One more thing about the Contagious Media Showdown and then I'll take a break from it for a week.

I've been watching the rankings change over the last couple of days and I've noticed something curious. At first I thought it was a mistake or a bug, but it hasn't changed through many updates, so now I'm thinking it's intentional. And it's all to do with the numbers....

A few weeks back I attended the workshop that Contagious Media ran, that gave pointers to potential competitors on how to get noticed online. One of the examples was the fantastic Dog Island, a site that purported to represent a retirement home for pet dogs. The beauty of the site is that to anyone not in the know, it seems completely real, and has fooled many many people. And it has done so by staying under the radar. And I wondered at the time if any entrants to the Showdown would try a true underground hoax, and how they would manage to not be exposed.

So, looking at the current rankings, Crying While Eating is #1, Ringtone Dancer has moved up to #2, and Blogebrity is #4. But - what about #3? Well, there is no #3 listed - there's a jump in the numbers. Which makes me think there's another entrant in the competition that we don't yet know about, one that's currently getting a lot of visitors, but so far has been unidentified as a contest entry to allow it to hide it's hoax status.

So what could it be? I looked back at sites we've featured over the last couple of weeks but nothing jumped out at me. The Abercrombie & Fitch T Shirts? Days In The Life of a Nude Photographer? Elita from Multipoker? Nothing seems to fit the bill. If anyone has any theories, please post them in the comments section.

You know, if it turns out that the Virtual Stripper is a Contagious Media creation, I'm going to be very impressed.

View our continuing coverage of the Contagious Media Showdown here

I'm currently packing my cases to spend a few days at the Jersey Shore, so I'll make this short and sweet. Many thanks to Screenhead, who - I think - provided most of the links I'm featuring tonight. Screenhead consistently finds great little obscure movies, and they also featured us this week, and drove a lot of traffic here.

One of my favorite alternate comic artists, Gilbert Hernandez, has made a weird little movie, The Naked Cosmos

Flippin' Sweeeet! Learn to dance with Napoleon Dynamite

Mysteries of life explained in Elevator World

Made it Ma - King of the Flies!!

Sex + Death + Freedom = Pervert: The Movie

Wonder if Pervert used any Fluffers?

A broken VCR accidentally recorded an episode of The Simpsons with the closed captioning track enabled for a blogger at blog.wfmu.org.

He posted an mp3 of it here.

It's kind of amusing to hear the announcer quickly describe everything that is happening on screen. So this is what it's like to be blind huh?

Remember the suck-up guy post? Well I got this email last night.
I work for Degree, and when I saw your post I wanted to get in touch with you. I could probaly get you the guy in the box's info if you still want it. Give me a ring at work.

Sure, I'll interview him, but I also want to open it up to our dozen or so readers. Please forward any questions you have for Mr. Suck-Up, and I'll ask every one of them.

Found this via MokaBreak. Grokker is a different kind of search engine that shows results using a visual, zoom-in/zoom-out navigation system. Did a little more searching, and it turns out this has been around for close to a year...so sue me, you think I surf for a living.

Also, being a dedicated narcissist, I typed in jellio. Turns out there's another Jellio, and he's really into Calvin and Hobbes.