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.
- Team USA uniforms for the 2018 Olympics are inspired by spacesuits and really quite awesome.
- It’s depressing how often lists of things restaurant workers want you to know essentially boil down to “don’t abuse people who are paid to put up with your shit.” Like, maybe treat them like they’re human beings?
- Sometimes I feel like Donald Duck really gets me, you know?
- I feel like the looming retail bubble is going to be a really good time for workers.
- This Week in Life Goals: They say training cats is impossible (if it’s possible can someone tell me how to get them to more consistently use one of the four goddamn litter boxes scattered about the house), but if you work hard and believe in yourself, maybe you too can get dozens of cats to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry and precious metal.
- Please, world, can we not do the Mel Gibson redemption tour?
- This Week in Columbo: When does the dear detective first appear in each episode? (More on why the graph came to be and other great musings on Columbo here.)
- Can I get the minutes for this meeting of the Guy Fieri fan club?
- Facebook’s new scheme to deal with people circulating nudes without consent seems to involve a lot of victims uploading their nudes to Facebook for who-knows-how-many-random-admins to see.
- Also in corporate overreach: I get that it’s a sign of massive privilege that I have 1) my own porch attached to my own house and b) a neighborhood where folks aren’t going to nick stuff off of my porch, but giving people the ability to walk into your home to deliver Amazon packages sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
- Let’s check in on the US government for a second. Oh, what’s that, a dude moving through the process of becoming a federal judge despite never having tried a case also wrote a book about his ghost hunts? Cool, cool.
- In between washing up on a beach and being displayed as a skeleton in a museum, sometimes a whale spends several years buried under horse dung to get all of the pesky soft tissues out of the way. As one does.
- This Week in Linguistics: “Won’t” uses a different vowel in its contraction form than the normal “will not” because the fact that “willn’t” sounds so ridiculous insulated “won’t” from centuries of vowel shifts.
- The origin of time travel in fiction involves an interesting genre that fell out of the popular consciousness entirely.
- If cats are going to knead anyway, we might as well put them to work kneading our bread.