Behold the immortal chocolate whirlpools of the AP's Wire Services homepage

I was looking into wire services today and found what appears to be the AP's main wire services site. All but vestigial, every link at it is broken, redirecting to the group's more modern homepage. And yet there it remains, badly-tiling bronze swirl GIFs and all, a mainstream media answer to Hollywood's deathless Space Jam website.

Back in the mid-2000s, as a newspaper staffer, I remember trying to get an AP contact to understand something important about licensing or story ingestion or some other website thing. Beyond the blunt futility of it all, the details escape me now. But not the weird nightmares. In them, I was trying to hack through thorn-bushes with a nerf bat. The bat would be getting torn to pieces, but the bushes remained impassive, occasionally wobbling a bit.

Suspecting that there might be other contemporary manifestations of the AP's institutional slightly-touchedness, I find that they're currently suing clipping services. [The Wrap]

• [Daniel Bergey]

  Did you not link to it, or am I just an idiot?

  • [Rob Beschizza]

    First sentence!

• [David Smith]

  Kai’s Power Tools nostalgia-blast!    

• [s2redux]

  Speaking of immortal sites…

• [tedrock]

  It lacks the graphic impact of those pages, but Mark Frauenfelder’s out of date bio page certainly brings me back to a simpler time… http://boingboing.net/markf.html

• [Dom]

  The Top News Stories link works, and it’s current! 
  http://www.apwireservices.com/template_news.html

• [JIMWICh]

  Plate of shrimp!  chocolatewhirlpool.tumblr.com just happens to be the name of my new band!

• [Steve White]

  AP Wire Services is my new bicycle.

• [alxr]

  It especially alarms me that the copyright date starts at 2005, as opposed to 1995.