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!
- I hope you come to the ol’ Wednesday Walk for a lot of reasons. I try to feature a nice variety of things. I hope that one of the things you came here for was a video compilation of Guy Fieri chowing down set to Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” because that is what I’m giving you today.
- It’s December now, which means that of course it’s time for the War on Christmas! Happy Winterval, one and all.
- This Week in Art: Creating similar works of art under the influence of various drugs is a noble experiment indeed. Somehow, that is NOT what I’d have expected codeine to look like.
- This Week in Photography: Women’s Work shows women in lines of work where they wouldn’t stereotypically be found. Any work is women’s work.
- Studies of calendar synesthesia might yield some interesting insights about how we visualize time.
- This Week in Engagement Photos: Sometimes Disney princesses find love in the most lovely ways.
- The pace of action in the face of climate change has been, to put it lightly, achingly slow at best. (The incoming US President was elected on a platform that casts climate change as a hoax perpetrated by foreign agents, and will no doubt appoint officials who will end or severely curtail the work NASA does to track and catalogue climate phenomena. So there’s all that to look forward to.) Global climate inevitably affects every local effort to save every local species and subspecies, changing the playing field all conservation efforts work on.
- Sometimes some beautiful things happen at the ol’ comic book store.
- Hugh Williams keeps surviving Welsh shipwrecks throughout the centuries, thanks to the power of probabilities.
- You may know of the glitz, the glamour, the pomp, and the pageantry of the Eurovision song contest. What I didn’t know is that during the Cold War the USSR had its own song contest, with a much more democratic voting system.
- One proposed solution for PTSD among military drone operators is a “Siri-like” interface that anthropomorphizes the drone itself and deflects the feeling of responsibility. Because employing fewer soldiers to murder fewer people is never an option.
- This Week in Chemistry: This interactive periodic table describes things we do with (almost) all of the elements, from breathing to nuclear weapons. Y’know, the basics.
- Cut off from pesticides from other countries, Cuba is yielding much healthier bees than the rest of the world.
- Unearthed archival photos of Nina Simone are always welcome.
- (Warning: suicide mentions, screenshots of online abuse.) RIP Lizzy Waite, driven to death by existential anguish, only to have alt-right neo-Nazis immediately jump on her Facebook page.
- RIP Peng Chang-kue, inventor of General Tso’s chicken.
- Finally, the story of the “man using a sheet cake as a pillow” stock photo can be told.
