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!
- You often see clichéd theories about TV shows or movies saying that it’s all a dream, or in someone’s head somehow (poor old Tommy Westphall). You might suspect that it’s not possible for anyone to have a dream that’s so long or detailed, but one person on the internet says he lived ten years in a few seconds.
- If you’ve ever had trouble visualizing how different forms of plate tectonics work, take a look at several terms demonstrated in Oreo cookies.
- Mister Rogers was just the greatest human being.
- There’s a transcript of The Johnny Karate Super Awesome Musical Explosion show’s legal disclaimer, because of course there is.
- This Week in Pet Products: dog collars that quickly give your dog’s status to any (english-reading) observer.
- Inside a thousand-year-old statue of Buddha, there’s a mummified monk.
- In the absence of official record-collection, you can see here how many people have been murdered by cops in the US lately.
- Meanwhile in Ferguson, civil rights attorneys are suing the city for running debtors’ prisons. And on it goes.
- Meanwhile in Arkansas, it is now literally illegal to ban discrimination against LGBT people, a move so repugnant that even Wal-Mart put out a statement against it.
- Meanwhile in Norway: Chanting “No to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia,” more than a thousand Muslims formed a “ring of peace” around a synagogue in Oslo following an anti-Semitic attack. So sometimes there’s hope.
- Meanwhile in New England, USA, there’s a convenient new tool to confirm a large metropolitan area’s status: Is Boston Fucked?
- The Flow Hive promises to put a tap on your beehive and disturb your backyard bees less than more traditional beehives.
- Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author, has terminal cancer and must confront his final months. His column publicly announcing his diagnosis is a moving account of a man thoughtfully detaching from larger concerns (“I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future”) and focusing on the months ahead.
- In a 1950s Disney documentary, four artists discuss how they harmonize their styles to make Sleeping Beauty and then display their different styles by painting the same tree.
- This Week in Mashups: Fall Out Boy and Gloria Gaynor, two great tastes that taste great together.
- Web design professionals have to deal with all manner of outrageous, tacky demands from customers. Sometimes the designer must throw her hands in the air and deliver exactly what’s asked for.
- At long last, after I don’t know how many instances and I don’t know how much damage done, Reddit is banning one form of sexual assault.
- Since we in the US are heading toward the end of the Obama administration, the time for preparing his presidential library is close at hand, and the wrangling has begun.
- This Week in Nutpicking: a Christian who wants to ban dinosaurs from her children’s education because they’re the work of the devil, or something. As is said in the thread where I first saw this story, “asking a small child to choose between God and Triceratops does not end well for God.”
- Seventy thousand years ago, another star came very close to our solar system.
- As a major project, one art student designed a beautiful, hypothetical set of Hungarian euros. Ingeniously, the security feature is a skeleton for each animal depicted on the currency, viewable under UV light.
- You’ve seen these famous films, but you’ve never seen them recreated with stock footage!
- Dr. Seuss has a new book coming out, the same way 2Pac kept making all those albums.
