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 informative.
- In the US, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic and attendant incredibly weak federal response & inconsistent state-level responses, efforts to strip millions of people from what little health insurance they have continues unabated while at the ground level country-club conservatives make as much of a show of flaunting viral containment guidelines as their lower-class counterparts do of their pickup truck smokestacks. As if we didn’t already know that the Republican Party is a death cult.
- Obviously the current world crisis involves a great deal of risk for those who are trying to deal with it on any level, whose noble sacrifice we are all indebted to — none more than the astrophysicist who had to get magnets dislodged from his nose when he tried to while away his time in lockdown by inventing a device to keep people from touching their faces.
- Perhaps a better lockdown hobby would be browsing the special offers publishers are offering to keep readers occupied.
- Some people on the ground level are trying to make genuine and serious contributions in whatever way they can. GE workers are launching protests demanding that the company divert resources to produce badly-needed ventilators, while Instacart workers are striking against the lack of basic protections the company is willing to offer, alongside Amazon workers and others. GameStop’s corporate goons suggested plastic bags for employees in lieu of gloves, so maybe we can get some vitriol going their way too.
- Meanwhile, if you’re in lockdown or otherwise adjusting to the telecommuting lifestyle, please make sure you have a very good handle on how exactly your teleconferencing software works and what it’s doing when you’re not using it.
- The streets of Paris belong to the ducks now. Maybe they should keep them.
- Artist Hieronymus Bosch is known for intriguing, intricate, absurd…well, see for yourself. The best way to honor someone who imagined such surreal phantasmagorias, of course, is a parade.
- This Week in Rankings: McDonald’s scented candles. The writer of that list pooh-poohs the idea of burning all six candles at once to summon the restless spirit of the Hamburglar, which I find personally insulting.
- A new dinosaur species has been found in amber from 100 million years ago, which is cause for celebration in itself — but in thie case, it turns out the dinosaur is also a very very smolboi.
- This Week in Radical Recontextualization: The internet opens a dizzying array of avenues for expressing the same thing in any given manner or style, mixing, remixing, and recombining elements of disparate artforms to create new contexts for well-known stories. Consider, for instance, Frankenstein retold in the medium of Vines.
- Friend of the Walk Todd Weber brings news of a portable N64 that takes all of your old cartridges, if you’re willing to sacrifice an old console for a cool project.
- The US Supreme Court recently ruled that states can’t be sued for copyright infringement. I look forward to the new mascot for the Louisiana department of health, Mickey Mouse.
- This Week in Music: If you want to wish someone a happy birthday, you can do so in the style of 10 classical composers. The Liszt variation is perfect for that person you want to wish a happy birthday to while running away from them.
