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.

• So Sean Penn wrote a novel, and it’s as bad as the phrase “Sean Penn wrote a novel” makes it sound.
• Why You Should Surround Yourself With More Books Than You’ll Ever Have Time to Read. I don’t think a headline has ever endorsed my lifestyle more explicitly.
• I hope Chris had a good time celebrating his rise last week.
• The overwhelming dedication some people have to defensiveness in the face of even the mildest criticism, even of a side character from a cartoon that was relevant 20 years ago, truly is sad.
• Building walls in your home with gigantic Lego bricks seems fun and all, but having watched entirely too much This Old House lately, I’m not entirely assured about the stability of those walls.
• By the way, DID YOU KNOW you can watch the entirely of This Old House, going back to 1979, on their site? The 1979 episodes are A TRIP, believe you me.
• You know, they say Christmas starts impinging on our lives earlier and earlier every year. There is but one force keeping it in check, and it’s Halloween.
• Most animals you see in ancient cave drawings are oxen or cows or some other land mammal. It turns out there are cave drawings of whales too.
• My boyfriend has been bugging me for a while to get a micropig. He thinks it’s going to be just like this, but I’m a little anxious about stories I’ve seen about “micropigs” that turned out to be regular, huge-ass pigs. I suppose the best case scenario there is that we turn out like these guys.
• This Week in Friendly Animals: Imagine you’re a bird flying in the sky, bold and free. You see a dot off in the distance, fly over to investigate, and it turns out to be a human plummeting toward the ground.