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.
- RIP Aretha Franklin.
- This Week in Headlines: It’s Okay to Give Up on Mediocre Books Because We’re All Going to Die.
- Kelly Marie Tran is moving forward despite the best efforts of Star Wars bros.
- Clowns who don’t want their distinctive faces to be stolen by other clowns can register their intellectual property by having an artist painstakingly paint their faces onto cold, dead orbs. This is crying out for a museum tour.
- This Week in Graphs: Plot house size against household size (ie how large the building is versus how many people live in it) in the US over the last century, and you get a nice tidy X as larger homes are shared by fewer people, inviting a host of sociological questions.
- An octopus is pretty much as intelligent as a human, or a dolphin. This makes forcibly dosing octopodes with MDMA somewhat uncomfortable, even if it does suggest some interesting things about shared neurotransmitters between such distantly-related species.
- Also in non-human intelligences, French crows are being trained to shame tourists by picking up their litter. I’m not sure who’s going to be rightly shamed about that, though, if they can keep littering and watch the crows.
- Early video game consoles obviously put pretty extreme limitations on the composers tasked with providing game music, but I did not realize just how onerous the Super Nintendo was.
- We all recently pondered the ritual implications of one brave soul’s efforts to get Carly Rae Jepsen a sword. Details are only now emerging on how she’s going to use it.
- For more than fifty years, the province of Alberta has been on a crusade to wipe out all rats within its borders, complete with propaganda and rat patrols. It’s now pretty much the only place in the world withOUT rats.
- Some ancient cave paintings are remarkably sophisticated; the art doesn’t develop chronologically in a way that’s easy to narrativize.
- This Week in Cats: The rusty-spotted cat is a south Asian feline species for whom adults look like kittens. The species is threatened, so while I really never thought my life would lead me to relocate to Sri Lanka to open a cat sanctuary, here we are.
