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!
- Mazel tov to Yisrael Kristal, Auschwitz survivor, who is officially the oldest living man. Because fuck the Nazis forever.
- If you want to imagine Star Wars as either a medieval Irish epic or an ancient Icelandic saga, boy howdy is the internet for you.
- This Week in Burdensome Regulation: lawmakers in West Virginia decriminalized raw milk, and then proceeded to immediately get themselves sick by drinking some celebratory raw milk. Nice one, buckos.
- This Week in Advice: Captain Awkward has quite a few top tips on maintaining yourself in a work environment while dealing with depression. Of course everyone’s depression is a little different — more often than not I can take care of work stuff much better than household chores or big-picture responsibilities because my tasks at work lend themselves better to tunnel vision, but hey.
- This Week in Histories of Everything: the history of scents and what we consider stinky has some fascinating turns, including the era when Christians collectively decided that bathing was to be derided as vain and self-centered.
- I never thought I’d post an ASMR video in one of these things, but here we are: if you want to just relax for a few minutes, breathe deeply, and pretend that the inexorable march of entropy can be reversed, enjoy a knife very calmly putting tomatoes back together.
- Daylight Savings hit many of us this weekend, and Dave’s cousin Oskaar would like to share his views. (NSFW language.)
- Genealogy can often be dispiriting for people whose searches end at a slaver’s auction. Many people might be getting more information about their family histories soon, though.
- Less than half of teens identify as straight. You know, studies and anecdotal evidence say that younger generations aren’t less racist than older ones to nearly the extent often assumed, but any generation with fewer heteros in it than the previous one (especially one with more people rejecting the gender binary too) is heading in the right direction. Rock on, kids.
- This history of the English language in five words manages to hit on the tribes that brought their dialects of German to what we now call England, the class distinctions bred into Middle English by French conquerors, the long history of attempts to standardize the language, and loanwords from other languages assimilated into our tongue. So, yeah, well done.
- I vaguely recall watching documentaries during childhood that posited an asteroid causing the mass extinction of the last generations of dinosaurs (other than the ones who became all the birds of course) as an unconfirmed theory. We know quite a bit more now.
- There is a project dedicated to showing that Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life” improves the ending of every movie. Interesting. Try it with “Brothers in Arms” and I’m in.
- Syrian refugees in Canada have not only been welcomed by the nation’s apparently-dreamy Prime Minister, but also by the furry convention also using a hotel some of them are being housed in. The furries appear to have been extremely welcoming, and the kids in particular had a great time. I can think of fewer welcoming committees more cheerful than a group of Canadian furries. (Link contains an autoplay video, but it’s short and adorable. And work-safe as long as your boss and/or coworkers aren’t super sensitive about furries.)
