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.
- PTBN Pop Grand Poobah Todd Weber brings word of another great advancement in the field of governmental cat filters.
- This Week in Fandom Rabbit Holes: The Twilight saga has brought an immense fandom community — and tourism industry — to Forks, Washington. It’s past time for a lot of us who were really snide about the Twilight phenomenon to settle down and think about how we treat media whose primary audience is women and girls.
- It’s important in this day and age to clean out your toxins on a regular basis. You need a lot of dedication to get through The Chili Dog Cleanse, but for those of us who’ve done it it really is rewarding.
- The worst nightmare of anyone working at a grocery store has to be dying in it, with nobody noticing.
- This Week in Wednesday Walk Top Tips: Do not insist on a gender-separated menu for your wedding. Do not do this. First, you probably have guests who are both women and beer aficionado. Second, nobody needs to be reminded of gender roles more in this, the year of our lord Beyoncé two-thousand and nineteen. Third, which special pudding do your nonbinary guests eat?
- Questions abound about the origins, intentions, and mindset of the redditors stapling bread to trees in Sheffield, England, but honestly, this is probably the most wholesome thing happening on Reddit, so I figure it’s okay.
- In North Carolina, one emu has been on the lam for weeks. Bless you, fugitive emu — run wild, run free!
- Personal-finance scolds have long used coffee as a blunt object to beat people over the head with, even though it seems to be very easy to, you know, not do that.
- Hart Island, near the Bronx in New York City, is home to a mass grave of thousands of people who died of HIV/AIDS in New York in the 80s and 90s. Without family members willing to acknowledge their “loved” ones, and with many cemetaries refusing to admit corpses of people who’d had HIV, New York shipped these bodies to Hart Island.