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!
- Here’s The Clash checking out at a grocery store. Your argument is invalid.
- Birds are the closest living descendants of the dinosaurs. They’re so close, in fact, that if you tweak a couple of genes in a chicken it will develop with a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak.
- Minimal Maps highlights specific land features of the US’ lower 48, so you can see where all the forestry is, or the water. The precious, precious water.
- Jahn-Taller metals could be highly fascinating.
- The Musical Instrument Museum has an octobass, a massive instrument that basically looks like Honey I Blew Up the Bass.
- And now, a few selections from the worldwide misery file. First: RIP London Chanel.
- There are no charges filed against the NYPD thug who shoved a fourteen-year-old child through a window during a bit of stop-and-frisk abuse. Also in cops, New Orleans still actively employs at least a dozen cops who’ve been charged with rape and/or child porn; and these are only some people who’ve actually been charged.
- The Guarani-Kaiowá tribe, native to what was colonized and named Brazil, might commit mass suicide if the Brazilian government doesn’t stop trying to evict the members from their land.
- In 2012, an Italian woman visiting England was forcibly sedated before a C-section was performed without her consent, after which her forcibly-birthed child was kept by Essex social services, apparently because the mother is bipolar and had a panic attack. A couple notes. Many people stop taking psych meds during pregnancy due to the risk of side effects, lest you think this woman irresponsible somehow. Even aside from that, lots of people on and off meds have panic attacks. For anyone to misunderstand this to such a degree to use a C-section as an assault is monstrous enough, and doubly so for social services to act so monstrously. The child is now being adopted by a British couple.
- Franchise marketing has tendrils aplenty, reaching to all parts of life with novelty souvenirs of your favorite media properties, including some sex toys that weren’t properly thought out. (NSFW I guess, because there’re pictures of sex toys. Seriously, though, what is it with these people making their dick substitutes look like anonymous, amorphous blobs rather than, y’know, dicks? (To be fair, there are lots of people who are interested in stimulation who have no interest in dicks. TEHO, YMMV, OMG LOL.))
- Fabergé fractals look like fantastically-crafted magical objects from the Islamic Golden Age.
- A group of vicars and other professional Christians ride the rides at a rockin’ theme park. Does what it says on the tin. If you expect a lot of them to be praying during the scary parts of the rides, you will not be disappointed. Also, dig the ones cracking open their Bibles in the middle of a water ride.
- This Week in Art: put some lovely Renaissance-era scenes in modern locations.
- The editors of Spin assembled their top 300 albums of the last 30 years. I’ve probably heard of about twelve percent of the selections, so have at it, music folks.
- You can re-light a candle immediately after blowing it out by holding a lit match an inch or two above the wick, because the flame can travel through the wax vapor in the smoke.
- Living concrete takes advantage of bacteria that produce limestone to create concrete structures that seal their own cracks with new stone. Amazing.
