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!
- If any of the Walkers out there are getting married any time soon, let Isaac Asimov write your vows for you.
- This Week in Musical Covers: selections from Harry Potter, as performed by the Indian Jam Project.
- The narrow genetic difference between ancient and modern cats invites the question of whether they’re even technically domesticated.
- In Bavaria, locals reacted to a Nazi march by turning it into an unwitting charity march for an enti-extremist organization, effectively tricking the neo-Nazis into raising ten thousand euros to combat neo-Nazis. Thanks, Bavarians!
- Why I’d Be Kicked Out of the Scooby-Doo Gang.
- This Week in Art AND This Week in Infectious Disease, Both at the Same Time: by using different bacteria, you can paint pretty pretty pictures in petri dishes. Here more than anywhere, it’s very important that you don’t touch the art.
- Broadway is extending into the streaming market. If it winds up on the service, I’ll have a decision to make as to whether I pony up the money to see Hamilton in person.
- Bang-up job, anti-vaccine dolts.
- This Week in Slow Motion: pretty pretty water spirals that really make you think about the cosmos.
- One black metal band studied Catholicism so intensely for the purposes of blaspheming it that they wound up converting to Catholicism. Uh…good job, Christians.
- If the BBC Reported on the Royal Family Like it Did on North Korea.
- Finding more places to put dead bodies can’t be a pleasant pursuit in the best times, but the conditions of the urban dead in 19th-century New York City sound downright horrifying.
- This Week in the Milk of Human Kindness: I’ve long been fond of saying that all teens are dirtbag teens, and maybe when I do that I’m overcompensating for shameful acts in my own past, because I certainly wouldn’t want to thusly tar all the children assaulted and murdered by thugs with badges. Past that, though, sometimes you read something that starts off as a classic “dirtbag teen acts like a dirtbag” story, and then takes an amazingly heartwarming turn. Go on, warm your cockles.
- I can’t wait for JJ Abrams’ next movie.
- If you want to know the source for every single ding-dang sample in the Beastie Boys’ career, today is your lucky day.
- Ghosts pop up in our digital life fairly regularly. Dead friends give off birthday reminders on Facebook, and might still invite us to play Farmville. My mom is still listed as a contact on my phone, with a photo I took in 2011 attached to a number I canceled in 2013. Some folks take a look at the old neighborhood on Google Maps and find dead loved ones.