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!
- On the occasion of some new remastered reissues, Phil Collins redid the photo shoots for all of his album covers.
- This Week in Slow Motion: hot flamethrower action!
- This Week in Linguistics: be wary of crossing platforms when sending emoticons to your pals, since different image sets carry different connotations. Always mind your connotations!
- This Week in Nostalgia: TV Guide hosts a complete archive of cover art for past issues, if you ever feel like diving through old issues and reminiscing about the stars of yesteryear.
- You’re going to run into issues when you’re mapping IP address locations and you choose an arbitrary place to put all the ones you can’t locate. Or, at least, the people who actually live there are going to run into issues.
- This Week in Evolutionary Biology: most mammals do not menstruate the way humans (and other primates) do, so how did that happen? This is just fascinating, fascinating stuff. (Standard “not all women menstruate and not all people who do are women” disclaimers apply.)
- Sometimes movies and TV don’t lie to you. Sometimes writing HELP on a beach in really honking huge letters will actually get you rescued from a deserted island.
- You haven’t heard “My Heart Will Go On” until you’ve heard it in the original Klingon. (More on Klingons in this week’s episode of The Glenn Butler Podcast Hour Spectacular! Synergy!!)
- Passover is coming in a week or two, and what better way is there to mark the upcoming festivities in this terrifying and abominable US election year than a short video history of politicians pandering to Jews. Oy with all these goyim.
- This Week in Hipster Design: check out all the hot takes on tables. The log table is cool and all and the glass river table was in some previous edition of the Wednesday Walk, but please, please do not put a swingset in your dining room. If you really want to put a lawn on your dining room table…look, I’m not here to judge. I guess it’d be good to knock over your water glass every once in a while in that case.
- Metafilter is here to offer a voluminous list of easy weeknight recipes, AKA just a little more effort than I often feel like putting into cooking. Only in recent years have I gotten to the “toss some chicken pieces/a hunk of pork into the slow cooker with vegetables and seasonings” level.
- This Week in Histories of Everything: in the olden days, a lot of life insurance was handled by fraternal orders and other such groups. Social Security and the modern insurance establishment would eventually supplement much of what those were prividing, but you can find the effects here and there. On a purely anecdotal level, the only reason I was able to bury my mom next to her parents was because my grandfather and his brothers bought a decent swath of a graveyard with their sixties-era lodgemates. I hope they had goat rituals too.
- In Chicago, locals got their weather report from Tom Hiddleston. You’re welcome.
