When I left home for college, I began experimenting with many different and exciting things, including drugs, alcoholic beverages, and — perhaps most dangerously — high-speed internet.  I moved from the dark ages of 56k dial-up and Internet Explorer to the golden cities on the hills of cable internet and Mozilla Firefox.  The hours I’ve lost to the world wide web are being catalogued in some gigantic computer somewhere, just waiting to be used against me when I’m standing at the pearly gates or when SkyNet takes over the world.

I don’t have to tell even the most casual internaut that the web is filled with crap.  I’m not just talking about comments on YouTube (“these waterfalls are gay!  obama wasn’t even born in america!”) or poorly-designed geocities pages; I’m talking about the random worldly detritus that has been, against better judgement, digitized for the remainder of time.  When I lived in the same dormitory as the venerable THSeamonsters, he turned me on to this device for wading through and around the excreta called StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon is a small browser add-on that, according to their website, “helps you discover and share great websites.”  It basically adds three little buttons below your address bar: “Stumble,” “like,” and “dislike.”  When you hit stumble, it takes you to a site that people similar to you have “liked.”  The more you use the button, the more it figures out what kind of things you want to read, which is how my browser now knows I’ll enjoy looking at a series of pictures of ants carrying a potato chip or reading about ten all-time great hoaxes.   This kind of personal interest and care makes me feel somewhat better about sitting naked in front of a laptop at three in the morning.

I recently discovered, though, that the real gem of StumbleUpon is the “StumbleThru” option.  StumbleThru allows you to see all the pages you’d like from a certain domain — and in my case, this domain is always Wikipedia.

Allow me to present you with five random stumbled Wikipedia pages.  We all just might learn something.  (or learn something, learn something, laugh at something, learn something, and be disgusted by something, respectively)

1. Ancient astronauts

Ancient astronaut theories or paleocontact are various proposals that intelligent extraterrestrial beings (called ancient astronauts or ancient aliens) have visited Earth and that this contact is linked to the origins or development of human cultures, technologies, and/or religions.

2. Colossal Squid

The Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, from Greek mesos (middle), onyx (claw), and teuthis (squid)), sometimes called the Antarctic or Giant Cranch Squid, is believed to be the largest squid species. It is the only known member of the genus Mesonychoteuthis. Though it is known from only a few specimens, current estimates put its maximum size at 12–14 metres (39–46 feet) long, based on analysis of smaller and immature specimens, making it the largest known invertebrate.

3. Yale’s “We Suck” prank

The Yale “We Suck” prank was a practical joke accomplished November 20, 2004, at the annual Yale-Harvard football game, Yale University students used a card stunt to trick more than 1,800 Harvard University fans into holding up placecards that spelled “WE SUCK”.

4. Portal (video game)

Portal is a single-player first-person action/puzzle video game developed by Valve Corporation. [...] The game consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player’s character and other simple objects using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (“ASHPD”, also dubbed the “Portal Gun”), a unit that can create an inter-spatial portal between flat planes. The player character is challenged by an AI named “GLaDOS” to complete each puzzle in the “Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center” using the Portal Gun with the promise of receiving cake when all the puzzles are completed.

5. Shark episode

The Shark episode or Mudshark incident was an alleged event which took place at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle, Washington, on 28 July 1969, involving Richard Cole, a road manager for English rock band Led Zeppelin, and members of the American psychedelic rock band Vanilla Fudge. [...] The Shark episode is alleged to have involved some type of sexual act with a fish. However, there are many variations on the story, all involving one or some of the band members, as well as variations of the type of fish (often claimed to be a shark), and the nature of the acts performed.

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