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!
- Friend of the Walk Steve Wille brings word of one intrepid douche’s lawsuit for seventeen dollars in damages from the offense of texting during a movie and walking out on the date when asked to stop texting. If someone gets up and walks out of a date, I don’t know how you find the temerity to attempt any sort of communication again, let alone file a lawsuit in an actual factual court.
- Friend of the Walk Andy Halleen sends a primo mashup, Earth Wind & Fire plus Ozzy.
- So Star Trek: Legacy has been making the rounds in the last couple of weeks. It’s essentially a 20-minute fan cut-down of Star Trek: The Motion Picture that uses Daft Punk’s score from Tron: Legacy instead of Jerry Goldsmith’s Star Trek score. Now, I actually really like the Daft Punk score — it’s like a modern Hans Zimmer rhythm-and-big-epic-chords score (complete with the Horn of Doom that became ubiquitous after Inception) imbued with more of a melodic sense than Zimmer typically brings to bear these days. It’s good, solid stuff; check out a couple of tracks. But, as I mentioned in my podcast on Star Trek I, the score is one of the most important elements of the movie, animating entire sequences and bringing more of a sense of the mysterious and the epic than the script did. At the risk of overreacting to someone’s funtime fan project, replacing it is almost sacrilege. Still, it stands as an example of how scoring — and editing the whole thing like a 20-minute trailer — can give you a very different impression of the same source material.
- If you haven’t opted out of Twitter’s new tracking settings, maybe go do so.
- This Week in Neural Networks, Learning Computers: Feed an algorithm a list of paint colors and ask it to name some new ones, and you get a whole lot of ideas. Which one are you?? I’m Ronching Blue!
- RIP Jeremy Mardis, a 6-year-old murdered by cops. (And because he was white, his murderers actually face consequences.)
- This Week in Time Travel: Bless the person who brought dabbing to World War II.
- “Never Again” is a hell of a slogan; so is “Never Forget.” We say it about the Holocaust. Some say it about the Armenians. You might say it about Rwanda, or Sudan, or any number of places and peoples. The point people often miss is that Never Again can’t just mean the occasional lip service to Jews — Never Again means never again anywhere, to anyone. It means not making the exact same mistakes and displaying the exact same cowardice people showed during the Holocaust; it means, for one, other countries not denying admission to people who are being actively eliminated. Sometimes, at least, someone listens.
- In happier news, last week the ol’ Walk featured a should-be-movie about an elite LGBT-saving commando unit, and this week there’s another thrilling tale in the Russian lesbian who escaped her abusive family by sailing across the Mediterranean and Atlantic to be with her love in Canada.
- Also in good news, Alabama is poised to restore voting rights to thousands of people who’ve been disenfranchised. It’s incredibly rare to see good news on voting rights in the US these days.
- In somewhat more tame but still fine news, the New York Pride march will be broadcast on ABC this year. Well, it’ll be shown on channel 7 in the tri-state area; can’t have it showing on red-state affiliates, you know. I mentioned this to my brother and he asked whether this is a sign of growing acceptance or growing corporatization, and of course it’s both — it was palpable when I went two years ago (in the midst of everyone’s great joy upon the legalization of marriage), when the representation of all different ethnic and social groups within the LGBTQIAP+ community took place between floats advertising different banks. But still, it’ll be on TV just like the Thanksgiving Day parade, cool.
- This Week in What to do with Your Earthly Remains: Now you can have your ashes pressed into a vinyl record. I suppose it’s up to you whether to record a message for your loved ones or record your favorite dubstep remix.
- The Dutch King has been leading a duplicitous double life…as an airline pilot. This is the political news in some countries.
- The old canard about native words for snow isn’t quite right, but it does seem that there are more than fifty German words for apple cores. German is such a beautiful language.
- Always remember, it’s never too early to start talking to your cat about abstinence. I mean, it’ll accomplish about as much as talking to anyone else about abstinence.
- Time for our animal-assisted breathing exercises. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch ducks making use of their special ramp at the US Capitol pond, the best of government installations.
