Welcome to the Wednesday Walk Around the Web, where we weave & wind through weblinks weekly. Hopefully you will find the links on offer amusing, interesting, or, occasionally, profound. Views expressed in the Wednesday Walk do not necessarily reflect those of anyone but the writer. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Walk? Email Glenn!
- I hope you all had a nice Martin Luther King Day. It’s a good time to remember that fifteen years ago the King family won a civil suit proving that James Earl Ray was set up as the fall guy for a larger conspiracy, involving governmental agencies, to assassinate Dr. King.
- In a bit of a turn, here are some beautiful photos of a flipped iceberg.
- From Serious Eats: an ode to the diner.
- This Week in Kickstarter: a doctoral thesis on theoretical solid state chemistry, in comic book form.
- Do you want to inconvenience someone mightily? Try sending them glitter!
- We could have a great game day with the Packers — they’ll bring Catan! (And they have so much free time now.)
- Wireless earbuds are coming. The question is: have you ever worn earbuds for more than half an hour without making your ears hurt?
- Many people agree that the best part of the recently-concluded Hobbit trilogy was Smaug the Tyrannical, Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities. As it turns out, Bramblepelt Candysnatch didn’t just voice Smaug the Stupendous, he provided performance capture too…which basically meant writhing around on a studio floor for a bit.
- Sometimes you see the name of an article and you know what it will contain, yet click anyway. Friends, I give you What It’s Like to Date Your Dad. Just remember: DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS. (The woman in that interview, incidentally, is a bit confused about royalty.
- Last week we mentioned the seismometers installed outside the Seahawks home stadium. here’s a chart of seismic readings during the overtime period of the NFC Championship Game. See if you can tell when the game ended!
- More on the Seahawks, specifically Michael Bennett: in the immortal words of Dusty Rhodes, HE GOT A BICYCLE! I don’t know where the kid is who was a-riding it. (Thankfully, even though the bicycle was procured from the Seattle cops, Michael Bennett was not shot or otherwise assaulted.)
- Speaking of D-linemen, after the AFC title game was over Vince Wilfork went out and helped one of the locals out of a wrecked car.
- New life goal: plunk a bowling ball down over the Mariana Trench and hit a strike in California.
- Over 80 percent of people in the US support mandatory labels on foods containing DNA. If you know what DNA is (please tell me you know what DNA is), think about that one for a second.
- Bubble wrap was originally invented as a textured wallpaper. We could all have had padded rooms.
- Don’t buy into a blanket fear of pitbulls. Go on fearing Pitbull if you want, though.
- Fascinating articles about cat domestication and evolutionary development will pretty much automatically get into the ol’ Walk, especially now that I’m on the fast track to becoming an old cat lady.
- For sale: former missile silo, excellent home for just about anything you’d want to do deep underground.
- Some intrepid soul assembled the half-hour that was cut out of Into the Woods, plus some things that were just done differently because they took out a lot of the narrator’s role. I mean, I get removing some of the self-consciously theatrical elements (even while the movie kept a LOT of them, which I discussed a little on a wrestling podcast recently). Still, they make plenty of two-and-a-half-hour movies nowadays, and it’s a pity to lose lines like “I thought you died in a baking accident” and “If the end is right, it justifies the beans.” And the second “Agony!”
- It’s time to examine the tough questions, to really take a deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool: is Quidditch a sport?
