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!
- Tonight is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, so take a moment.
- To celebrate Yom HaShoah, Iran is putting on The Second Holocaust International Cartoon and Caricature Contest. So there’s a thing.
- We all know that the Brontosaurus is actually an Apatosaurus, and that the posters and books we had as kids sold us a pack of lies tied together with strings of deceit. Now, because discovery is an ever-moving process and taxonomy has to move to fit it, the Brontosaurus is coming back!
- Steve Wille, friend to the Walk as he is friend to all that is good in this world, sends us word of more blood ice, bleeding.
- There have been numerous reviews of the Hobbit films, including those from people who hold the book close to their hearts. What sets Amal El-Mohtar’s review apart is the depth of the metaphor that she got from the book, the good will with which she saw the first film, and the extent to which the movies devoted themselves to the letter and not the feeling.
- Lactose intolerance was bred out of many humans over a thousand years after the invention of cheese.
- Friends, if you’re going to assault someone and/or be assaulted yourself (I recommend neither), please try to have it be over something more important than the Eagles.
- If you, like me, used to let keygen programs run and run while you were pirating warez just because the MIDI music associated with them was so cool, behold the Keygen Jukebox.
- One person tried to play Grand Theft Auto while not behaving like a monster. The results are great….well, in once sense. Great for us; not so great for the characters in the game.
- The tidal wave of white supremacist police murders continues; this time, a “reserve deputy” (read: a 73-year-old insurance executive who chaired the county sheriff’s 2012 campaign) murdered Eric Harris. “Fuck your breath,” Harris was told as he died. Obviously this is all horrifying, and merely saying “this is all horrifying” does nothing to absolve me or any other white person of the responsibility to try to be decent human beings and create a more decent world.
- In Virginia, a deaf man was jailed for six weeks without access to an interpreter when he was accused of stealing a tablet that was lost by its owners. The sheriff’s office says it wasn’t negligent because people tried to communicate with the man in languages that he couldn’t understand. How disrespectful of him.
- On the other side of the accessibility coin, an intrepid fan has created an exhaustive description of Watchmen for blind or low-vision readers.
- Dolly Shivani Cherukuri is the youngest Indian to score more than 200 points at an archery trial, at two years of age.
- Get a load of Nick Offerman’s woodshop. There’s a lot of nostalgia here for me — the man made his own jig, folks!
- This Week in Vestigial Body Parts: Penguins have internal knees.
- This Week in Spiders Living in Your Face: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
- This Week in Covers: Enter Sandman.
- Apparently quite a lot of people age out of their addictions, which certainly goes against a boatload of cultural narratives.
- Artists and their cats. It does what it says on the tin.
- How do astronauts perform everyday tasks while living on the space station? Carefully.
- There’s still some debate as to why we have allergies.
- The most expensive home in Brooklyn, a thirty-two-million-dollar penthouse, is up for sale. Be sure to use the Amazon link on the Place to Be Nation sidebar to make all your necessary purchases; every penny goes to dear ol’ Brad’s opening offer.
- Meet the Stanley Cup.
- This Week in Design: the aluminum can.
- We’re still trying to clone the woolly mammoth. I’m just happy I haven’t seen anything new about cloning a neanderthal in several years. (Short version: it’d be scientifically fascinating, but at the end of the cloning process we’d have, y’know, a person with rights and stuff rather than a research object.)
