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.
- In a timely update, my brother and I weighed in on the ol’ Spectacular regarding the newest Star War. Come for the droid liberation theology, stay for the trenchant view of fan culture.
- I realize I’m also kinda sorta in the advice-giving business now on the podcast, and maybe peacekeeping has its merits, but I’m also convinced that this woman did nothing wrong, she just learned how to speak Gary’s language.
- This Week in Product Placement: It’s important to get some messages out into the world.
- This Week in Film Rankings: The Marvel Cinematic Universe, ranked from least to most gay. Happy Pride!
- The modern equivalent of the message in the bottle may well be the transatlantic trash swept up by hurricanes and carried by ocean currents.
- This Week in Ethnic Cleansing: Having taken I-don’t-know-how-many children hostage, the US government is now using them as leverage to get their parents to sign “voluntary” deportation orders.
- One more moment of outrage. The avenues of recourse for convicted criminals are too few and too often closed off, especially when a jury decides to sentence a man to execution rather than life in prison because he’s gay and the jurors think prison rape would be fun for him. Regardless of whether he’s guilty or not — I won’t pretend to know the facts of the case — the sentencing process and every bit of thought that went into it is grotesque. Happy fucking Pride.
- A slice of good news now: Starbucks, who could use some good publicity lately, is extending their employee health care package to cover their employees’ health care. Happy Pride! Now, how many Starbucks employees are on the health plan?
- There’s a blood moon coming on July 27th, and the usual suspects are preaching about the end-of-the-world potentials. Even I’m praying this time, though. Pleeeeeeeeeeease.
- There’s trolling, and then there’s digging a canal between your country and your neighbor to turn them into an island.
- Too often lost in the conversation about whether adding salt to your pasta water actually helps it cook faster (it doesn’t) is the fact that it helps your pasta taste like salt, which is far more important.
- Movies often depict asteroid impacts as slow-moving, dramatic things. This description of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (and a whole lot of other things) is really evocative of the suddenness of the thing. “In the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next.” The end of the excerpt is a the real kicker.
- They say perpetual motion is impossible, and yet this plane flies and flies. Checkmate, scientists.
