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? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- This Week in Profiles in Courage: A person is crawling along the path of the London Marathon in a gorilla suit to raise money for a gorilla conservation charity.
- PTBN’s grand poobah, JT Rozzero, brings word of a man who knows what his priorities are, and his priorities are beer. (Autoplay video.)
- JT also wants you to know how to get your makeup so, so right.
- Often it’s important for an artist to have a particular niche — a medium, a subject, a perspective. You can find all of these in one artist’s series of paintings of Chase banks on fire.
- At some point in life, you have to decide where you fall on the sandwich alignment chart.
- It’s important to eat your vegetables, but it’s also important to get some perspective on them.
- Naked mole rats can survive conditions that would kill any other mammal, including long periods with little to no oxygen.
- This Week in Theatre: Reimaginings of Shakespeare are numerous, and sometimes not incredible, but I do wish I could see King Lear with Sheep.
- RIP Vanessa Raghubar, killed by a drunk cop.
- Sometimes the internet is an okay place.
- This Week in Murder: There’s much made of the horrifying implications of carrying around internet-enabled devices that are constantly reporting your location and activities (and maybe recording you), but every now and then you get something like the fitbit that reported a woman walking around her house for an hour after her husband said an intruder killed her.
- Presidential Museums are interesting things, embarking on long transitions from hagiographic presentations by people deeply invested in the presidents in the years directly after they’ve left office, hopefully to more dispassionate historical examinations. (And maybe back to hagiography — how many museums for most 19th-century US presidents excuse or ignore their white supremacy? Like, what’s the Andrew Jackson museum like?) Also: I’ll admit that when I first saw the photo of the staircase at the Gerald Ford museum I thought it might be the one he fell off of, though the truth is rather more serious.
- Good for the members of the 2000 US Olympic gymnastics team for speaking out about what they endured. (Warning: child abuse)
- This Week in Counterintuitive Things You Can Feel Smart for Knowing: Apparently speed limits, in the US at least, don’t really affect how fast people drive but should still probably be higher.
- The best way to avoid awkward social interactions might be to turn into a tree. Who among us hasn’t been there, eh?
- The Affordable Care Act, and the attendant reduction in medical costs for millions of people in the US, correlates with filings for personal bankruptcy getting cut in half. Which is pretty good news unless you’re in love with medical debt.
- Folks love trying to figure out whether our cats really love us or not, all the better to anthropomorphize them with. Meanwhile, I’m secure in the knowledge that mine is still suffering from deep-seated PTSD but realizes that I’m the one providing his food and brushings.