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.
- We still need your advice questions for Steve Wille’s guest appearances on the ol’ Spectacular — big or small, we’ll consider them all! Email us or go to our Ask.fm page to send your questions today. (Your name won’t be read on the show without permission (so tell us what to call you if anything), and Ask.fm allows anonymous submissions.)
- This Week in Bonus Features: A project to conduct laser-assisted scanning of all of England to gauge the exact depth of waterways can also help identify long-forgotten Roman roads.
- The same technology is visually uncovering a huge Mayan city in Guatemala.
- The city of Houston is running a program to empower citizens to issue tickets for people who illegally take up disabled parking spaces. That wouldn’t have been the first solution I thought of, but you do need to stop people from taking up spaces they don’t have permits for, and especially blocking the spaces for wheelchair-accessible vehicles.
- If you or someone you know likes to wear dresses, it may be important to know what makes a dress more or less compatible with close-quarters combat. Dress safely and be ready to defend yourself, friends.
- This Week in Great News: San Francisco will apply its marijuana legalization laws retroactively, cleaning up convictions for things that are now legal. There was a mechanism for people to petition the court to do this individually, but having the prosecutor’s office do it proactively is so much better.
- Breath-holding is now, like a lot of things in the 90s, XTREEEEEME.
- This Week in Compost: In Costa Rica, twelve thousand tons of discarded orange peels rejuvenated a forest.
- This Week in Gendered Nonsense: Thankfully, it seems like the crunchless “ladies’ Doritos” have been shut down.
- It seems like there are a lot of false alarms being tripped lately, from the missile alert in Hawaii a few weeks back to a tsunami warning in the eastern US.
- I do sometimes like it when a joke is done or redone so much that it stops being funny and then loops back around again and is even funnier. Letterman used to be the master of this, but it’s really what the internet is made for. Friends, I give you Connect Four.
- RIP eastern cougars.
- This Week in Pets: If you’re lucky enough to be able to work from home part or full-time, you do get to have animals of your choosing express their great disappointment that you aren’t paying enough sttention to them.