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!
- This Week in Heartwarming Holiday Cheer: when a little girl can’t speak to Santa, Santa can sign.
- This Week in Dilemmas: person wins the lottery, gets enough money to hopefully not have to worry about money again, and isn’t sure how to respond to demands for a portion of the winnings from the parents who shunned him when they found out he’s gay. I’ll just say that this guy seems like an incredibly forgiving person. At least I hope that’s the case.
- It’s time to celebrate Candle Fever this week, another holiday that commemorates one of the many many times in history that someone’s gotten it in their heads that they need to outlaw the practice of Judaism. So light some candles, listen to Adam Sandler’s new rewrite of his song, and learn a little about dreidel.
- Great news: we get to have Jimmy Carter, least murderous US president in living memory, with us on this planet for a while longer.
- This Week in 3D Printing: my friends, we have a bigfoot skeleton. Now just bury it in a rural area in the Pacific northwest, wait a couple years, and shockingly find it.
- This Week in Fragile Masculinity: if you want to drink some wine but are worried that it’s too girly and might make you look like a wuss, boy howdy do I have the bullshit for you. Look, drink some wine if you like wine. Wine is good. Don’t gender beverages. You shouldn’t even be gendering people, really, please don’t gender beverages. Or rooms. And please don’t create stupid portmanteaux to try to convince yourself that I) manliness is good and b) you’re fulfilling it. (It’s not a “mancave,” it’s your fucking family room or living room or whatever. Everyone wants to watch TV.)
- Map-making is meticulous and expensive, so to make it feasible maps became mostly marketing tools.
- We better get to Mars soon, because sometime in the nest 20 to 40 million years Phobos is going to disintegrate and form a ring, and I for one don’t want to miss it.
- If you ever think that maybe you were born in the wrong century, consider the historical fact of a growing industrial London with no sewer system, followed by a nascent sewer system that emptied into the general water supply. Oh, and the coal dust sucked too.
- The widowhood effect is real, especially in cases of sudden death.
- There’s a new Rubik’s cube record!
- The wonders of data mining as applied to a century of yearbook photos reveals the rise of smiling.
- A whooooole lot of sci-fi novels are coming to screens near you, including more Scalzi adaptations than you can shake a stick at.
