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!
- Allow me a quick Ferguson update. More than 40 days after murdering Mike Brown, Darren Wilson has received several paychecks and no indictments or arrest warrants. The streetside memorial to Mike Brown was set on fire a couple nights ago; scroll down for a neat photo of some cops standing around watching it burn.
- How many of your favorite authors and other luminaries hooked up with each other at some point? See the chart to trace the sensual connections from Walt Whitman to Virginia Woolf, from Oscar wilde to Marlon Brando, from Bram Stoker to Marilyn Monroe.
- Wake Forest’s big recruiting gimmick is photoshopping magazine covers to feature children with celebrities. Because Selena Gomez is your reward for playing football. Uh huh.
- A ninth-grader’s science-fair project greatly simplifies laparoscopic surgery. Well done, kid!
- This week is bisexual awareness week. So I hope you’re aware.
- If you haven’t read ESPN’s report on how deep the rabbit-hole of horror goes with the Ravens organization, steady yourself and give it a go. Amazingly, it almost makes team management look even worse than the violent domestic abuser.
- Last week, Scotland voted against declaring independence; the dreams of a thousand dreamers died that day. Scotland still gets something out of it, though. (Incidentally, a completely informal (in the best way) Grindr poll predicted the result with a 54-46 split, which turned out to be accurate within one percentage point.)
- Hear Marvin Gaye’s fabulous, fabulous voice more clearly when it’s on its own.
- We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You built a robotic Vince McMahon! Ahhhhhh, damn you! Damn you all to hell! IN A CELLLLLL!
- The mellifluous Brad Woodling provides what he feels is the best sports moment of 2014. While I have a soft spot for Charlotte Kalla’s finish in the relay race at the Olympics, an argument can be made. (This video doesn’t quite do justice to Kalla; it’s from her home country, but the English commentary on NBCSN was thrilling in its own right.)
- Time is a flat circle. U2 has done all this before, and U2 will do all this again.
- We live in advanced times. We live in a time when any of the iconic photographs of history can be recreated using John Malkovich.
- Every life is a pile of good things and bad things, and Vincent Van Gogh’s pile may have been a bit different than previously suspected: biographers are now claiming that he didn’t kill himself, that he was merely covering for the horrible accident of some children.
- The current crop of massively popular dystopias may not be the best idea.
- This Week in Excellent Headlines: Randy Eurasians Surprise Scientists with Ancient Sex Romp.
- This Week in Excellent Lede Paragraphs: “Ghostbusters is the best comedy ever made about the limits of the Lovecraftian worldview.”
- Imagine some popular old-timey comic-strip characters (many of which are still in our newspapers today). Then imagine their artists drawing them blindfolded. Some are unrecognizable, while some are remarkably close. Dagwood takes on a delightful Hirschfeld-like caricature style.
- Reporting on the Times is a documentary about the New York Times minimizing and/or turning away from the Holocaust as it happened. As with pretty much any examination of people’s behavior during the Holocaust, it’s pretty damning.
- Biological dark matter is inside you, and we don’t yet know what it wants. Have a nice day!
- We’ve reached the twentieth anniversary of The Shawshank Redemption, one of the greatest of films (no matter what some people on a website say).
- The 2014 Ig Nobel Prize winners have been decided, including some serious research as to the probability of slipping on a banana peel, “whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat,” the psychology of staying up late, the neuroscience behind people projecting their imaginations onto toast, and the use of bacon to treat nosebleeds. You know, friends, I’ve had a whole lot of nosebleeds in my day, but I never tried packing my nose with bacon; I typically opted to use something more absorbent, or to simply drip into a nearby wastepaper basket for a while. (I was such a popular teen!!)
- This Week in Music: “99 Red Balloons,” played on actual red balloons.
