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.
- Perhaps it’s not the most amazing revelation that swords are metal as hell. For instance, sometimes when you start polishing an old sword, the sword bleeds.
- As the amount of data we’re storing increases, especially the amount of data we store on cloud services, the most reliable backup medium continues, amazingly, to be magnetic tape.
- It’s getting to be autumn in the northern hemisphere, which means it’s time for those of us who are able to to go get our flu shots! Consider all of the people you help protect when you do.
- Jason Greenhouse brings word of a nice gay penguin couple that adopted an abandoned chick. I hope this family is very happy together.
- This Week in Sports: The new Philly Flyers mascot is very very good, and now appears in a variety of stock photos as well as your dreams!
- Nintendo would like the opportunity to sell you a Mario ROM you can go and download for your own damn self. (There are some people disputing whether Nintendo would’ve gotten an identical ROM by taking a legitimate image of the game on their own. I can’t really speak to the technicalities — that sounds plausible, but so does the lazier and more hypocritical scenario.)
- It’s easy to laugh at people doing simple tasks badly in infomercials, and they are hilarious, but a lot of the items people dismiss as useless wastes of time and plastic are products that let people with physical disabilities be a little more independent, whose manufacturers are simply trying to sell off excess stock or reach a wider market.
- The home inspection nightmare is a fascinating genre of quick fixes that never got done properly. Seriously, people, you want to keep your water and your electricity quite separate.
- This Week in Interior Decorating: This café in Seoul is decorated as if that A-Ha video came to life.
- Lots of us are experiencing some rude awakenings about our culture’s indifference and/or hostility toward sexual abuse. (Lots of us have no business just now having an awakening, but the least we can do is get on board going forward.) In that context, it might be worth revisiting things like Lyle and Erik Menendez’s abuse allegations that most people seemed to dismiss out of hand.
- The only debate in this year’s gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania was moderated by Alex Trebek. 2018, everybody.
- Creeeepy is an online store set up by eight-year-old Nolan (and a parent), and is definitely where you need to get this year’s spoopy Halloween gear.
- Something I learned this week: Some ants may be able to see the stars in the night sky.
- Lab-grown meat seems like a great way to both deflect environmental and ethical concerns about animal husbandry, and create a lot of detailed concerns for vegans and Jews who keep kosher to iron out.
- Everything is awful, but this dog is tap-dancing.
