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!
- This Week in Covers: “The Final Countdown,” by Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn.
- Before you write any Elizabethan-era dialogue, be sure you have the difference between “thou” and “thee” locked down.
- There was some deplorable looting going on during the protests in Baltimore recently. It was being done, as so many crimes are, by the cops.
- A cop who murdered two unarmed people by climbing on their car hood and blasting them through the windshield has been acquitted, because it is nearly impossible to succeed in legal action against someone trained by the state as a professional murderer.
- The Egyptian Jewish community is the largest religious community in the country, and it’s dying.
- We’re often surrounded by the miseries that people inflict on each other. Personally, I find that noting some of them here is very nearly the least I can do. But sometimes it’s too much, and a person might be forgiven for becoming overwhelmed and tuning out for a bit.
- Consider Batman Returns as a movie that plays significantly with levels of social orders.
- Moviegoing audiences were robbed of a Gladiator 2 that makes Maximus some sort of cross between the Highlander and Mars, God of War. Also, Tim Burton decided to do Batman rather than Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian for some reason.
- I will read as long a speculation on the macroeconomics of Star Wars as the internet sees fit to provide.
- So one form of data that gets hoovered up into the NSA’s vast storage is personal photographs. Including your nudes.
- A painter with synesthesia describes what it’s like to cross your senses, and paints some famous songs.
- With all the talk of self-driving cars going around, you had to know there would be a self-driving semi truck on the way. At least we might wind up with fewer truckers jacked up on No-Doz trying to drive through the night.
- #YesAllWomen is one year old.
- How much of your life, to date, has the United States spent at war?
- The world’s oldest person keeps dying. (Note: there’s a parenthetical toward the end of this article that begins “Strangely…” and yet is not at all strange. Oh well.)
- The Pretentious-O-Meter will show you what a douche you really are. Consider it a digital bosom buddy.
- The oldest known medical consent form dates back to the Ottoman Empire of the 16th century, for a bladder stone removal.
- Nearsightedness might be a side effect of staying inside.
- Still in One Piece is a porcelain sculpture that manages to be simultaneously sweet and haunting.
- Tug of war can escalate quickly.
