Welcome to the Wednesday Walk Around the Web, where we weave & wind through weblinks weekly. Here you may find some things that amuse, some that titillate, and the occasional link that provokes. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Wednesday Walk? Email Glenn!
- Some people will still ask people with tattoos if they’ve considered what they’ll look like when they get old. You know what, yeah, and they’ll still be what they always were, ya goon.
- One author connects five metal albums with their poetic counterparts. You know, Milton was pretty metal.
- I smell another blog group-funding project, and its name is Poveglia.
- This Week in Outdated Predictions of the Future: Fashion really didn’t take the turns set out in one visionary’s 1893 article, but nobody can say we’re better for it.
- RIP Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Goodbye Internet Explorer 6, we’ve all moved on without you.
- Relax. It’s okay. Willie Nelson’s stuffed armadillo has been returned to him. Ol’ Dillo is back where he belongs.
- This Week in Infographics: in 2009, the New York Times made a visualization of music sales by format. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be going to my local music store to get the latest cassettes.
- Whales preserve the species they need to complete their food chains by fertilizing the oceans. This seems pretty small for a food chain.
- The earliest recorded instance of match-fixing in ancient wrestling is from an Egyptian tournament in 267 CE.
- Among other items of note, Ars Technica’s analysis of Steam statistics shows that 37% of games registered to users have never been played.
- There’s actually video of people riding the most dangerous water slide ever devised.
- Jason Krowe wants you to live your best life.
- Opera is dying because nobody gets it and it’s wholly removed from what a lot of people want. It wasn’t always so.
- This Week in Historical Linguistics: perhaps you’ve heard that in the 18th century, the British spoke with accents much closer to those in the modern US than the modern Britain. Have a little more detail.
- All available statistics indicate that proactively changing lanes doesn’t help you get out of traffic jams more quickly. But, and it’s a big but, statistics are not equal to psychology; changing lanes will probably make you feel like you’re doing something, so go ahead. It’s a useful illusion, like free will!
- This week’s PTB Nation Link of the Week is the third part of Philosophy of the Shield, Tim Capel’s tour of Captain America’s long history, which in this installment takes us through a few presidential administrations and some dark mirrors held up to our beloved Cap.
