Beer, tourists, clotheslines and chatty catties

Surf's up -

A group that aims to combine beer and music for a new festival launches this week's walk around the web, with stops along the way involving Monty Python, salad greens and your Twitter network ... if you happen to have one.

Rock-toberfest

www.oktoberfest-newfoundland.com

I've been to Oktoberfest in Kitchener-Waterloo in Ontario, and would some day love to take in the real thing in Germany.

Did you know a group of folks in St. John's want to adapt the idea for local purposes, to create what they hope will be an annual festival?

The idea is to not only entertain the home crowd, but enrich the fall tourism season with an extra incentive to stick around and enjoy what they call "a little taste of Oktoberfest, but with a large twist of Newfoundland culture, music and love of a great party."

Clothesline Sudoku

tinyurl.com/lwmu8m

Speaking of tourism, I found this game on the provincial government's tourism site, tucked into the part that plays up the "breathing room" visitors find here.

The traditional Sudoku grid is adapted here with icons from the province (icebergs, blueberries, salmon and so on); your job is to fill them in.

A good few icons are sprinkled on the board to get you started.

LOLcat builder

cheezburger.com/lolbuilder.aspx

Yes, you can has your own cheezburger, too. From the folks who bring you the ever-popular LOLcats site (which combines photos of cats, and other animals, with caustic captions burned into the image) is this tool to make your very own.

You can also upload your own picture, but don't assume it will show up online right away, or at all: they still screen submissions for laughability and, apparently, taste, and get far more submissions than they use.

In any event, your friends and family may get more of a kick out of an in-joke than the rest of the world.

Twitter friend visualization

tinyurl.com/3yzwhg

Twitter is one of the leading social networking applications at the moment; use this tool as one way to get a sense of how your personal network is connected to many, many others.

The tool gives you a visual sense of who's in your proverbial circle; click on one member, and a whole other array opens up, and so on and so on.

Silly Walks Generator

www.sillywalksgenerator.com

From the land of Monty Python comes this bit of lunacy, in which you can generate a funny walk to rival anything John Cleese could do with his arms and legs.

The generator is a promotional device to help sell a DVD collection. Pick a character (e.g., lumberjack, Spanish inquisition member), a backdrop (pleasant meadow, English street) and program a series of manoeuvres with the body parts. If you like what you come up with, you can save your walk and e-mail the link to a friend.

Know your greens

www.ebfarm.com/Recipes/SaladID.aspx

This is the time of year when the supply of fresh green things at the markets is teeming, and already at our house we've enjoyed a series of delicious salads with a variety of greens. Here's a guide for knowing your chard from your mache.

Skewville

skewville.org

Skewville consists of twin brothers working in New York, using art in a clever, streetwise way, blending together social commentary, advertising motifs and, um, sneakers. They have a new exhibition underway, although this site shows just how much they use urban landscapes as a canvas to play on.

Guess the Colours

www.gamesforthebrain.com/game/guesscolors

This is a problem-solving game, pretty much like the Master Mind game I played when I was a kid.

The idea is to figure out which colours fit into which places, with only a set number of guesses to crack the code.

With each turn, you get a report telling you whether you have an exact match (but not which one) or the right colour in the wrong spot. It's a great exercise for the little grey cells.

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's. Blog: johngushue.typepad.com. Twitter: twitter.com/JohnGushue.