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!
- Where salt is scarce, some butterflies get it from turtles’ tears.
- Parents: consider Judy Blume’s advice and don’t worry too much about what your kids read. (Standard disclaimer: I don’t have kids; what do I know.)
- “Happy Birthday” is famously under copyright by Warner Music, leaving us with a variety of terrible corporate variations in chain restaurants. Some people, however, have assembled evidence to the contrary, suggesting that not only does Warner not hold the rights to the song, they’ve also gathered hundreds of millions of dollars in illegitimate fees. Welp!
- BuzzFeed has a history of TMZ. I’ll just leave that combination there.
- You all now have your marching orders for Halloween.
- All of the true DolFans will be wearing a new T-shirt this season. It’s a little wordy.
- A Utah school employee says he was fired recently because his bosses weren’t comfortable with the connotations of a post about homophones. Mm hmm.
- A man in a persistent vegetative state has recently managed to communicate with the outside world. That’s…huge.
- When a Malaysian astronaut was preparing to go to space, he ran into a bit of a thorny issue: how does a Muslim pray toward Mecca in space? The result is the start of a guide for bringing our religions with us into space, if we simply must bring them.
- Nobody actually likes honeydew. Honeydew is merely a fiction we sell ourselves, a symptom of our collective mania.
- Explore the Roman empire in the style we’re accustomed to today in this digital atlas.
- Finally, your breakfast can be properly interesting with the help of the Möbius bagel. Now show me some Möbius lox.
- “Saving yourself” until marriage is a dangerous, horrible way to indoctrinate kids.
- The Walk recently noted the entrance of Sherlock Holmes into the public domain. For defending license fees that have been deemed indefensible, the Conan Doyle estate (in a somewhat imaginative definition of the word “estate”) has been ordered to pay the legal fees of the person who challenged them.
- The Avengers assemble in 8-bit form. It’s the game we should have.
- Craig Ferguson has a replacement for The Late Late Show, and it’s Craig.
- Audio can be reconstructed from silent video of objects vibrating. Surely this won’t be used for any sort of intelligence overreach. Nah.
- In March of the Juggalos, Morgan Freeman expertly narrates the mating practices of everyone’s favorite pack of insane clown devotees slash watchlisted gang.
- Electric bacteria derive energy from the source.
- Someone converted electromagnetic waves traveling through space into sound, and the results may not quite set your mind at ease.
- YouTube is wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. One thing you’ll find in abundance is imaginative covers of peoples’ favorite film themes, a genre I hope to contribute to someday. (Incidentally, the “Meets Metal” guy’s channel is chock full of awesome riffs on themes & songs all across music. There’s an A-level YouTuber right there.)
- This Week in Crowdfunding Opportunities: the Casablanca piano is up for sale!
- We’ve come up with a whooooooole lot of names for sexytimes in the last 600 years. I beg of you, call your sweetums today (if you have one, and if not, find one (or more??)) and propose a good ol’ session of putting the devil into hell, or houghmagandy, or playing at rumpscuttle and clapperdepouch.
- In the PTB Nation Link of the Week…wait, they made a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle with boobs? Like, molded into her shell? That makes even less sense than that time the cat-people in Avatar had boobs.
