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!
- Just in time for the gift-buying rush from Black Friday to the Christmas Armageddon, those of you working retail need to brush up on your customer-care techniques. (And if you’re getting gifts online, don’t forget the Amazon portal in the sidebar at Place to Be Nation Dot Com!)
- Jason Brown, former Rams center, decided when he left football that he would buy a farm and give food to people who need it.
- For the wooly mammoth, life (and science) might find a way.
- A whole lot of cartographers aren’t quite clear about the existence of New Zealand.
- For different artists, anything can be a canvas, including the morning cup of coffee.
- The Philae lander successfully landed on a freakin’ comet last Wednesday (catch xkcd’s gif-ication of the landing here), and has already found organic molecules, a very interesting development. Sadly, the life of the lander might be cut short because it landed in the shadow of a cliff that prevents its solar panels from gathering as much light as they need, so it’s operating on battery power more than anticipated, but we’re still getting a lot out of it. (And yeah, one of the scientists on the ESA team wore an eyeroll-worthy shirt for the worldwide broadcast, which of course leads men on the internet to harrass women, as most everything does. Because this is really about ethics in comet journalism.)
- Also in the sexist internet d00dz category, an Australian TV personality miffed by the double-standard by which creeps constantly audit his co-host’s wardrobe backed up his sense of things by wearing the same suit for a year with not one comment registered.
- This Week in Holiday Charities: gifts for kids with incarcerated moms.
- In a candid photo from 1938, some women get some exercise and let off some steam on a rooftop.
- Most of us think of prosthetic limbs as things that might let a person walk again, or pick up and manipulate items. When you’re a farmer, the prosthetics have to be a little tougher.
- This Week in Oral Histories: Sports Night! Say, how do you know if something is funny if it doesn’t have a laugh track?
- The Bros Mario features everyone’s favorite bros as they might’ve been in the 40s.
- Hannibal Buress feels Cracker Barrel is an underrated establishment. The Tim Duncan of chain restaurants, apparently.
- Life is like a bunch of donuts.
- Back in August I relayed the story of the Italian seismologists charged with manslaughter for not predicting an earthquake well enough. Last week they were cleared by an appeals court, though of course it’s not quite over.
- Sacha Goldberger reimagines our heroes & villains of film for Elizabethan times. Would that make Darth Vader a tyrannical Papist?
- RIP R.A. Montgomery.
- Nick Offerman doesn’t like communication shortcuts used by kids these days, and he’s doing something about it.
