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. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Walk? Email Glenn!
- L’Shana Tova to everyone being written and sealed in the book of life for another year. Have a happy 5776, folks.
- Sometimes there are valuable lessons to be gleaned from the past. Sprinkling lead into wine to sweeten it is not one of them.
- Amazon has been in the book business for twenty years now.
- So much for National Geographic. It’ll all go along these lines soon.
- In Europe, Kissing, Petting, and Fucking are all reasonably close together…but Wedding is up a much longer road.
- Hwætever
- Ol’ Zucky says the official dislike button is on the way. Thank goodness there’ll finally be a way to express negativity on The Facebook. I really needed another passive-aggressive thing to do before unfollowing anyone expressing conservative sentiment in my feed.
- This Week in Things Ethnic Minorities in the US Can’t Do Without Being Assaulted by Cops: in California, cops claim they feared their lives were in danger because of a guy holding a cell phone in his garage, because cops are the biggest of the scaredy-cat whiners we have going; in Harlem, Kamilah Brock was taken hostage by the NYPD, the dominant gang in New York City, who proceeded to haul her to a psych ward because they couldn’t believe a black woman could possibly own a BMW.
- This Week in Christian Supremacy: a woman who objected to a court forcing her to see a counselor who took up session time with prayer lost custody of her children as a result.
- National borders around the world.
- Last bummer for this week: take a minute to think about the role of climate change in the unfolding situation in Syria.
- I have got to find a way to get hooked up with tickets for The Spice Grohls.
- When shit gets real and you need a way to express the epic quality of the task before you, try out “YMCA” edited & cajoled into a minor key. There are so many key-transpositions out there on this wide wonderful internet of ours, and I will keep barreling through them when the thought arises.
- Punch Your Way to Heaven is, and I’m going to quote here, “a fun retro action game created for the GameBoy Jam, in which you must punch people in the face and climb up their dead bodies to reach heaven and fight God.” This seems a much more reasonable response to the supposition of a deity than the most common social movements.
- I’m not one to cast aspersions on the selfie stick. I generally try to shy away from absolutes in life, but one that I’ve never seen adequately contradicted is that anyone earnestly saying that “kids these days” are somehow lesser, because of whatever someone wants to display grumptitude about, is full of shit. I’m sorry you didn’t have cell phones in your day, grandpa, but now almost everyone has a smallish rectangle in their pocket that gives them access to large swaths of all human knowledge…&c., &c. You might want to rethink the selfie stick, though, if you’re going to be driving.
- It seems that sperm whales don’t just have culture, their clicks have dialects.
- You’ve probably got to be prepared for some awkward questions if you’re a sex educator. (Work-safetiness note: link includes fanciful diagrams of human genitals.)
- Homo naledi is a newly-identified human relative that lived in ancient South Africa, and apparently treated their dead in a way previously considered unique to Homo sapiens.
- Bill Murray owns a baseball team. This is a real thing that’s happened. His official title, much like Mike Quackenbush, is Director of Fun.
- Folic acid is a required additive to enriched flour, a great victory for public health that helps protect children from birth defects and such. It’s not, however, an additive in the flour used to make masa, and so people who eat more tortillas than other bread products are left out of these great benefits. That could change soon.
