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 informative.
- RIP Priscilla Slater, murdered by cops.
- As more and more people are murdered by cops, we all have to deal with the fact that you have to consider the possible consequences before you call them, and in some cases calling the cops on someone is tantamount to attempted murder. (A wellness check, incidentally, is another function we’ve ceded and/or assigned to the cops that really ought to be the responsibility of someone who isn’t armed and primed to fire.)
- It’s still a bit early to say for sure, but it looks like COVID-19 tests performed on over three thousand protesters don’t show a pronounced bump in transmission rates.
- Say you’re a politician who isn’t an unrepentant fascist, but you can’t quite bring yourself to voice support for the movement to rein in police brutality by actually, like, pushing back against the cops. How do you go about crafting a public statement? The internet is here for you. Now more than ever.
- Conspiracy theorists will latch onto literally anything if they really put their minds (sic) to it — some folks have apparently convinced themselves that the Times Square billboards at the end of Captain America: Part the First foreshadow the coronavirus, meaning that Disney yadda yadda Bill Gates’ microchips something something 5G vaccines etc. etc. and probably the Jews. One intrepid investigator put extraordinary effort into tracking down the actual billboards and my friends, you have to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
- Also in wild, unfounded assumptions: The tenuous-at-best connection between the ancient Mayan calendar turning over and the end of the world is colliding with the Christian crackpot’s tendency to predict the end of the world and then move the date forward when it conveniently doesn’t happen, as apparently the 2012 apocalypse is coming around again. I think I speak for us all when I say: CAN’T WAIT.
- As covered previously, many large corporations and makers of consumer products are here for us during the pandemic, now more than ever. We’re moving into a new phase of PPE chic now, with DEVO’s energy dome/face shield making safety products more fashion forward. DEVO truly IS here for us now more than ever.
- Look, many of us are desperate to find some peace of mind during the plague times, but none of us should be so desperate as to actually take bleach seriously as a medicinal supplement.
- Statues of individual real-life people may be inherently suspect, since even if they’re not memorializing bigots of historical scale they’re still contributing to an individualistic Great Man view of history (and honestly, they’re usually memorializing bigots of historical scale). Far preferable are monuments like the Russian paean to the humble lab mouse, one hotel’s fancily-dressed horse, and the life-size Shrek at the Dreamworks headquarters. However, and I’m sure this has been noted previously in the ol’ Walk, if we’re going to keep memorializing real live people in a display of regional pride, the very least we could do would be to toss statues of legendary white supremacists into the damn river and, failing that, at least swap vile cretins like Nathan Bedford Forrest with local folks you can really be proud of.
- In the age of social distancing, it’s important to find spaces where you can find solace alone.
- If we can return to lighthearted lockdown hobbies for a moment, building Ninja Warrior-esque obstacle courses for the squirrels in your backyard offers no end of delights for the home-bound hobbyist.
- From out of the shadows, in our time of great need, comes Allie Brosh with a new book. Any sighting of the Hyperbole and a Half author is a true blessing.
- This Week in OTHER Pandemics: A tissue sample from 1966 has turned out to contain the oldest known complete version of the HIV genome, giving background to and confirming models of the early spread of the disease before the mass outbreak.
- This week’s banner image is from Tanzanian artist Sungi Mlengeya’s minimalist work exploring space and community among black women.
