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.
- During the 1918 flu epidemic, the city of Philadelphia held the Fourth Liberty Loan Parade in honor of soldiers returning from World War I, who brought influenza with them and promptly infected many of the two hundred thousand people who packed themselves together along the parade route. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, The Anti-Mask League formed in opposition to ever more desperate pleas from public health officials, who had to dodge literal bombs. Why bring this up now? Oh, no reason.
- In the modern day, the Blue Angels intend to fly their big loud flying machines “in honor of” healthcare workers, somehow, thereby stretching the definition of “honor” past any reasonable breaking point.
- Zoom’s stocks have been booming lately, which you might expect as its visibility and market share has expanded by about ten thousand percent in the last three months. Wait. Hold the phone. I’m getting breaking news that stocks are booming for any company named Zoom regardless of their absolute lack of any relationship to the teleconferencing software I and everyone I know had never heard of three months ago. Stock investing is definitely a great system to hang overwhelmingly large portions of the world’s economies on, and not at all an overhyped Ponzi scheme run by a self-reinforcing circle of malicious buffoons.
- We’ve looked at a veritable bevy of lockdown hobbies in recent weeks, but one lockdown hobby that you’d be better off avoiding is torturing yourself and others with diet culture propaganda. Everyone is being affected by this to some degree and everyone is experiencing some degree of anxiety or personal pain or concern for their loved ones, and if some stress-eating is what gets you through it, guess what — you got through it.
- Last week brought word of a friendly competition between museums to see who had the creepiest objects in their collections, but as it happens, private collectors can enter their own submissions too.
- Dolly Parton’s production company produced Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Is there anything she can’t do??
- This Week in Personality Tests: I notice you’re on the road to New Mexico, and I really must know — what is it you’re burying there?
- This Week in Recontextualization: Sometimes the musical milestones of a generation have to be flexible, and so we have “Barbie Girl” revived as a tragic, longing, desperate ballad for our times. Where’s this version of Blue Da Ba Dee? Hang on a tick actually…yep, thought so. Here it is.
- We, as humans, run on blood. It is our essence, coursing through us at every moment yet desperately contained, hidden, kept away from the light of day. Let’s, perhaps, show it a little more.
- People say there’s no originality left in mainstream film because everything’s an adaptation of a book or a TV series or an older movie or a video game or a board game or a tweet, but that’s simply not true. Some of them are adaptations of magazine articles as well.
