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.
- Ancient medical tests pretty much always leave something to be desired — that something being “accuracy” or “reliability” or “having anything at all to do with the things they’re ostensibly testing” — but it turns out that an ancient Egyptian pregnancy test is actually more accurate than not.
- Jupiter’s magnetic field is much stranger than previously thought and certainly stranger than Earth’s, including what are effectively two south poles, possibly due to a dissolved core.
- This Week in Wednesday Walk Top Tips: If you’re looking for someplace to toss your cigarette butt, a) please look into quitting, there are people who can help you; 2) a random hole in the sidewalk might not be the best place. It could in fact be…I dunno, a busted gas main? A chamber full of ambient methane? A dynamite cubby? Hey, someone blew up my dynamite cubby!
- PTBN Grand Poobah Brad Hindscrooge brings word of a Florida branch of HateChicken LLC offering a lifetime of free chicken to one of its regulars…for his hundredth birthday. Caring gesture for an old man, or active trolling of an old man: you decide. Maybe both! (Autoplay video)
- Speaking of old men, let’s all try to do something as wholesome as the viral gentleman who shows up at the local pet shelter to brush and fall asleep with the cats.
- I’m not really one for most sports, but I can at least have an academic appreciation for a cultural milieu that produces sentences like “Grandma’s borscht tastes better out of the Stanley Cup.”
- Paul Gosar is a garbage human whose six siblings agree that he should not be in the US House of Representatives, in one of the great family dunking sessions of our time. Gosar (R-Landfill) fired back by saying that Stalin would have loved all of this, referring of course to Stalin’s famous method of responding to his political enemies by asking their families what they thought.
- The founders of Instagram are leaving, apparently because of the rising tide of Facebook integration threatening to make Instagram as terrible as Facebook.
- Mel & Sue from Great British Bake-Off are playing contract killers in a new series. Y to the E to the S spells YES.
- It’s hard to imagine a more jarring experience than attending a parent’s funeral one day and taking your family to Disney World the next. But one does what one must, and sometimes it actually works out. (A month and a half after my dad died, my mom and I went to Myrtle Beach. It was deep in the off-season (the middle of February to be specific), so we pretty much had the run of the place. She bought the photo that some Medieval Times cast member took of us. It was the last of our many, many road trips. A few months after my mom died, I went halfway down the eastern seaboard to catch a NIN concert with Tim Capel (of PTBN’s Comics Contingent). I heartily recommend grief-travel as a means of context-changing.)
- The fantabulous Steve Wille brings word that you — yes, you! — can build a bespoke electric skateboard for your cat.
