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? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- The story about the Big Thunder Mountain rollercoaster helping people pass small kidney stones before they grow (and require surgery) appears to be legit. Depending on political developments, Walt Disney World may soon be the most affordable health care provider in the US. All this and more wait for you in the next edition of Neil Trama’s WDWorld Traveler column right here at Place to Be Nation!
- The head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center has more than chosen his side in the cat-vs-bird struggle, he’s proposed eliminating outdoor cats from the environment to keep them from disrupting bird populations. First, we’ll have to crank out a lot more bird memes. Get the birbs on the line!
- Schools have kids put on mock debates on various issues — to teach critical thinking, persuasive writing, supporting one’s arguments, whatever. The last time I remember doing it was in a low-level college English course where we were tasked with arguing for or against the construction of a new parking garage. Pretty take stuff. In New York, one high school teacher has seen fit to assign students one side or the other, arguing for or against, the Holocaust.
- Everyone loves Donnie Yen now that he’s been in a Star War, but don’t miss out on the awesomeness of his mom. (Nevermind the clickbaity headline. Not everything is a contest, geez.)
- Abusive family members, or an otherwise horrible home life, is right up there on the list of reasons to cut someone out of your life, and the guilt that often comes with that often can’t be assuaged by letting toxic relationships linger. Forgiveness is generally a good thing to practice, but not at the cost of self-preservation. (Warning: link contains descriptions of child abuse and rape.)
- Bless the anodyne Twitter bots, like the one that replaces the word “God” in Joel Osteen’s tweets with “your dick.” Why yes, I am twelve, why do you ask?
- JT Rozzero adds to the Wednesday Walk Christian News Section a thrilling account of a pastor who depended on his god to protect him in a river that’s literally called Crocodile River. Something something pride goeth something something.
- Also in the Wednesday Walk’s coverage of religious news, a death row inmate in Alabama selected a Bible as his last meal. You know, with a headline like that, who even cares that it’s the dreaded FAKE NEWS cropping up again?
- One of the reasons so many people care so deeply about marriage equality is hospital visitation and the like, the right for someone’s partner not to be literally hustled out of the room when decisions need to be made or loved ones need to be comforted. That hustling is also a small example of the socially-backed sense of being an outsider that all such discrimination reinforces. Imagine, then, that your loved one dies and the funeral home your family already made arrangements with refuses to pick up the body.
- The Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood marathon is ongoing, in case you need some nostalgia, some comfort, or some positivity in these terrible times.
- The oldest known stone bracelet seems to be forty thousand years old, found in a Denisovan cave in modern Siberia, and exhibiting some techniques usually thought to develop among later subspecies of humans. Who knew they had drills 40000 years ago?
- In our grand age of digital consumption disrupting industries left and right, won’t SOMEbody think of Coke?
- If you’re going to have one of those Amazon or Google AI assistant/surveillance device, and you’re not going to rig it up to a Big Mouth Billy Bass as previously observed in the Walk, you should definitely rig it up to a skull.
- Tattooing is an art, and covering up for badly-done tattoos is itself an art.
- The Russian LGBT Network has rescued 40 men from the ongoing purges in Chechnya. I am now begging for a movie about the group of elite LGBTQIAP+ commandos executing this raid.
- McMansion Hell is an awesome blog about the things that make a certain style of house deeply unsettling, with a little architectural background tossed in along the way. The author does a really good job explaining more of the background of it in a more thoughtful way than the post format usually allows.
- Let’s have one more happy thing to try to balance out the week. Cookie Monster met a puppy, and what happened next will brighten your day.
