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 current state (no pun intended) of Puerto Rico is officially really very bad. Imagine trying to restore agriculture and other essential pieces of infrastructure in your home if it was similarly devastated.
- It seems like the time to get a good perspective on indoctrinating children with jingoistic propaganda.
- This Week in Mad Poopers: PTBN’s very own Jason Greenhouse has made this a regular feature by providing another harrowing tale of public defecation. Seriously, folks, we may disagree on a few things but we can have some fucking ground floor of decency.
- This Week in Comics: Track the use of multi-panel pans over the last century.
- Let’s check in on a more with-it perspective on comics, while we’re here.
- Friend of the Walk Randy Landau brings word of the cutest li’l BMW you ever did see, a forebearer of some small-car concepts we still have to deal with.
- Serena Williams’ letter to her mom is really quite sweet.
- The ol’ Walk aims to be of service to all of you fine readers. For instance, if you’re single and ready to mingle, might I suggest this surefire pickup line?
- Astronomical modeling software lets you do a lot of cool things, like calculating when Sappho wrote poems mentioning the Pleiades.
- Hans Zimmer is so omnipresent in high-profile movies that even mainstream publications are wondering if maybe it’s a bit much at this point. (Many cranks on hobbyist message boards — and I count myself among their number — were at this point by the time his composer-mentorship program started turning out a lot of mini-Zimmers and his sound really proliferated by the end of the 90s, with Gladiator ushering in one imperial phase.)
- Gatorade was recently fined $300000 for telling kids to avoid water.
- It’s easy to chide Kodak for rolling its collective eyes at digital photography when one of its engineers invented it in 1973, but to be fair, no one wants to take 23 seconds to take a picture before recording it to a cassette tape.
- I’m sure lots of people are going to want the new Iphone, but consider what else you can spend that money on.
- B.o.B. is trying to raise money to send satellites into orbit to see if the Earth is flat. I’m pretty sure there are already satellite photos — and photos from space shuttles, the international space station, and every other spacefaring vehicle ever hurled off the surface of this hell-orb — that he could look at any time he wants. Why he’d trust another one, I do not know.
- It’s nice to see Alejandro Villanueva apologize for accidentally making a spectacle of himself last Sunday.
- As a new Star Trek show trods across our TV screens (as discussed on the ol’ Spectacular), I hope others will join me in hoping that it will have appropriately ropey fight choreography. The second episode had some nice close-quarters combat, but I’m waiting for the double axehandle, or Captain Kirk’s patented cross-body. I’d accept the TNG palm strike to the forehead. Even the recent movies integrated The Galaxy’s Worst Back Body Drop; you just can’t have Star Trek without it.
- If you are or know someone who wants to leave the Mormon church without being hounded, QuitMormon can help.
- Nursing homes in Portugal are doing the bottle flip challenge, and it’s as lovely as you imagine. Happy elderly dabs are some of the best dabs.
- House flippers played a crucial role in the 2007 housing bubble burst. My aunt still keeps trying to get me to start flipping apartments with her; think I’ll stay out of that boondoggle.
- Just like the makers of dictionaries have to decide when to start including words and how to define them (despite a lot of folks’ tendency to treat the dictionary like it was handed down from on high rather than made by actual factual human beings), so too must they decide when a word has outlived its use and can be omitted. Other than the humongous tomes of the truly unabridged dictionaries, of course.
