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.)
- For instance, if you’re having problems with people mishandling or stealing your books, I might recommend some tried and true medieval curses to protect them.
- This Week in Skin Care: I will admit that, though I’ve never washed my face with dish soap, I do largely have the skin care regimen of a stereotypical hetero dude; namely, bar soap when I’m showering (formerly supplemented by the occasional face soap before I knew about the environmental impact of microbeads). Honestly, this has all kind of fallen in the “I never learned anything about this and at this point I’m afraid to ask” category.
- Godzilla is famously a product of atomic-era imaginings of what new horrors the nuclear age might bring. What monsters will climate change inspire, then? (Let’s try to do better than Waterworld and The Day After Tomorrow.)
- Pita Taufatofua, the star of the last two Olympic opening ceremonies, not only qualified for a cross-country skiing event just a few months after first training on snow, but finished the race and made some friends along the way. He’d better be back in two years.
- Perception is weird. There are folks who say that tennis balls are green. This is that damned dress all over again.
- A lot of Ikea furniture is made of a tightly-packed cardboard honeycomb which, to be fair, is actually pretty strong and environmentally friendly…but all the same, I wouldn’t put anything heavy and/or expensive, like a TV or my body, on it. (I actually used to have an Ikea bed I picked up from a friend who was moving. It didn’t survive an adventurous period in my life.)
- This Week in Headlines: Cow escapes on way to slaughterhouse, smashes through metal fence, breaks arm of man trying to catch her then swims to safety on island in lake.
- PTBN’s very own Jason Greenhouse brings word of an airplane that made an emergency landing when one passenger kept farting. You may think that starting a fistfight over some farts is an overreaction, and you may be right, but consider that for the length of time an airplane is in the air it’s basically a hermetically-sealed container for the worst smells of everyone on board. There’s arguably a communitarian obligation to mitigate that as best one can. (Nice job noting that the passenger in question was fat, though. Believe me, thin people fart too.)
- Think about writing a program that works out how much time passed between two different dates. Simple subtraction, right? Then consider time zones. Then consider countries that have switched time zones. Then consider Daylight Savings Time. Then consider regions that change when they start and end DST. Then you start thinking about history and calendars and things get really complicated. Watch one man struggle with the complicationos and eventually succumb to madness. There’s no other way to live, really.
- This Week in Creative Problem-Solving: Russian citizens have noticed that writing the name of a top Putin opposition leader on a pile of snow will get the snow cleared, so of course more folks started doing it.
