This week’s completely pointless website is the tower of bears. A bunch of teddy bears make an innocuous pyramid like some 10-year-old girl’s fantasy cheerleading team. Mouse over a bear to see it topple to the ground, taking with it any teddy standing on it. Leave them alone for a bit, and they will dutifully recreate their original configuration like a little stuffed Sisyphus. Estimated time wasting potential: 3 minutes.

Finally a stick figure family decal has been put to good use. Someone took a picture of the Ass Family minivan and posted it on flickr. Maybe they will add a dog named Lard.

Stupid websites are all around us, and as an advocate of reusing and recycling the web, I’m happy to point them out whenever I come across them. Here’s one that will keep you occupied for no more than 10 minutes. 4 cartoon horses stand and blink at you, inviting you to click on their long faces. Each time you do, that horse contributes his harmony to the overall barbershop quartet style song. it’s almost unbearable to hear all 4 parts at once, but singing cartoon horses are admittedly a little bit humorous.

There are those ideas which seem funny and clever when a couple of brothers are heading to Sears to create that special portrait to give to mom on Mother’s Day. Some of them just don’t stand the test of time, and others probably weren’t even clever to begin with. These Navy brothers and their Busch Light can clinking moment are a case in point. Luckily we have the internet where a blog called sexy people collects all of these wonderful portrait moments for us.

Some things are more fun when they are presented in a different way. Take the montage of Simpsons couch gags, for example. It’s most (though not all) of the couch sequences from The Simpsons sped up to fit into a five minute video. From swapping heads, to vending machines, to space aliens, to medieval times, all of your favorites are represented. See the full video here.

This is a pretty amazing painted portrait which looks like it could be a photograph. Artist Dru Blair created the work in 2005, and he shares step by step images as well as the interesting story behind it. He says “This is a painting completed in February 2005. It was a Portrait Class project that I decided to finish in my spare time after the workshop. It probably took a total of around 65-75 hours to complete. The main colors are blocked in at the beginning, but refinement is withheld until the very end.”

This is a fun idea for a blog which is both thought provoking and kind of funny. Blank is like blank gives a simile in each post, along with a humorous explanation. The author calls them analogies, but unlike the analogies you remember from the SAT test (trunk is to elephant as snout is to pig), I think these are better classified as examples of simile. There are some good ones, like these examples.

Raising a baby is like being lactose intolerant: You can’t enjoy the same things most people do, and your friends are kind of weirded out by it.

A world where Will Smith is the last human alive is like a bowl containing one M&M: Maybe it’d be better if it was empty.

Using a semicolon is like barbecuing: I’m never quite sure I’m doing it correctly.

Wikipedia is like hearing a great story in a bar: You hope it’s true, but never bother confirming it.

Joe D shares his refaced U.S. currency collection as a Flickr set. His description says “I’m surprised how much everyone likes this. It’s just something I’ve been toying around with every now and then. It all started when i would draw glasses or beards on money with the counterfeit pen on the registers at work and just grew in to a hobby.” Even though there is nothing extraordinary about the art, it’s still fun to see these well-known portraits in a whole new way.

I spent many hours mashing the two buttons on the original Nintendo game controller, so this project really brings back some memories. Kyle Downes talks about creating it and shows off the pictures at his blog called Ultra Awesome. If I were skilled enough to create something this cool, I would fire up some Ice Hockey, some Legend of Zelda, and then I’d use it to input the Contra cheat code. That is ultra awesome indeed.

There is something satisfying about opening a package and finding a nice new sheet of bubble wrap just asking to be popped. The magic of the World Wide Web has now made it possible to replicate the experience virtually. It’s true that it’s not quite the same, but if you’re like me, you can entertain yourself for almost 5 minutes with the bubble wrap flash application.

It seems like everyone has their home brew cure for the hiccups. I usually just try to drink a bunch of water in short small sips which seems to work eventually. The Growing Happiness blog claims to have the very best cure for hiccups, and they say that it’s as simple as drinking warm water, and the hiccups will disappear in 15 seconds. I haven’t had the chance to try it yet, but it seems like just another tale of “here’s what works for me.” Looking at the comments on the post, many people are saying that they have a better solution than warm water, so I don’t think this is the end of the debate.

Sometimes you just want a quick couple sheets of lined paper or graph paper, and you don’t want to take a trip to the office supply store. For those situations, you can download a pdf file from printable paper and print your own. Considering the price of ink, this isn’t a good solution for creating a whole notebook, but if you need a specialty paper that you don’t normally use such as music or ledger paper, it could come in pretty handy.

With the growing popularity of MP3 players, iTunes, and other music downloading services, the audio CD market is quickly shrinking to nothing. But for the time being, most of us have CD players in our cars and stereos, and almost all of us have some CDs that we’re not planning to listen to ever again. That’s where lala.com comes in. It’s a social networking site which includes a tracking system for CD trading. List the CDs you’re willing to trade, and you’ll get a request when another users wants one of them. Send it out, and when they verify its arrival, you’ll receive a credit which gives you the opportunity to request an album that you want from another user. The cool part is that you can find users who like the same type of music and take a look at their collection to find new music that suits your taste.

For the most part I don’t really like ecards. They take the same sayings you find on paper cards and add some stupid flash graphics of fireworks or popping champagne corks. Then, along with an unwanted card, you find that a bunch of spammers put your email address on their list. I can’t help but like some of the cards available at someecards.com, however, because the writing is pretty clever. So if you want to send a greeting for tax day, check them out.

As a youngster, I remember having a Simon. I think I even played it all the way through a couple times. Frankly, I always got a little bored with it’s repeating patterns, but it was kind of fun to challenge your friends to a session of Simon. Now you can relive the lack of excitement and tedium online with the Simon flash game website. Try it once for the memory, and then put it back on the top shelf of the virtual closet next to the other board games that you never play anymore.