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!
- It’s time to get your pumpkins carved, eh?
- While you’re at it, check out some horror stories for the occasion.
- And once you’ve procured your candy corn, eat some like the real thing. The presence of actual fruit makes it healthy!
- And of course, you can’t forget to tell the little ones all about Halloween Keith.
- Why do witches ride brooms in our spooky tales of fright? Drugs, mostly, as with any enjoyment we might get out of life.
- Last week we examined the wine connoisseur’s guide to Halloween candy. This week, as the apocalyptic occasion approaches, we have another perspective. If you’re spending your Halloween with Tootsie rolls and boxed wine, I’m so, so sorry. Send me a message to let me know you’re okay.
- This Week in Things That Exist: an entire YouTube channel dedicated to “Country Roads” covers.
- A person who’s been convicted of “an activist-related property crime” might have some interesting experiences going through airport security. And of course this person has a blog.
- X-Wing and Tie Fighter, the height of Star Wars games in the 90s, are both finally being released for post-Windows-2000 systems. Oh, the times I had turning around in a Tie Fighter mission and shooting at the star destroyer I’d just launched from.
- We can all picture some iconic album covers. Little did we know they weren’t quite telling the whole story.
- This Week in Stealing Nude Photos: cops have to get in on the scene, because of course they do.
- This Week in Sitcom People: Alfonso Ribeiro will not play around with you.
- Of All the Gin Joints is an upcoming book full of ribald anecdotes about Hollywood’s greats boozin’ it up. And I do love a ribald anecdote.
- NASA’s Antares rocket exploded shortly after liftoff. No people were hurt; the rocket was carrying supplies and equipment for the space station. Space is still hard.
- RIP Gerard Parkes.
- Roman Emperors didn’t really meet good ends, as we might think of them.
- Travis Banks sends in a reevaluation of Contagion on the occasion of a new infectious disease scare. (Once more: Ebola is very rare and you’re astronomically unlikely to get it unless you’re a doctor or nurse for someone who already has it, as long as we can get some decent procedures in place rather than imprisoning a woman who doesn’t even have the ding-dang disease. And if you are a caregiver who’s contracted the disease, the Wednesday Walk salutes you.)
- 3D printers promise to bring all sorts of medical and technological wonders to our lives (though some way of preventing them from making weapons would be nice). Never has this been more apparent than in the case of the T-rex skull shower head.
- Selfies are great. Take as many as you want, share them with your friends, whatever floats your boat. Just don’t take them with bears. Non-human bears, at least.
- In a struggle between a ballerina and an MMA fighter, I think we all know who comes out on top.
- The future of the book is always unfolding before us, hopefully in a hybrid form that doesn’t entirely forgo long-lasting paper for convenience.
- I’m sure that as young children a lot of us got some sort of speech from our parents about not using calculators in math class or for our homework. “It just does your homework for you!” That may have been true when our math homework was adding columns of numbers or multiplying fractions, but by the time we got to algebra that wasn’t really a concern any more — plus there was always the admonition to show one’s work. PhotoMath is a program for your smartphone that apparently does your kid’s math homework for them until they get to calculus, or maybe trig. except for word problems.
- “Mr. Edison has invented too many things, and almost without exception they are things of the most deleterious character.”
- We have a new world-record parachute jump.
