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? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- US Thanksgiving is this week, so it’s time to bring back one of my very favorite videos from the wide world on the web, Bill Shatner’s cautionary song about deep-fried turkey safety. Always the question is asked: where’s the dingle-dangle??
- Staying in the US, it’s important to call your representatives and give them what-for. If you, like me, are aghast at having to talk to a person out loud on your texting device, there are ways to work with the anxiety.
- There’s already a bumper crop in tracking the conflicts of interest and general corruption of the US President-Elect.
- I wish brave hearts to well-meaning folks faced with Thanksgiving tables ranging from awkwardness to knock-down fights. Courage. (The general principle applies to everyone, but the particular link is about a Jewish family, and anti-SJ Jews really stick in my craw. How many Jewish traditions and laws and mitzvot are based in empathy? “You were slaves in Egypt,” so care for the widow and the orphan. “You were slaves in Egypt,” so leave the gleanings of your harvest for the poor. And anti-immigration Jews make no damned sense, considering the last several millennia of Jews being kicked out of and not accepted in every country we’ve ever been in. It’s about little pieces of tikkun olam. Sigh. I know I’m a broken record on this. Anyhow.)
- It turns out you can make sandcastles that highlight any architectural style. I feel better about all of my childhood sand-McMansions.
- Sometimes guns really are handled in the best way.
- This Week in Parenting Top Tips: If you can afford to get your kids tons of stuff for the holidays, great! If you’re inclined to get on the Santa tip, maybe have Santa give them some more modest things and take credit for the PS4 yourself, so kids whose parents can’t afford the PS4 don’t think Santa just hates them.
- This Week in Flatware: this set of forks & spoons is bent so that nothing that goes into your mouth touches the table when you put it down, which I realize must be great for germophobes and such, but I cannot shake the memory of half of my flatware accidentally being bent like that when I was growing up because some members of my family were pretty strong.
- This Week in Defensive Driving: If you, like I do, have a car that’s too low to the ground to avoid being stricken by every SUV and truck’s headlights, maybe you could at least scare the crap out of the other drivers in return.
- This Week in Oral Histories of Everything: Double Dare! Man, the description of how ripe the studio would smell after a day of shooting really sticks with you. Also, a pullquote for the day: “there were things like that that we’d make gakkier or less gakky.” Words to live by.
- One of those things that’s completely invisible to me is the difficulty of riding a bike around city streets.
- This Week in Choosing Your Own Adventure: This White Rainbow means either 1) weather is an amazing thing; b) the color truly is being sucked out of the world.
- This Week in Foodborne Illness: catching hepatitis from a strawberry margarita is just rotten luck. If you’re going to wind up with hepatitis, it might as well be from what you do after some margaritas.
- The witness protection program seems like too wacky an idea to actually work, especially given how well it works.
- Not only was last year’s New Horizons flyby of Pluto amazing, but it’s also amazing that 6.25 gigs of data was beamed back all the way from Pluto over the course of a year and a half.
- Meanwhile in Canada, you can tell your friends and loved ones how you feel by mailing them personalized potatoes. The holiday season is right around the corner, folks.
- It’s time to give up. Robots can do everything better than pitiful little humans with skin and such.
- The invention of the glass mirror not only improved on polished metal mirrors, it also arguably jumpstarted individualism in European and European-descended cultures.
- This Week in Photography: Re-shoots taken 40 years after the first set. Bless the punk who stayed a punk; good on you, sir.
- In New York, a state legislator introduced a bill to prevent the use of conversion therapy, i.e. hetero-supremacist torture, on LGBTQIAP+ kids: The Prevention of Emotional Neglect and Childhood Endangerment Act, or PENCE Act. Nice.
- Hypothermia can sometimes be used to give emergency-room doctors more time to save stabbing and gunshot victims. I’m pretty sure this technique was first pioneered on The X-Files.
- This Week in Soothing Animals: Animal Planet runs a parakeet live feed. They run a bunch of others too, but we’re going to need a lot of soothing in the days ahead.
