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.
- The thing that’s really a wonderment after the past week of hurricane-related strife in the Caribbean and southeastern US is: did someone take these parrots in?? (At least, it is now that we’ve had wellness checks on Chad and The Hard-Traveling Fanboys and others in the PTBN family.)
- Holy beans, someone translated the Voynich manuscript!
- Sometimes those “find your ancestry through a mail-order DNA test” reports get pretty fraught.
- After the swarming of various domestic terrorist movements in the US over the last several years, I’m just glad some of their victims are doing all right. Good for Zoe Quinn.
- This is an interesting perspective that makes sense of the ever-shifting tides of Star Wars directors.
- Social constructs get a lot of crap, because I don’t think people understand that every category distinction humans made to describe the world was made up by humans and is subject to varying levels of arbitrariness. Like, the distinction between fruits and vegetables is a social construct.
- If you and/or your sweetums are looking to spice things up in the bedroom — or, y’know, wherever — you can always take some tips from the animal kingdom.
- Blankets and top sheets are nearly universal among humans, for psychological and physiological reasons.
- This Week in Sculpture: Kudos to the creator of the ghost clock.
- RIP Edith Windsor.
- RIP Jerry Pournelle.
- It’s worth remembering that Freud still remains in the cultural consciousness because he was a good writer and made provocative declarations, not because of, like, science and stuff.
- If you can, definitely make your way to the annual tomato fight.
- The year 2017 is beyond absurd, obviously. The latest development is the outing of the author of My Immortal. Seriously. What even is this year.
- This Week in Statues That Need to Come Down: Yiiiiiiiiiikes.
- There may be a compromise solution for some statues, though.
- There’s a whole cottage industry in making fun of McMansions and other architectural atrocities. Even if they mainly exist for the purposes of conspicuous consumption, whyyyyyyy do rich people think things like this are good ideas?
- This Week in Celebrity Photoshoots: More people need to add puppies to more photoshoots. Like, all the ones that don’t have cats.
