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? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- This Week in Fear: Ten Meter Tower is an oddly compelling compilation of people who’ve been convinced to scale a ten-meter diving platform for the first time, and must then try to convince themselves to actually jump.
- This Week in Browser Games: Whale Synth lets you create your own whale song through the wonder of clicking and dragging, potentially letting you re-enact the climax of Star Trek IV.
- PTBN Grand Poobah Brad Hindscrooge sends word of the parody Twitter account du jour, putting the US president’s words in their proper context.
- Wooly mammoth de-extinction is supposedly moving along apace, now aiming to create a hybrid elephant with elements of mammoth DNA spliced in.
- This Week in Athletics: I need an Olympics-sized worldwide push for the Wind Games, featuring amazing competitors doing routines in a vertical wind tunnel, effectively skydiving indoors.
- We finally have a computer that can survive the scorching temperatures and crushing air pressures of the surface of Venus.
- It’s amazing what documents can be painstakingly restored and preserved, even after they’ve been balled up and shoved into a chimneyfor a couple hundred years.
- All of the articles about the folks at Monticello taking steps to acknowledge Sally Hemmings still tread too lightly on Jefferson. When one person is a slave and the other a slave master, there is no meaningful consent, so using words like “relationship” or “affair” carry a dreadful undertone.
- This Week in Domestic Terrorism: The latest wave of bomb threats to Jewish community centers across the US comes accompanied by graveside vandalism, because what we need right now is more methods of escalation that come with deep histories.
- Quick, let’s have some good news: In news that borders on Water Is Wet, legalization of marriage correlates with a drop in suicide attempts/ideation among LGBT teens. Take it from someone who used to be a queer kid: if you stop mobilizing every arm of society and government in a unified effort to convince them they’re broken (or, at least, mobilize those arms a little bit less), they might hate themselves less!
- Also in good news, we have the Golden Girls-themed restaurant in Manhattan. You all do not know the grin that came over my face when I read that they actually serve Genügenflürgen.
- This list of the best action scenes of the 21st century could probably drive some reactions from friend of the Walk and action cinema connoisseur Greg Phillips, but at the very least I’m glad to see the sauna fight from Eastern Promises get some love. Brutal, brutal stuff.
- I love the explanation that the creator of the ice-based orchestra featuring instruments made of ice gives for the spiritual backing of his project: the instruments are made of frozen water, and we’re made of melted water. Truly the connection is obvious.
- I know my generation is old enough to start building nostalgia industries when I see wistful remembrances of Homestar Runner, borne of a time when parts of the internet were not terrifying. The next step is a Seeso series, I reckon.
- It turns out that law-school nerdery has a treasure trove to bring to bear on the subject of who in Middle-earth can stake a legal claim to The One Ring.
- The best races are the ones won by someone who fell down in the middle of the race. The second-best races are the ones where all but one competitor falls down.
- This Week in Happy-Making: Jimmy Fallon, Metallica, and The Roots perform “Enter Sandman” on classroom instruments. That is all.