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.
- Lesbian elders trying out current lesbian slang and gay elders trying out current gay slang really make my day. (The selection of gay slang really does highlight how much of it is taken directly from black women, though, which is A Whole Thing.)
- In Texas, a police sergeant was dosed with fentanyl, possibly from a flyer left on her car, which invites the question: if you have access to the good stuff, why waste it on a cop?
- In my Solo podcast I went in pretty hard on the idea of a Boba Fett movie, and indeed the idea of Boba Fett as a thing some people actually seem interested in. Upon hearing the premise for the Fett film, however, I have to say I’m ready to be convinced.
- The sub-prime car-lending market is heading in the same direction the sub-prime housing market did before the Global Economic Collapse ten years ago, so that’s swell.
- Don’t worry though, predatory lending is alive and well in housing.
- One more on predatory lending: Apparently cold-mailing checks to people and hoping they’re desperate enough to cash them and incur ridiculous fees & interest is an actual factual business model. (Autoplay video)
- This Week in Sports: The World Cup often inspires psychic animals to predict matches, but as PTBN Grand Poobah Brad Hindscrooge reminds us, this often ends in culinary tragedy. (For real, though, octopodes along with dolphins are probably the closest to human-understandable intelligence of any non-humans, so…sigh.)
- Friend of the Walk Jordan Duncan brings word of the evolutionary history of descended testes, a trait with a great deal of variation. The article says the researchers leading the way on this field of study “did not start out targeting testicles,” which is probably true for a lot of us, but I really think that as long as you’re not harming anyone you should go wild once in a while.
- Also in testicles, I don’t think there are a lot of jobs that might involve ripping one off, but I guess MMA fighter is one of them.
- This Week in the March of Technology: Monolithic touchscreens are cool and all, but if you want something retail employees can use most efficiently, or something a person can use while driving, there are inherent limitations.
- We don’t often think of the medieval world as one that connected disparate nations and cultures, but even though it would take some time to travel great distances there were trade routes spreading all across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
- All right, here’s a sad one. Buzz Aldrin is suing family members for abusively seizing control of his assets. Which happens to a lot of older people, but it gets publicized a lot more when the person alleging elder abuse walked on the moon.
- This Week in Art: Remember the back covers of gag magazines, that would reform into different images when you folded and unfolded them? I feel like Ben avli(S) is taking that to a whole new level.
