This month they are conducting the 4th RISQ Survey of Quebec Internauts (www.risq.qc.ca/survey/4/). Since March 1996, they have surveyed thousands of surfing Quebecers every six months in order to examine how many of us pretend we're hard at work while we check out the cool site of the day, if we ever stumble into Quebec-made sites and how fast our modems help us waste all this time. Be the statistic you always wanted to be. Results will be posted on December 1, 1997.

Chunk 666 members spend their days "foraging" for spare parts, "chunkifying" their bikes, clogging up traffic and passing out. Extended front forks, mismatched tire sizes, high handlebars and banana seats are all the rage. The site is also very cleverly written as a sort of autobiographical ethnography (they describe themselves as a cross between "a grade-school playground and a clan of monkeys").

Just how big is the chunk movement? Bible of hipness Vice Magazine put the most massively chunkified chopper bike, driven by a pasty-white Cosby kid, on the cover of their September issue.

But if you're a news junkie with a sense of humour, you'll want to bookmark The Onion (www.theonion.com), the near-brilliant news satire Web site. Updated weekly and decidedly incorrect in its politics, the cover stories for The Onion's last two issues were "Nation's educators alarmed by poorly written suicide notes" and "World's Muslims lighten up."

Each headline is accompanied by a story written in perfect news form, though the jokes often run out of gas pretty quickly. But then again, you can pack an awful lot of cultural commentary in a headline such as "New $50 million planetarium opens young minds to the wonders of Pink Floyd."

Each legend is carefully judged true or false to boot. Disney (the man and the company) rates a category of its own. Oh, and for the record, "no verified medical case of a rodent extraction from a patient's rectum has been reported." However, there is a link to the Rectal Foreign Bodies Page (www.well.com/user/cynsa/newbutt.html), which lists hundreds of documented and apocryphal cases of accidental and recreational incidents, from plantains to frozen pig's tails. I was the 1,567,609th visitor: there are obviously a lot of people interested in such anal-ysis.

Previous contents run the gamut from morbid (JonBenet Ramsey's autopsy report) to hilarious (a witness's statement after Martha Stewart attempted to mow him down with her Suburban). Admittedly, these documents smack more of Geraldo than 60 Minutes, but there must be some value to finding out that Howard Stern still has the contractual right to use the word "douche" and that the f-word is alive and well in Martha Stewart's vocabulary.

The Stern Page (members.global2000.net/~djbrian/howard.html) has MP3 sound files, as well as news about Stern's radio presence on the continent. Then there's the Interactive King of All Media Newsletter (www.koam.com), an information-dense clearing house of information and links to other sites. If the fawning adoration begins to wear thin, visit the American Family Association of Michigan's Howard Stern Information and Action page (www.afa.net/stern) and find out how he's corrupting "the young and those who are easily misled."

While the humour is hit and miss, there is some damn funny stuff here. Check out their back issues for the "Gay or eurotrash" contest and "Sissy: the lost issue of Sassy magazine."

But believe it or not, good things happen all the time. Children are rescued from certain death, honest strangers return lost wallets and Canadians get an all-cartoon channel. The media's obsession with deviance means good news isn't worth reporting.

The Positive Press (www.positivepress.com), under the auspices of the Athens Institute in Virginia, believes otherwise. "We seek to demonstrate that there is a great demand for positive news," reads their Positive Point of View page, and they do this with a daily dose of positive news, positive sayings and, interestingly, a historical perspective. Just think: only 200 years ago, most of us would have been dead before we hit 40. So what are you complaining about?

Categories include Classic Confusion, Advertising (KFC's slogan, when introduced in China, read "Eat your fingers off!"), and Food. The Hong Kong Films category--a must for avid Fant-Asia goers--is replete with teeth-gnashing subtitles such as "Fatty, you with your thick face hurt my instep."

The entire site is almost enough to make you want to start up an Office de la langue anglaise, except for the fact that it's so damn funny. Even if you've seen some these before, you'll discover new ones. "Take my advice, or I'll spank you without pants."

The Index and Glossary of the Scottish Voluntary Euthanasia Society (www.euthanasia.org/a_z.html) provides the Internet's most comprehensive and unbiased glossary on the topic, covering cases and history around the world. It misses only one thing, however: an interesting essay on the language used in the debate, which can be found at www.iaetf.org/fctwww.htm. While the thrust is anti-euthanasia, the principles are worth considering.