Bored? Three Web sites to visit this week

Meranda Watling

43THINGS.COM

Everyone has a list, written or in his or her head, of things to accomplish in life. But now, with www.43things.com, you can share that list with the world and find others with the same or similar goals.

Sign up for a user name and start sharing your list, or just peruse someone else’s list. You can also add notes about your progress or completion of the goal and read what others have to say about how worth it the thing is to do.

On the front page of the site, there is a list of recent answers to the question: “What do you want to do with your life?” The answers vary greatly from the monumental, such as “be the president of the U.S.,” to the mundane, such as “pass freshman English,” to the just plain weird, such as “lick somebody.”

No matter what your personal goals are now, perhaps another’s goal will inspire a few new ones for yourself. Or just can give someone a “cheer” to say, “I’m with you buddy.”

ORISINAL.COM

What could be better than an adorable panda racing through a bamboo forest on your computer screen or three little monkeys trying to catch fruit and avoid bombs? Well, perhaps tipping cows without the guilt factor. No matter what you’re into, all of these and more can be found at www.orisinal.com.

Orisinal is overflowing with small, flash-driven games full of cuddly creatures. Each game lets you try a different skill, from defying gravity with a click of the mouse to catching apples before they splatter on the ground.

Controlling the games and animals via mouse, you can take a tour around the site in mere minutes. Unlike most games Web sites, Orisinal is not ad-heavy or sponsor-overloaded. The Web site has only Google-driven text ads across the bottom of the screen. In addition, the games are relatively small files, which for the most part can be quickly downloaded and mastered in less than a minute.

BOOKAMINUTE

While the summary of Crime and Punishment on this Web site may not provide enough detail to write your English term paper, it does offer a pretty concise synopsis of the key points in the book.

At fewer than 40 words, the summary is definitely more readable than the nearly 600 page tome itself or even the SparkNotes version of the classic. In fact, think of the humorous, ultra-condensed summaries at www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute as the SparkNotes of the SparkNotes.

The current selection covers everything from Dostoevsky’s classic to most of William Shakespeare’s most-read works, including many on your high school literature book lists.

Contact Stater editor Meranda Watling at [email protected].