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.
- We still need your advice questions for Steve Wille’s guest appearances on the ol’ Spectacular — big or small, we’ll consider them all! Email us or go to our Ask.fm page to send your questions today. (Your name won’t be read on the show without permission (so tell us what to call you if anything), and Ask.fm allows anonymous submissions.)
- This Week in Research Anthropology: One intrepid observer went in deep on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Health event, and it is a wild ride, from people who insist that they died and came back to life out of sheer willpower to a doctor who doesn’t believe in the connection between serotonin and depression or HIV and AIDS.
- Translating descriptive names to another language can be dicey at the best of times; translating restaurant menus offers a set of challenges of its own.
- Barbados recently paid tribute to its centenarian citizens by putting them on stamps.
- This Week in Music: The rubber chicken is a remarkably versatile instrument.
- It is so weird that a lot of folks can discern obvious bots on social media but the platforms themselves never do anything about them. How about that!
- The Polish legislature recently passed a bill criminalizing any discussion of the role that Poles had in the Holocaust, maintaining that Poland bears no fault or blame because it was occupied by Nazi Germany. Where does one even start. Okay, one point: Holocaust denial isn’t just the denial that events took place (events that are well-documented and widely witnessed but moving on); it can also be the denial of complicity, the insistence that only Nazis can be called antisemitic or held accountable for crimes against humanity — and when it comes to the ones that happened in Poland after the Germans were defeated and driven out, well, there must be other groups to blame. The same dynamic occurs in every formerly-occupied European country where a blessed but tiny minority helped hide and protect Jews and others targeted for annihilation, while the majority either actively shipped their neighbors off or looked the other way while it happened. Everyone has their nationalist myths, and you get a lot of shit for poking at them; not everyone literally criminalizes dissent from their nationalist myths.
- All right. Let’s calm down a little with some tenuously-connected tales of wacky hijinks, creeps, robbers, and onion violence at fast food restaurants.
- Code hidden in YouTube ads and on other sites can use your computers to mine cryptocurrency. Use your ad blockers, folks. Except on the Place to Be Nation Dot Com of course!
- It’s hard to find a good man when so many are creeps and abusers. If you’re only attracted to dudes and have no other options, then, it’s better to find happiness with someone who’s safely dead. Saves you the trouble of killing him yourself, at least.
- This Week in People Doing Amazing Things: Watch this dude surf along a 115-foot-tall wave and tell me it’s not from a movie.
- This Week in Photography: Trust your phone to stitch your photos together into panorama shots and it might just turn you into a mountain.
- This Week in Slow Motion and High Focus: This explanation of how TVs generate pictures is interesting, and finally taught me what an OLED TV is.
- This Week in Animal Positivity: Snow leopards munch on their tails a lot. It’s as awesome as it sounds. Let’s all try to be positive for a second while the world falls apart.
