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.
- Many standard units of measurement started as mundane objects before being defined by universal constants. The kilogram was the one holdout, until now.
- This thread about the experience of cleaning up after hoarder parents long after they’ve died certainly hits close to home.
- When Jon Bois has a new video out, dayenu. When it’s a two-parter, dayenu. When it has such a seemingly innocuous subject as a study of the rise, fall, and extinction of athletes named Bob, you know you’re in for something special. Not a lot of people can deeply and consistently integrate subjects like statistics and baseball into videos that remain hauntingly beautiful. (And-a part the second.)
- You learn a lot of wild things when you look into statistics of car-related deaths over time.
- This Week in #Goals: This spiderwort plant has survived in a sealed bottle since 1960, with only one brief interruption for some watering in 1972. It circulates water through evaporation & reabsorbtion, and cycles its own oxygen & carbon dioxide.
- Candy heart comics are true Relatable Content. I cycle between both sides in number three allllll the time.
- It’s illuminating to learn how much the US military involves itself in domestic movies. Their influence on the content of these movies comes out in different ways, even within a series like the MCU, where movies like Captain Marvel and the first Captain America relate to it in slightly different ways while still making sure to stay within the military’s content restrictions.
- Speaking of Cap, there are always fine folks on the lines doing good work to improve these MCU movies.
- This Week in Good Dogs: Who’s a good dog? this pug/sparrow is a very good doggo, and ALSO a good birb.
- It’s so rare to get good news out of US courts, so let’s enjoy a couple rays of sunshine: first, a circuit court ruled in favor of Food Not Bombs in its appeal of a particularly disgusting crackdown by Fort Lauderdale cops on people giving food to homeless folks; next, a group of black sex workers were awarded compensation for racist discrimination and horrible working conditions.
- Anything decent that happens this week, of course, happens in the context of the enduring governmental and cultural assault on anyone with a uterus. So many people have been warning about this and trying to organize against it, and their rage is pure and right.
