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. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Wednesday Walk? Email Glenn!
- It’s pretty likely that these dreams have crossed the minds of many readers.
- Jon Bois writes sports articles the way they should be written. (If you care to any degree and in any amount about US football and haven’t read his Breaking Madden series, start at the bottom of the archive and read them all. Trust me.)
- RIP Ruby Dee.
- The Jacksonville Jaguars are taking out 9500 seats in their home stadium to install luxury decks with pools. Okay then. (Warning: autoplay video)
- If you’ve ever wondered what my sense of humor is (and really, why would you), it can be imagined as the tension of a string tied at one end to the most innocent, silly puns there are and at the other end to Cuil Theory.
- Congratulations to the new United States Poet Laureate!
- There’s a significant black market in dinosaur bones.
- What gives books their distinct smells?
- The Roman poet Catullus wrote one poem so explicit that no English translations were published until just a few decades ago.
- The anniversary of Dock Ellis’ acid-fueled no-hitter recently passed, and it’s still a hell of a story.
- This Week in Street Art: finally, our neighborhoods are watched by our finest heroes.
- Kitty litter became a consumer product because of a split-second substitution, and is also used to house nuclear waste.
- A lot of headlines have flown around recently declaring that the Turing Test has been passed. Not so fast.
- You can actually make a .zip file that contains itself infinitely. Finally, we’ve realized the dreams of Phil Katz.
- One pseudonymous internet commenter on grief: “I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. … I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life.”
- Public water can be analyzed in real time to detect residual traces of drugs. So that’s exciting.
- Pixeltrek allows you to roam the corridors of the Enterprise-D and go where you wish — just don’t bother the Andorian in the bathroom.
- Joel Micah Harris’ DeviantArt page is a treasure trove of superhero manatees.
- Jason Krowe brings news of a car that, if all goes according to plan, will truly travel at ludicrous speed.
- In the PTB Nation Links of the Week, our travels through the last few decades of cinema brought us to 1978, 1979, and 1980. If you’re reading this on Wednesday afternoon or later, you can find 1981 right here.
