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!
- RIP Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, author, activist, academic, husband, father, grandfather, Nobel laureate, vocal witness. The White House statement on him is a hell of a thing. May his memory be a blessing, as they say.
- Forget the human centipede: meet the human dominoes.
- Aziz Ansari’s dad is kind of a treasure.
- This Week in Cops: in Washington, a man was fitted with an ankle bracelet during his house arrest…except an intrepid cop put on his prosthetic leg, which he popped off and left at home while he went out and murdered someone. Capital work by all involved.
- This Week in Root Systems: a fallen tree pulls up the whole lawn like a carpet. You know, I’d hate to lose any of the few trees I have left, but that would be an incredible opportunity to replace the lawn with something less revolting than grass.
- Washington DC will vote on statehood this fall. DC statehood would be just great — it has no federal representation that matters, despite having more residents than Wyoming (and even if it didn’t its residents would still be, y’know, human beings and citizens and all that) — buuuuuuuuuut anything DC does has to be approved by the US congress, and as long as Republicans exist they aren’t going to allow people who’re probably not going to vote for them to be represented.
- This Week in Art: Calvin and Hobbes goes THREE-DEEEEEEEEEE!
- I, along with many other people, had been under the impression that the world’s supply of helium was running low. It seems that’s not the case. Okay then!
- This Week in Friendly AI: DoNotPay is a robot lawyer that’s helping to contest millions of dollars’ worth of traffic tickets.
- Celebrate the arrival of the Juno mission to Jupiter by taking a look at the history of Jovian exploration.
- This Week in Orange Juice: that wily Donald Sutherland is always selling orange juice. Always. He’s been on it ever since Geena Davis’ term as US President.
- This Week in Video Games: sometimes it’s important to remember that not every thing happening in the world of gaming is a woman being harassed or threatened for daring to play/review/make games. (Most, it feels like, but still.) Sometimes you hear about people wistfully racing against the ghosts of their dead parents.
- Also in video games, This Week in Doom Wads: PTBN overlord Brad [insert second name] would like you to know that you can now use Doom to murder Jerry Seinfeld and company in his apartment. Go and do.
- Which Is It: prescription drug or Tolkien Elf?
- Please, please, learn how to spot the signs of depression among your horsies.
- So Rihanna did a song for the new Star Trek movie. I’m sure it’ll be a topic of discussion when the Spectacular gets to the movie in a few weeks, but in the meantime a lot of people have felt the need to express their views on it, and a lot of them sure are sexist, gatekeeping douchebags. It’s almost like they’ve never heard of IDIC or something. (Or the fact that glamorous black women have been part of ST for literally fifty years.)
- Over on the creator side of the creator/fan divide, apparently JK Rowling wrote a thing about magic in North America and made quite a whitewashed, colonial, stereotypical hash of it.