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 informative.
- Simone Biles ended her latest world gymnastics championship-winning routine with a literal mic drop, because this is her world and the rest of us are just living in it.
- The results are in, and the winner of Fat Bear Week is Holly, a very very good bear indeed.
- Prehistoric humans bottle-fed their babies with clay pots and funnels.
- Boatloads of musicians in the 60s and 70s appear on album covers in the same wicker chair, taking part in a long tradition on portrait photography.
- You can buy the real-deal screen-used Leonardo costume from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III — it’s nearly rotted away over the years, but it can be your horrifying rotting turtle man, and we all deserve something that’ll make us happy.
- In Spain, two altar boys were unjustly punished for simply wanting to make church a little more fun.
- Chances are that if you’ve noticed a harp playing in a song, movie, or TV show, it was being played by Gayle Levant, who’s played on everything from Nat King Cole and Ray Charles albums to Titanic and Lost. Lost in particular relied on the harp as a featured instrument A LOT.
- The experimental spirit lives on in such daring research questions as “what happens if you play the bagpipes while bungee-jumping?” I never thought I’d get to hear what the doppler effect does to bagpipes, but the internet is here to provide. (Warning: upkilt camera view, possibly NSFW)
- The sounds of a 486 computer booting up are like sliding under a warm blanket for many of us.
- A new lawsuit alleges that the opening theme from X-Men: The Animated Series was plagiarized from the opening of Linda, a cop show that was a hit in Hungary in the 80s. While knowing neither what the precise legal definition of musical theft, now how the Hungarian composer’s estate could prove that his US counterpart knew about Linda, nor even whether there’s a statute of limitations on this sort of thing, I can at least say that the two pieces definitely seem to have a familial relation. The X-Men version does add a climax to the melody, though, and of course the most essential element, the tolling bell.
- Also in superheroes: Some adaptations stray so far from the source material that they become unrecognizable. When are we going to get an accurate movie version of J.D. Salinger’s Spider-Man?
- Let’s check in on movement atheism for a second — still a shitshow? Still a shitshow.
