I'm About To Waste A Ton Of Your Time

Everybody with a computer knows how to use it to waste time — there's Facebook. There's Twitter. There's Flash games. My grandmother has logged over 10,000 games of Solitaire on her current PC.

If you're exceptionally nerdy, though, nothing, except maybe xkcd, can beatWikipedia. You can have plenty of fun just starting on an article and clicking through to other stuff, but a Cape Town web developer has created a list of 530 interesting articles that is too good to not pass on to my millions-strong readership.

(Yes, I know what you're thinking. "There really aren't that many people reading this thing online." Trust me. It's millions. I get a lot of play in the College Park Patch print edition.)

I know you're about to go through each one individually, but just to help you out, here are a few highlights:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Probably my favorite Wikipedia entry ever. Grammatically speaking, this is a perfectly sound sentence. This one's good because it takes so much thought power just to believe what they're trying to tell you.

List of military tactics

One of those great pages that yields a million other cool pages. Of particular coolness are the pages on the flying wedge (now banned from college football for causing too many injuries), and Shock and Awe (now banned from my dating life for the same reason).

Clock of the Long Now

About attempts to design a clock that will keep accurate time for 10,000 years and the different methods to do it and why they won't work. 

English As She Is Spoke

The unintentionally hilarious Portugese-English phrase book that Mark Twain said was "perfect." The precursor to Jay Leno making fun of poor English on Chinese takeout menus on Monday nights. For example: in Portugese, "este lago parece-me bem piscoso. Vamos pescar para nos divertirmos" means "this lake seems like it's full of fish. Let's have some fun fishing," but the given translation is "That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing."

I could spend all day looking at this stuff (and I have). Any entries on the list striking YOUR fancy?

Also, this isn't on the list of 530 but I HAVE to pass along the link to the Tsar Bomba page, about the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated — originally designed to have more than 7,500 times as much power as the nuke dropped on Hiroshima. When the final version was detonated, it created a fireball FIVE MILES WIDE.

Welcome to my life.