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 Frozen Lake Shenanigans: Drop a red-hot piece of steel into a frozen lake, just to see how long it takes it to melt through. There’s a price, though, as of course you have to get it back.
- PTB’s very own JT Rozzero brings word of some exciting new internment plans for use after our deaths.
- Frequent readers of the Walk will know that I’m always looking for low-effort solutions to the horror and disgust of the common lawn. It’d be just ducky if I had the energy and drive to garden, but it seems there are also folks who rent other people’s lawns to garden on, which seems like the best of all worlds.
- In a former Cold War bunker in Virginia, the Mostly Lost gathering invites experts on and fans of early silent films to try to identify any odd reels and scraps of footage they can, some of which have long since lost any solid identifying information, by calling out a familiar actor or matching a plot to a known title or synopsis.
- This Week in Good News: Marriage is now legal in Bermuda. Congrats, Bermudanians!
- This Week in Mashups: There are some combinations of songs that just should not work together, and yet they’re perfect.
- The last living Nuremberg prosecutor has a valuable perspective on current events. (Warning: autoplay video)
- We all think vampires are Romanian and Dracula is Vlad the Impaler because of shifting national borders, the outsized influence of Bram Stoker, and the things he added that overtook the infinitesimal drips of actual folk tradition he used.
- Black market insulin is a thing, which is horrifying enough before considering that that’s before the coming wave of horrors in the US health care system.
- Also in horrors, India is legalizing the mining of mica (used to make eyeshadow and car paint sparkle) to try to bring the industry above board and cut down on the child labor involved.
- For the first time in decades the most ancient remaining dog breed, the New Guinea highland wild dog, has been sighted. Interesting that they note that the dogs’ ears stand straight up — I read a long time ago that loose floppy ears are a definite marker of domestication.
- The Klencke Atlas is a 6-foot-wide, 350-year-old book, so you might imagine that digitizing it takes a special setup.
- Anti-vaxxers, knowing no bottom to their barrel, are targeting immigrant communities with their pro-measles agenda.
- Sometimes I like to think about the Wednesday Walk classics, such as the dolphin that used a dead fish as a fleshlight, which I think really established the Walk brand in the first edition hosted here at the ol’ PTB. In that vein, let’s dive a little deeper into dolphin sex, shall we? Spoiler: research involves inflating dead dolphins’ penises to simulate erection!
