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!
- Medical science and art meet in Bill’s Brain, a series of MRI images in the form of a hooked rug. Well done.
- Some racists are apparently planning on boycotting the new Star Wars movie because it has too gosh-darn many non-white people in it and its director is Jewish. I mean, obviously, fuck ’em; haters gonna hate, white supremacists gonna white supremacist. But also, who looks at the one-and-a-half black people in the Star Wars trilogy and thinks, sure, that seems about right? (Note: Link contains explicit examples of racist/antisemitic propaganda. Like, in a much more concentrated form than Western culture in general.)
- Friend of the Walk Steve Wille sent word in yesterday about an ominous death on an Aer Lingus flight when a man ran amok, bit another passenger, and died. What could cause this suddent bout of violence — demonic possession? Sudden ideological conversion? Brain-implant triggering to test the remote control of covert government agents? Nah, dude was a drug mule and had two pounds of cocaine in his stomach.
- This Week in Things Black People Can’t Do Without Harrassment or Worse: sing in church. Literally. I mean, earlier this year we saw all too tragically that black people can’t even hold a study group in a church without being gunned down, but suing people for having a choir practice?
- Meanwhile in Afghanistan, NATO bombed a hospital, presumably because something something protect our freedoms blah blah blah flags.
- Meanwhile in Canada, a new law creates different classes of citizen based on whether a person has or could be eligible for citizenship in another country — which, because of the Law of Return in Israel, includes virtually all Canadian Jews. This is cramping my hazy un-thought-out plan to flee directly to Canada should things get seriously worse in my own country. Anyway, I hear Canadians have elected a somewhat better government now? Best wishes from down south, Canadian Walkers.
- The Macintosh Phone is the Iphone twenty years earlier. Bonus points for putting a serial port on the bottom.
- An early draft of the King James Bible has been found, highlighting the fact that it’s a patchwork of different people’s translations into English. (And weren’t they translations of earlier translations anyway? If I recall correctly, and I might not, the writers of the KJV were working from Latin translations more than the original Hebrew & Greek. (Or Aramaic? I don’t know much about New Testament scholarship, and Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible come from the original.))
- This casting list for Pulp Fiction is presumably the sort of thing you don’t want getting out, but hopefully by now it’s been long enough that it won’t rough up anyone’s ego if they were the second choice or whatever. Anyway, there’re a bunch of interesting alternate universes here: Pulp Fiction with Nicholas Cage, or Larry Fishburne, or Tommy Lee Jones? Or Eddie Murphy??
- An artist hired to provide graffiti for background walls on Homeland called out the show for racism from within the show. Again, well done.
- This Week in Pouring Molten Metal into Things: aluminum into a watermelon!
- Bios is an urn that grows a tree in the spot where you bury your loved ones’ ashes. Turn cemeteries into forests.
- It can be embarrassing to butt-dial someone, especially someone you have no intention of talking to. (I once got butt-dialed by someone a week after we had a friendship-breakup, and then got butt-dialed again a few days later by that person’s mom — whooooooops!) I’m not sure if it’s better or worse to butt-dial 911.
- Google has removed its famous Don’t Be Evil verbiage. Welp, the world’s their oyster now. The replacement is apparently Do the Right Thing, which can basically mean anything to anyone…not that “evil” couldn’t necessarily.
- This just in: water is wet, and kids are happier and healthier when their families are less poor. You hear that money doesn’t buy happiness, and I guess what most people are referring to when they say that is genuine human connection or a deep sense of meaning in life, but money can get rid of the deep stresses of financial instability and give you the time to ponder how fundamentally alone you are in the universe — you, a series of electrical impulses running through soft tissue trapped in a skull. Then, if your fortunes are really looking up, maybe you can afford therapy.
- Also, yes, of course, happy Back to the Future Day. Good tidings to all, and to all a GREAT SCOTT!
