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.
- Sometimes the things you make are seen by many. Sometimes the things you do outlive you. Sometimes it turns out something you did outlives you by eleven thousand years.
- I am very very glad I don’t work in an open-plan office, especially when most of my attention is devoted to aggressively avoiding contact with other people.
- On that note, I suppose I have the Quakers to thank for inventing price tags and saving me from having to not only have a conversation every time I want to buy something but also have it be a negotiation.
- Friends, I bet most of you have had both biscuits and triscuits, which invites the question: what other sorts of -scuits has science yet to discover?
- This Week in Community Service: In Washington DC, one intrepid member of the community is knocking over speed cameras.
- Sometimes it’s interesting to consider how you’d explain certain societies’ traditions to someone who completely lacks your frame of reference. For instance, try explaining to a hypothetical space alien who’s just landed on Earth exactly why people go out of their way to procure and save decades-old mouldering pieces of cake ostensibly made to celebrate the courtship and dating rituals of people whose distant ancestors seized power over a smallish island nation.
- Welcome to Infrastructure Week. Last week was also Infrastructure Week. We are now in an Infrastructure Week without end.
- In Portland, Oregon, fifteen years ago, when public officials asserted their supposed right to root through people’s trash with no notice or warrant, some intrepid local journalists decided to see what they could find in the police chief’s, district attorney’s, and mayor’s trash. For some reason they felt violated, even though nothing deeply scandalous was revealed. I wonder why. (Yes, the search did reveal a member of Focus on the Family, but presumably someone hateful enough to sign up for that group wouldn’t consider it scandalous.)
- They say if you truly love something, you’ll let it go. The duck is free, no longer held by cruel tethers. Let it be.
- This Week in Cover Songs: I have your new old ringtone all ready for you.
- Abba is back, just to prove that something good can still happen in this fallen, broken world.
- Whooooooooooooooooooooops!
- Person takes DNA test, learns that her mother’s fertility doctor was her biological doctor. I saw that X-Files episode. Was she born with a tail?
- Wednesday Walk Top Tip: You do not want to cook pasta without water. At best you’ll ruin your pot; at worst you’ll spark a nasty fire. At absolute worst you’ll spark a fire and get a whole nation upset with you by committing your pasta crime in Italy. Two different former roommates of mine committed similar pasta crimes, except they at least started with water so nothing caught on fire, the pasta just turned into carbon, started pulling the nonstick coating off the pots, and let off torrents of foul smoke. So it goes when you’re intoxicated enough to think, hey, I should make some pasta in the middle of the night, and then forget about your pasta entirely.
- The internet has saved us from some horrible phone calls. Now if everyone would buy in and buckle down, it can save us from virtually all phone calls.
- You have to be careful how you speak when you’re ordering a pizza from Amelia Bedelia.
- One person’s “cheating” is another person’s ingenuity.
