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A Pox on Your Mouse As hexing moves into the 21st century, the web offers great new ways to give a damn By Sarah Phelan IF LOCAL CURSES aren't enough for you, check out these 10 online curse sites, where you can find everything from ready-to-hurl curses and leprechaun specials to international curse generators and Red Sox fans' diaries. 1) The Elizabethan Insult Generator is where you can impress your friends with insults such as "Thou pribbling shard-borne minimus!" 2) VnutZ's Domain: International Curses and Insults can help you out if you want to tell locals to back off and get lost without them getting offended, since it generates curses in everything from Czechoslovakian to Turkish. Use with caution abroad. 3) Irish Curses go something like "May the snails devour his corpse, and the rains do harm worse. May the devil sweep the hairy creature soon." 4) Conservative Insult Generator is perfect for these modern Bushesque times, days when you often feel the need to shout, "You elitist blind-to-reality pork barrel." 5) The Random Shakespearean Quote Generator is less about cursing and more about sounding eddicated, as in "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!" 6) Captain Jack's Advice for the Lovelorn generates the kind of curses Long John Silver was apt to spout, as in "Prepare to board! You frothy beef-witted hijacker!" 7) The Curse Engine will convert your curse into Gaelic for those days when you're wanting to sound a bit more authentic and really impress those leprechauns you met at the bar last week. For example, "May the hounds of hell destroy your corn flakes" sounds way better when you put it like this: "Go Scriosa cuma ifrim do chuid caloga arbhair!" 8) The Curse of a Thousand Chain Letters doesn't so much generate its own evil as track the already existing evil of chain letters. It explains how this festering, damnable breed of email passes from person to person, growing in size and spreading misinformation along the way. Learn how people are deceived, bandwidth is clogged and your friends are terrorized. If you dare. 9) The Curse of Bambino is the diary of a Red Sox fan that sheds light on, among other things, why the Angels can't have a curse: As the webmaster for this site writes, "Sorry, Anaheim (and Oakland and L.A.), you can't have a curse because it just doesn't make any sense from a literary perspective. San Francisco, maybe. (After all, there is the classic Scooby-Doo episode about the Miner Forty-Niner.)" 10) Digital Voodoo is not recommended for the superstitious, since it generates creepy-looking voodoo dolls to which you can attach one of a selection of creepy-sounding messages, then send it to yourself or your (un)loved ones, quasi-anonymously. Our efforts generated a red-mouthed girl doll stuck with pins and a message saying "Look what you've become," which so amused one of our staffers that he sent one to his mom that read "Don't ever do that again!" Apparently she liked it, but then this is a woman who Indian arm-wrestled her kids each night, before tucking them in. [ Santa Cruz | Metroactive Central | Archives ]