The people at choosespain.com, the travel agency, are resigned to their double entendre name and the swimming pool company poolife.com isn’t about to throw in the towel.
Software programmer Andy Geldman, 35, has collected the best of the unintentionally funny URLs in a new book called Slurls: They Called Their Website What?, with the subtitle: The world’s worst Internet URLs.
“Lots of them are rude,” he says apologetically to the Star on Tuesday.
The dog grooming company in Warwickshire, England answers to www.doggiestyles.co.uk, for example. “Apparently, she didn’t realize.” And like most exposed by Geldman in his slurls blog, the company isn’t going to change, even though doggiestyle.co.uk is not at all about pets.
Houseofart.com didn’t make his stringent requirements (English, active, double meaning and not deliberate) but the show business agency whorepresents.com did. Among his favourites: the simple oh.no, which is the Norwegian holiday resort Osnes Hyttepark.
Among the ones that puzzle him the most: the domain name adopted by the tiny Cook Islands (you can look it up). “I mean, they didn’t have to. There can’t be that many businesses in the Cook Islands.”
Geldman swears effoff.com, the U.S. furniture company Effective Office Environments, was blissfully unaware of the British slang in the name and so makes the cut. And therapistfinder.com, a California counsellors’directory, embodies exactly what he finds funniest and most interesting: a perfectly sensible name that just happens to mean something else entirely without the capitals and the spaces.
A boring morning commute in 2006 to central London led to the creation of the blog, Geldman says. The book, officially released on Friday, was his attempt to “make something more of it.”
His stab at international URL humour falls short, he admits, when it comes to Canada. The book carries funny site names from Norway, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand — but none from Canada.
“Maybe you’re immune,” he muses. Then he offers a challenge: “The first person to find a Canadian slurl can have a free, signed copy of the book.”
No comments:
Post a Comment