Organize Bookmarks...

That's what the menu item says in Firefox. How many of you do it? How many keep their browser bookmarks in neat little folders, with the page edges all tapped together tidily, all squared away, yes, all squaaaared away? And how many, instead, just toss them all in there, and have one, huge, ungainly and unsightly mess of bookmarks, with no order at all, no rhyme, no reason, and no way to find anything? That bookmark to the weather site... come on, admit it — you have it in your bookmark list at least four times, because you can never find it when you need it so you bookmark it again each time.

Actually, I'm afraid I'm one of those neatniks. I keep them orderly, if not quite squared off. There are folders, and sometimes subfolders, and I can usually find what I'm looking for because it's in the sensible place, in a topical folder where it belongs.

Except for the whimsical stuff. There are those links — you have a bunch of them too, I know — that you find in your travels, or maybe someone sends them to you, and they're just silly. They're silly but they're at least a little bit fun, or maybe interesting, or maybe even marginally useful, and you want to be able to find them again some time, so you bookmark them. But here's the thing: there's no place for them in the organizational structure you've set up, because, well, there's just no place for them. They're silly. So you just stick them here, or there, or somewhere, and they accumulate. As they have for me.

It's time to clean them out. I don't really need them handy. I could, of course, make a folder called “Silly Stuff” and put them there. On the other hand, I can put them here just as well, serving the dual purpose of sharing them with y'all and getting them out of my bookmarks 'cause I can come back here and find them if I should ever want to.

So here they are, with no purpose other than to share whatever amusement or use I got from them when I bookmarked them. In no particular order, with no rhyme and no reason:

Today's Front Pages, from Newseum.
The CIA World Factbook, from, yes, the Central Intelligence Agency.
Lie by lie chronology of the Iraq war, from Mother Jones.
31 Days in Iraq, a visualization from the New York Times of the deaths in Iraq during one month, January 2006.
Stairways to Heaven, a compendium of over 100 renditions of Stairway to Heaven, from Frank Zappa to Dolly Parton, and everything in between.
The perfect gift for the geek in your life.
“Kyle's Mom is a Bitch” in French, from South Park.
What does 100 calories look like?, from wiseGEEK.
A search engine that will map the cell towers in a specified area.
The Calvin and Hobbes searchable database.
The official Asterix site, in five languages.
The End of the Internet.
The Oracle of Bacon (see Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon for an explanation).
Monthly scenic wallpaper from the UK's Ordnance Survey.
Pac-Mondrian, a Pac-Man ripoff using Piet Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie Woogie as the game board.
Mark Twain's treatise on “The Awful German Language”.
The PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address.
Visualization of the popularity of baby names since the 1880s. The visualization was actually done by IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg, who's done a whole lot of other interesting and useful visualizations, including SmartMoney's well known Map of the Market.
Blue ball machine, just a 100% silly animated GIF.
An illustrated history of catflinging. It'll sure be good to get this one out of my bookmarks list.