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!
- It’s fascinating to think about how concepts we take for granted were invented, and recently, such as progress. It turns out we’re pretty good at inventing things and then telling ourselves they’re inevitable.
- RIP Robert Osborne.
- It’s horrifying to think about being stuck in a burning house. It’s more horrifying to think about being stuck in a burning house with an infant, and the desperation that leads you to strap your baby into a car seat and drop them from a second-story window. (The baby survived; the mother didn’t.) (Warning: autoplay video.)
- If you have to get a heart transplant, why not take the chance to paw at your old one afterward?
- This Week in the Confluence of Disparate Interests: I bet you didn’t think you’d ever see John Williams posing for a picture with Kobe Bryant, did you?
- When DNA from England’s oldest complete skeleton, the nine-thousand-year-old Cheddar Man, was analyzed, a living relative was found living half a mile from Cheesey Pete’s final destination. Now there’s family continuity.
- Kristin Chenoweth can figure out the note of a car alarm off the top of her head. Your argument is invalid.
- Your (dry) garbage will be someone’s treasure trove after long enough, such as the candy wrappers that accumulated in a movie theater for decades.
- (Spoilers for Logan.) When I realized in its first few minutes that Logan has a near-future setting, I immediately started looking for the vehicles and other design elements. The trucks were a particular highlight. (Also, off-topic, but if P-Stew really is done with the X-films, it is a Movie Crime that they got him together with McAvoy for a grand total of one scene.)
- If we’re going to move into the grand future of driverless vehicles, we’re going to need much more detailed maps. (And if we’re supposed to get all of the benefits of traffic patterns that can absorb small disruptions without causing those frustrating traffic jams where you get to the end of it and there’s no apparent origin, the driven cars will have to go, which ain’t happening. But aaaaaaanyway.)
- I have just learned of the existence of the low-rider truck, a tall person’s worst nightmare.
- This Week in Art: When you have gallery space and a grudge against FedEx, you make concrete the fragility of items carried by FedEx.
- If a telepath reads my mind, what they’ll see is the X-Files opening with the Golden Girls music.
- This Week in Selective Breeding: If you put your mind to it and work carefully, you too can make an emoji snake.
- This Week in People Saving Animals: A moose stuck in a mostly-frozen-over lake.