Should you find yourself having to conjure up an instant Yuletide feature or two, you could do worse than take a look at the Urban Legends Reference Pages: Christmas.
These are a part of the useful Snopes.com site, which subjects assorted urban myths to sometimes quite lengthy analysis. Among the myths considered here are the idea that Coca-Cola invented the modern Santa, something I have certainly tended to believe in the past.
Having read the evidence here, I'm reconsidering. Popularised, yes, but invented? Probably not. Anyway, there's lots of fun here. I particularly like the story of the two brothers who gave each other the same pair of 'pants' (trousers to us) year after year.
Thanks to the invaluable FreePint newsletter for alerting me to the National electronic Library for Health, which is the NHS's database of health information for the professionals.
It is available for public use, however, and the level of detail and reliability makes it much preferable to the unusable NHSDirect site for our purposes. Note, though, that the site's main search engine does not find all of its content. For that you have to root through the directory.
One particularly good aspect is a thing called 'Hitting the headlines', which takes apart some recent health stories from the newspapers. For instance, the recent story about wine preventing dementia, though appealing, may not have been entirely accurate.
Meanwhile, also courtesy of FreePint, you should also take a look at OMNI, which stands for Organising Medical Networked Information. This is a university based access-point for a range of evaluated websites on health subjects. Rather less daunting than the big library above, it offers quick access to health material ranging from simple notes to patients to serious research.
Gary Price's excellent continuously-updated list of new Internet resources has a new name and location. It is now called The ResourceShelf and has its own domain: www.resourceshelf.com. If you don't know this site, you should. Most of it is American material, but he does do his best to find things that are of more interest to the rest of us.
I've been a big fan of Google since the days when people used to laugh incredulously when I recommended it. But there is no doubt that there is a negative side to its dominance of the search world.
A site called Google Watch is worth a look. Firstly, it asks some interesting (and only slightly paranoid) questions about what Google does with all that information it collects about our searches.
And then it offers its own search box that lets you use Google without having it remember your last searches and store them long-term. It also compares Google's results with those from Alltheweb, showing how little the two databases overlap and how much we miss if we only use Google.
Ad-free portalIf you like Yahoo! but are fed up with trying to find the content through a barrage of pop-up ads and banners, you should try My Way.
Using Google for search and the Open Directory for its directory listings, this new portal is clean, fast and uncluttered. It also offers most of the extra facilities people like in Yahoo!: email, a calendar, etc. What's more, you can carry on using your Yahoo and MSN facilities, just getting to them through MyWay, which claims to be quicker.
It's a brave attempt. So far, though, it doesn't mimic Yahoo's Briefcase, which is the best thing on that site.