Pop Quiz, Hotshot!

Under construction and out of style

In case you didn’t realize it, October 27, 2009, was a day that the Internet changed forever. It was the day when a million voices were silenced. It was a day when a little piece of our collective consciousness slipped away.

On that day, Yahoo! officially pulled the plug on GeoCities, it’s formerly uber-popular Web-site building platform.

By the time of its death, Geocities had been on life-support for years. Like many early Internet fads, having one’s own Web site was the thing to do. (In fact, at the time of the plug-pulling, this writer had three GeoCities sites up. And thanks to the WayBacK Machine, here’s the main page for one!)

These sites were the precursor to blogs. They were our public soap boxes before Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. They were everyone’s gold-rush claim on the Net.

But now that’s all gone. The bazillion megabytes dedicated to Sailor Moon, X-Files, Pokemon and any other late 1990s pop-culture fad has slipped into oblivion.

But one site, TextFiles.com, has done its duty to the community by saving one thing that was seemingly common to every single GeoCities site in existence:  The “Under Construction” animated gif.

Yes, for posterity’s sake this simple “museum page” has corralled as many of those silly little things as they could, and you can see what they saved by going here.

Oh, GeoCities, how we miss your unfinished pages. How we long for your broken links and neon-green text. We weep for your fanfic.

But at least we still have those cute little yellow-and-black animations.

 – JOHN SIMCOE

Gather your team for the Great Scavenger Hunt

Spurred by my love for movies such as “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “Midnight Madness,” “Scavenger Hunt,” “Million Dollar Mystery” and “Rat Race,” PQH! has always wanted to partake in a real-life scavenger hunt.

Some online searching revealed there is a real-life crazy-fun version of these movies, and the 2010 version is coming up soon. Even better, the organizers of the Great Scavenger Hunt don’t ask you to do anything illegal like sawing the heads off of statues or stealing a donkey.

Instead, teams in the Great Scavenger Hunt have 24 hours to take pictures in hundreds (yes, hundreds) of possible categories as they struggle to accumulate points and beat other competitors from across the country.

Google Images won’t help you either because one of the most frequent requirements in your photo collecting is that team members appear in the photo of the hunted item. As further insurance against snatching a web photo, the categories are often pretty far out there. After all, how exactly do you find a Human Banana Split without making one yourself?

That means you get pictures like this, where the entire team has to smell what the rock was cooking. Or how about the whole group in a bubble bath.

Interpretation is often left up to the team, so if you’re wondering what “Stone Cold Steve Autism” would look like, go here. Or how about “2 Squirrels, 1 Cup,” which must be the cousin to the infamous Internet video.

Another section of photos forces teams to ask for help from a stranger.  In these pics, the team must enlist the aid of a passerby to get their picture.
This year’s event is April 17-18, so gather your team, get your camera battery charged up and get a little crazy.

(And if anyone around here does get a team together, be sure to let PQH! know. We’d be happy to be your stranger or the subject of any humility you’d wish to put upon us.)