw data for the Weather Network’s forecasts. Meteorology is not just a science, it’s an art!

Both sites offer much more than just forecasts, of course. You can view weather maps, satellite imagery and radar images. There are lightning maps and sea ice maps, air quality forecasts and hurricane information.

The Weather Network, being a television-centered service, also offers quite a bit of video: clips of what they broadcast, but also links to webcams around the country, so you can check out local conditions visually. CBC’s webcams looking out over Wascana Centre and downtown Saskatoon are both there, for example.

At The Weather Network, you can get the same kind of information for a number of international cities as you can for those in North America. When I checked, for example, it was 19 degrees (with blowing dust) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and the forecast high was 31.

Environment Canada provides a link to one of the best sources of international weather, the World Weather Information Service of the World Meteorological Society. They provide official conditions and forecasts for most of the world. Need to know Friday’s forecast for Samarkand, Uzbekistan? It comes direct from “The Centre of Hydrometeorological Service at Cabinet of Minister’s of Republic of Uzbekistan (UZHYDROMET) “ (I suspect machine translation was involved in turning that into English.)

The biggest purely Internet-based weather site is the Weather Underground. It actually predates the Web: back in 1991 Jeff Masters, a PhD candidate in meteorology at the University of Michigan, wrote a special computer interface that displayed real-time weather information around the world to Internet users. By 1992, it had become the most popular service on the Internet. It evolved with the Internet, and launched its website in 1995. It started out just covering U.S. cities, but now it covers the world. One of the most interesting things about it is that it includes data from personal weather stations individuals set up to upload information to the Weather Underground. There are dozens around Canada, including one in Regina.

Those who prefer to get their weather from the Old Farmer’s Almanac will find it online, too. But the Old Farmer doesn’t give away his famous long-range forecast for free: you’ll have to register and pay a small fee to gain access. Or, of course, buy the book (and, yes, there’s a digital edition).

You can get the same kind of local forecast from the Old Farmer’s Almanac as you get at The Weather Network or Environment Canada’s site, with the added twist that the Old Farmer’s Almanac lets you know what it predicted for the month, so you can compare.

The Almanac also offers weather history: you can enter any date and get the conditions for that date, back to 1946. Except, alas, it doesn’t have records for every site: North Dakota records seem to be as close as you can get for Regina, at least for the older records.

Environment Canada has us covered, though: its Past Weather records go back to 1953 for Regina. Fifty years ago on September 27, for example, it was mostly sunny, the high was 24.4, and the low was 5.6.

Lots of sites devote space to weather trivia and records. My favorite is the page maintained by “Dan, Dan the Weather Man,” a U.K. weather forecaster who’s travelled all over the world—even Antarctica–and spent a short time in Toronto working for The Weather Network. He’s got all sorts of weather-related stuff on his page, and among that stuff is an extensive collection of Canadian weather trivia, organized by month. There seems to be an entry for every day of the year.

The entry for September 27:

1965, Pearson Airport, Toronto’s coldest September night on record; lows dip to -3.9 C. 2002, the remnants of Tropical Storm Isidore brought some rain to eastern Canada after one of the driest summers on record in some parts here.

Lots of individual meteorologists have websites devoted to their passion—like Nick Walker, who works for the U.S.’s Weather Channel. His site is unique because it’s home to the only Musical Meteorology pages I ran across, songs with titles like “What Makes Rain?”, “Clud Cover,” “That’s the Way Winds Blow,” and “Tomorrow’s Weather Here Today,” and, of course, his signature tune, “Weather Dude.”

That old saying about how “everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it” was never truer than on the Web. A quick Technorati search turned up 3,185 blogs about weather.

You could, in fact, spend all day, every day, doing nothing but reading about the weather.

Of course, if you did, you’d never experience a glorious fall day in Saskatchewan. But at least you’d always know what it’s doing in Samarkand!

Download an audio version.

****

The forecourt of the ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi bore the inscription “Know thyself.”

These days, we find out about ourselves the same way we find out about everything else: we go on the Internet.

For example, in recent weeks I’ve learned where I fall on the political compass, which Star Trek character I am, which Hogwarts house I belong to, and various things about my personality that must be well-hidden because I don’t recognize them at all.

And I learned all these things through some of the many—tens of thousands, if not millions—of quizzes available on the web.

I have no idea who put up the first interactive questionnaire on the web, but I suspect it happened fairly early on. And it was probably a teacher, because who thinks in terms of quizzes more than a teacher?

Certainly a lot of the quizzes and questionnaires put online are study guides for courses offered at various schools and universities. Most of these are of interest only to the teachers who post them and the students who take them. But the usefulness of quizzes as a teaching tool for the general public is also recognized through the quizzes posted for general use by educational institutions such as museums.

For example, the Virtual Museum of Canada has an online treasure hunt for students between the ages of 8 to 17, who have to answer questions about exhibits found in 23 virtual museums located across Canada, covering Canadian history, science, technology, art and nature.

The virtual museum in Saskatchewan that’s part of the treasure hunt is the Melfort and District Museum. The Sasktchewan treasure hunt question is: “Which of the following describes harvesting work? 1. Sowing the seeds. 2. Digging and turning the earth over with a tool or plough. 3. Harvesting the grain when it is ripe.”

Note that I didn’t say they were hard questions…

Somewhere along the way, someone started posting online existing questionnaires of the kind people have been taking for decades in high school guidance classes.

So, for example, you can find multiple versions of the venerable Myers-Briggs personality test, first created in 1942, and similar tests. There are whole sites dedicated to this kind of “serious” personality testing. One I ran across is HumanMetrics, which uses the slogan “Try Your Traits Before Trying Fate” and offers everything from the Jung Typology Test (similar to Briggs-Myers) to the Jung Marriage Test, the Small Business Entrepreneur Profiler (to tell you what kind of business you’d be best at running) the Assertiveness Test and the Morals Test.

IQ tests have also made their way online. I’ve taken a couple of them, with wildly varying results which I won’t share. One quick one is at iqtest.com.

Note, however, that many of the sites offer free tests to entice you to take more complex tests for which they charge you. Or they’ll charge you for a more complete assessment, or written report, or something like that. I’m pretty skeptical about IQ and personality tests, so I’d never shell out for them myself.

I prefer free quizzes, and there’s certainly no shortage of those, either.

One famous one that periodically gets quite a bit of attention is the Political Compass. You answer an extensive series of questions about your political ideas and concerns, and it places you on a four-axes compass ranging from left to right (which represents, well, Left to Right), and up and down (representing Libertarian at the bottom and Authoritarian at the top). My results put me dead center of both axes. I’m so boring I literally define middle-of-the road, apparently.

The Political Compass is relatively serious. Most online quizzes aren’t. A typical just-for-fun one would be the one at the Liverpool Museums’ “Beatles Games” site, called, “Which Beatle Are You?” and the first question gives you the flavour: “How are you today? Are you feeling okay?” Possible answers: “I feel fine,” “It’s all too much,” “I feel like death,” “I’m being driven round the bend,” “I’m down” and “…with a little help from my friends.”

For the record, I’m George Harrison.

There are a lot of these “What (fill in the blank) are you?” quizzes. For example, there are various versions of “Which Star Trek character are you?” According to at least one of them, I’m Lieutenant Uhura, which didn’t surprise me in the least, because I’ve always seen myself as a beautiful black woman in a mini-skirt.

A very popular one recently has been “Which Hogwarts house do you belong to?” There are multiple versions of this—everyone seems to be making them—but the one I took is a surprisingly in-depth questionnaire that kind of doubles up a proper personality quiz with a bit of fun. I belong in Ravensclaw, apparently.

Just as there are thousands of quizzes, there are dozens of sites devoted to them. One good place to start is Tickle.com. Their tests are divided into categories: entertainment, style and beauty, career, relationship, mind and body, teens, lifestyle, family, and something called PhD-certified. They also offer a section where you can create your own quiz, perhaps, “Which CBC personality are you?” (I couldn’t actually find one like that, but you could make one if you wanted to).

Highlighted quizzes last time I stopped by Tickle included “How do you stay on the bright side?”, “What moves you?”, “What’s your makeup must-have?”, What’s your true talent?” and my favorite, ““What’s your cat’s true identity?”

You can spend hours and hours taking online quizzes. Do they really help you know yourself? Well, at least if you take enough of them you’ll know you’re the kind of person who spends hours and hours taking online quizzes.

Whether you’ll find that a valuable personality insight or not, I really couldn’t say.

Download an audio version.

***

Jokes about how hard it is to fold a highway map use to be a staple of slice-of-life comedians. Well, highway maps are probably just as hard to fold as they ever were—but you don’t have to fold them, or even use them, if you don’t want to.

These days, more and more people are finding their maps on the World Wide Web. Whether you’re planning a trip or just want to find out where something you’ve heard about on the news occurred, the many map sites on the Web can provide directions, sometimes accompanied by aerial photographs.

Now, I’m a guy, and aside from the difficulty of folding up highway maps, the other standard travel-related joke is how guys hate asking other people for directions. (My theory is that it’s all related to evolution: we’re afraid if we show weakness by asking directions, other, more competent, males will be able to convince our mates to follow them instead of us. Which would probably be a smart thing for them to do, since we’re obviously lost.)

But no guy has a problem asking a piece of technology for advice, and thus: Maps on the Internet.

There were probably some local maps scanned and posted online very early on after the World Wide Web made its debut in 1991, but the first extensive map service was probably one that’s still going strong: The National Atlas of Canada. Today, that site boasts all kinds of maps. You can find topographic maps, a map of time zones, a map showing national parks, a map of historical Indian treaties, coastline maps, maps showing the lakes and rivers of Canada, and even a drainage basins map, should that float your boat (so to speak).

Some maps are simply images you can view online or download. Others are interactive. You can zoom in and out, search for specific features, and measure distances.

You could use the National Atlas of Canada to plan a trip, but that’s not really what it’s meant for. Instead, you’d probably want to use one of the other map services, which not only show you maps, but give you directions.

The first popular address-matching-and-routing service was probably Mapquest, which appeared in 1996. It’s owned by America Online, and it traces its ancestry back to a company founded in 1967, called Cartographic Services. The company started making maps with computers in the mid-1980s for its customers, and it adapted its software to create the Web service. In 2006 Mapquest sold off the division that still published traditional maps on paper to concentrate on its online service.

Using MapQuest (or any of the Web-based web mapping services) is easy. To see a map, just put in as much information as you know about the address. MapQuest will do its best to figure out what you mean. You can then zoom in or out to adjust detail as you see fit.

But the really cool thing you can do with online mapping services is to get directions. For example, if I ask for directions from the University of Regina (3737 Wascana Parkway) to CBC Regina (2440 Broad Street), it tells me:

1: Start out going NORTH on WASCANA PKWY toward UNIVERSITY DR N. (1.0 miles)

2: WASCANA PKWY becomes BROAD ST. (0.8 miles)

3: Make a U-TURN at COLLEGE AVE onto BROAD ST. (<0.1 miles)

4: End at 2440 Broad Street.

It gives me a total estimated time (five minutes) and a total estimated distance (1.97 miles). It also, however, tells me to make an illegal U-turn at the corner of Broad and College, which is not going to go over well with any cops—or other drivers—in the area. So let that be a valuable lesson in using online maps to get directions: take them with a grain of salt. There are oodles (that’s a technical Web term meaning “lots”) of other map services online. Yahoo and Microsoft both have their versions, too. Yahoo Maps gives the above directions as…well, actually, Yahoo Maps couldn’t even find 3737 Wascana Parkway, and didn’t recognize the name University of Regina, so it was pretty much useless. Still, for travel in the U.S. (where it found all sorts of other Reginas) it’s probably as good as the others.

And then, of course, there’s Google Maps, because there’s a Google everything. Its instructions:

Drive: 2.7 km – about 4 mins

1. Head north on Wascana Pkwy toward University Dr N – 1.1 km – 2 mins

2. Continue on Broad St – 1.5 km – 3 mins

3. Make a U-turn at College Ave 0.1 km.

Oops, there’s that U-Turn again. So again, the maps are useful—but you still have to exercise common sense.

Microsoft also has a map service, through its Windows Live site. And, yes, its instructions include the U-turn, too, although the way it phrases it sounds legal but would certainly confuse you if you didn’t know the intersection: “Turn LEFT (west) onto College Ave, and then immediately turn LEFT (south) onto Broad St.”

The services don’t just provide written directions: they actually draw the route on a map. And, though the details vary from service to service, you can usually then take a look at the route and alter it as you see fit, often just by clicking on the line marking the route and dragging it elsewhere, or adding waypoints to it so that it follows a route you may think is better—one that avoids that U-turn on College Avenue, for instance. You can then print new written directions that reflect your changes.

Map services increasingly are also providing aerial or satellite photographs of the areas they cover—and now, for some major areas, even ground-level photographs.

MapQuest actually offered satellite photographs early on. It took them down for a while, but is now offering them again. The real leader here is Google. Although the resolution varies from place to place, in major centers you can get quite high-resolution aerial images that can help you find particular buildings or locations. And recently Google has begun collecting ground-level photographs, so that in certain locations you can actually “drive” along the streets as you would if you were in a car, and get a better sense for the city you might be planning to visit—or have always wanted to visit but can’t actually get to.

These photographs, collected by specially equipped camera-carrying cars, have prompted some privacy concerns, since people could be photographed doing something they’re not supposed to be doing—sneaking out of work to have a smoke, for instance—and could conceivablly be seen and identified by someone using Google Maps at some later date.

If it sounds like soon the whole planet will be available online in virtual form—well, it already is, in a way. Google Earth is a whole virtual globe you can explore, zooming in from outer space to anywhere on the planet. Google Earth features overlays, which point you to places of interest and provide information about them (for example, the new Seven Wonders of the World), sometimes with additional photographs, or other related files. Many of these are generated by Google Earth users, who are also populating the globe with 3-D models of various structures.

That’s not the only virtual Earth, either. Appropriately enough, since these virtual worlds are built around satellite photographs, NASA has one called World Wind that lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, and shows you that place in 3D. And NASA has gone one (actually, several) better: there are also virtual versions of the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and more available to explore.

Just don’t try to get driving directions to Jupiter. You just know that you’ll be asked to make an illegal U-turn at Mars—and those interplanetary traffic tickets are expensive.