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!
- There are lots of controversial issues in the world. There’s lots of strife, lots of argument, lots of shouting matches. One thing I think we can all agree on, though, is that unboxing videos are over.
- The American Psychological Association collaborated with war criminals to justify torture. So there’s a thing.
- Business Baby is one high-powered executive you do NOT want to double-book.
- Miniature robots borrow biological features of geckos to climb with objects weighing over a hundred times more than they do. And they’re not coming for you, no way no how.
- Amazon wants to sell you every possible thing there is in existence. Including the services of some lovely goats to graze upon your lands. They leave you fertilizer as a bonus!
- There are lots of ways to quit a job. A lot of the ones you might find online are going to be for glorious scorched-earth departures from workplaces you hate, but sometimes it’s nice to rock the boat a little when you want to leave a good impression on your way out.
- Monowi, Nebraska is a town that seems to consist of a library, a tavern, and one resident who elected herself mayor and granted her own liquor license for the tavern. Sounds like a lovely place.
- Protests should be peaceful, people say. Indeed. Because the history of peaceful protest is long and fruitful.
- In Nevada, people who are acquitted in a legal case can ask that exhibits in the case be destroyed, which is a pretty plum arrangement for Floyd Mayweather.
- This Week in Responsible Gun Owners: security people in and around the US capitol just keep leaving loaded guns sitting around.
- RIP Alexia Christian, killed by cops who want you to believe she either had the magical ability to shoot a gun after being searched, handcuffed, and placed in a cop car, or was detained by cops too stupid to do any of that. RIP Erick Emmanuel Salas Sanchez, killed by cops who want you to believe they first used a taser, “but it had no effect.” RIP Andrew Jackson (only time you’ll catch me saying that), murdered by a cop who apparently wasn’t given as much training in non-lethally disarming someone with a knife as, say, your average psych ward nurse. RIP Phillip White, who was handcuffed by cops and fed to their dog. Seriously. Cops had their dog tear into a person’s face. This is what cops do.
- Racial strife continues in Israel as well, where Ethiopian Jews are subjected to burdensome immigration regulations and lied to about injections that turn out to be birth control. You know, there’s a certain hope that a history of oppression will make a people more aware of other forms of oppression; the history of anti-Semitism is just about as long as the history of history, even aside from Judaism’s foundational myths (“remember that you were slaves in Egypt,” as I-don’t-know-how-many verses in the Torah remind us), yet here we are. There’s a certain hope that the experience of pain, and a long memory of pain, can make us kinder to others in pain. Perhaps this is foolish, because here we are.
- There’s a new report about the sexual assault epidemic in the US military.
- Ebola survivors can harbor the disease in semen far longer than previously thought. I mean, people with applicable organs should pretty much always use condoms anyway, but Ebola survivors should super-duper always use condoms.
- This has been a heavy week, because the world is often awful and has many cops in it. For some contrast, check out a cat sleeping in the Roman Coliseum.
- If you work better with various forms of background noise, check out this noise generator.
- Your brain needs touch.
- In a heartening move, Amazon is phasing out gendered labels for children’s toys. A boy’s toy is a toy a boy has, and a girl’s toy is a toy a girl has; this shouldn’t be a difficult concept.
- Brittany Wright makes produce look beautiful with fantastic color gradients.
- Apparently the usage of “um” vs. “uh” varies regionally in the US.
- Let’s bring this one right back around. Here’s a picture of Dave Grohl with his ass on fire.
