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!
- I was sent the link to this video yesterday, and I don’t know any way to describe it that will do justice to its twists, its hilarity, and its amazing aesthetic. If you pick and choose which links you look at each week because you’re not interested in lizards or old maps (hey, no hard feelings, you do you), make this one of the ones you click. The video itself takes three and a half minutes to pass you by, but if you’re like me it might stay with you for far longer.
- This Week in Yelp: one-star reviews of US national parks. “Maybe I’m just not a cave man.” Finally, someplace the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer won’t be frightened and confused!
- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
- Sometimes, reality shows go terribly wrong. And so do ex-boyfriends.
- Machine translation is always a bit of an adventure. Put the lyrics to “Let it Go” through Google Translate several times and you wind up with something that is very nearly completely unlike the original song. Remember, friends: discrimination law is probably the queen. (Link via the ever-friendly Steven Graham.)
- The White House’s first website went up twenty years ago, in the primordial age of the world wide web. Were we ever that young?
- Oysters, as it turns out, are pretty important.
- There have been no platinum records in 2014. Singles are still kicking, so at least we can find some new music.
- Once you have your own stash of Halloween candy free of the prying hands of children, be sure to pair it with the right wine.
- A “pain scan” would be a great tool for helping people with atypical or unfortunately-stereotyped conditions, and weeding out drug-seekers with something a little more reliable than the level of trust a nurse or doctor happens to feel in any particular moment. But the way there is fraught with difficulties.
- Professional restaurant reviews, for those of us not likely to be serious about perusing listings for posh restaurants, are valuable more as reading material than actual recommendations, and as reading material they’re valuable mainly as a source of schadenfreude, as upscale eateries are rhetorically torn down for their outrageous prices and bourgeois atmospheres. On that level, this review of Beast does not disappoint, with such potent quotables as: “Got any friends who are, say, international drug barons? Excellent. They may be able to afford dinner.”
- Following a transplant of cells from his nasal cavity, a man who was paralyzed man can walk again.
- These demographic surveys of social networks may upset some typical notions about popular websites being overrun with Kids These Days. (It does show some effects of your parents being on Facebook, though.)
- Nigeria is Ebola-free. Apparently Senegal is as well. Don’t fall into the Ebola panic — there are hospitals gearing up for an influx of people mistaking flu symptoms for freaking Ebola, which is as good an occasion as any to remind you to instead go to your local pharmacy and get your flu shot if you don’t have some condition that makes it unsafe for you. Please. Go.
- As noted previously in the Wednesday Walk, the secession movement in Scotland recently lost a straight-up election, the closest it’s ever come to actually separating from England. What might Europe look like if every separatist movement got its way?
- Meet malachite, the material that gave us copper.
- As part of Batman’s 75th anniversary celebration, 33 Mexican artists were asked to use the iconic cape and cowl as their canvas. This onomatopoetic interpretation is definitely a highlight.
- If you’re going to bone down with your sweetums in the water, beware of too much suction. And in the wrong places!
- I dunno, were I locked in a bookstore overnight I might just read a lot. There’s time enough at last.
- For the first time, people are being removed from the no-fly list.
- A copy of Action Comics #1 was recently sold on eBay for 3.2 million dollars. (One wonders why the owner didn’t use another auction company, but you can’t argue with the results.) One way it achieved such a high value was by being unnaturally pristine.
