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!
- Hi folks. You may have noticed that it’s Armistice Day. Do please acknowledge the day by declaring a few armistices if possible, won’t you?
- This Week in Pretty Pretty Pictures: going to a lavender field is almost, like, a cheat code to instantly start taking gorgeous photos.
- Do any of the rooms in your home have names? The only two places I have ever even encountered houses with names are soap operas and depictions of antebellum plantations (including the Founding Fathers’ estates). Even that larger gesture is a practice for modern fictional rich people and/or historical racists, in other words. It does occur to me that my brother and I named some of our rooms a couple years ago, though — the hallway is Ten Thousand Places (a certain highly popular documentary series tells us that the US Civil War was fought there), the living room is Bramblepelt, and the basement is The Lower Regions.
- Make yourself acquainted with all the hot hipster trends and maybe you’ll finally be cool!
- The latest super-trendy food for super-trendy folks, the ones who who believe that you need superfoods in your paleo diet to cleanse your body’s toxins, appears to be soup. Just make some damn soup. People have been making soup for more than twenty thousand years. Soup is good. Have soup!
- Twitch ran a marathon showing of the entirety of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting, and they’re not done with him yet.
- A selection from the PTBN Tumblr: woe betide the man who thinks the Flex Cam is for him when it’s not.
- This Week in Headlines: Australia Deploys Sheepdogs to Save a Penguin Colony. Go Australia. Go dogs. Go penguins!
- French officials are lifting the ban that keeps pan/bi/gay men from donating blood — well, partially. The new policy requires men to be celibate for a year before donating blood, which, while justified by bigotry alone rather than medical facts, is still lighter than the FDA’s policy in the US. (And it’s not like they don’t test everyone’s blood anyway.)
- It seems plausible that a gravity assist from Jupiter could have ejected a planet from our solar system four billion years ago. It’s pretty neat that the clue comes in the orbit of one of Jupiter’s moons.
- This wide wonderful internet of ours is a wonderful place sometimes. There are communities that foster warmth, compassion, and understanding. There are people who are fantastic artists and who will draw something you ask for just to make you feel better. There are people who will, when asked, draw Alex Guarnaschelli punching Scott Conant in the face with a red onion.
- This Week in Star Wars: 140 detailed photos of the models used in the trilogy and the process of creating them.
- When you live in Turkey, or someplace else that has millennia of human history buried underneath it, you sometimes find huge ancient tunnel systems during normal home renovation. That kind of lends a new sense to the term “home archaeology.”
- You can get the world’s greatest headphones if you want…but they cost fifty-five thousand dollars. And also seem to involve vacuum tubes and a slab of marble?
- Apparently part of the recent election of a relatively sane government in Canada is the restoration of the census, which was apparently gutted in 2010. US readers: remember the hue and cry around our 2010 census, about how we were being cataloged by the big bad government so we could be sent to the FEMA death camps? Let’s just be glad we didn’t have a conservative government that would actually listen to the conspiracy theorists on that one.
- Many people may have been told they’re allergic to penicillin erroneously, without actually being tested for the allergy. Whooooooooooops.
