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.
- It’s amazing what a heroic march can do for a simple animal video.
- A gila monster doesn’t have bumpy skin — it has a bumpy skull.
- Any behavior you’d want to call “lazy” has causes and contexts — laziness effectively doesn’t exist. Developing enough empathy to really integrate it into our lives and judgments of others (and ourselves), meanwhile, is a Life Project for many of us.
- Official signage is one way we process our history and highlight what we find significant — such-and-such battle took place here, George Washington slept here (a sign you can find in pretty much every town in New England), etc. In New Hampshire, the creation of the BASIC programming language is joining those historical markers.
- (Warning: sexual assault) PTBN’s JT Rozzero brings word of Kellen Winslow’s longstanding pattern of exposing himself to teammates, masturbating in front of them, and other forms of constant improprieties, which was apparently happening for a long time before the rape and indecent exposure he’s actually been convicted of.
- This Week in Oral Histories of Everything: The genius that is “PUT THE SUGAR IN THE WATER” and related concepts.
- No, Seriously, Oral Histories of Everything: The rise and fall of Four Loko. Hey, remember when Four Loko had a legitimate cultural moment?
- This Week in Nature: Lay down and look at some trees.
- Tragically, the Toronto GarfieldEATS restaurant has not made as big a splash as anticipated. Normally even a bad pizza is still pretty good just because it’s pizza, but these may not be recoverable.
- Living languages are in a constant state of change, and the history of language is the story of a swirling mass of collective changes over time as languages develop and split off from each other. Some remaining common words or word roots indicate the relationships between languages, but usually even these have small differences — except for the trusty ol’ lox, which meant salmon even thousands of years before it ever met schmear.
- Quick poll: Hello strangers, what drugs have you done? Have you ever accidentally done meth?
- So this is where we are in US politics now: The US government is openly operating concentration camps (again). We’re literally reusing a 1940s-era concentration camp in Oklahoma. “Never again” has to mean never again to anyone. Donating to good causes is important but feels inadequate to the moment. I don’t know what else to tell you to do, but here we are.
