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.
- If you can afford to give some money to a good cause, please consider Or L’Simcha and/or the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, respectively the site of last weekend’s anti-Semitic mass shooting and the charity the attacker’s conspiracy theories crystallized around. (“Jews are bringing Those People to our country” is as old a conspiracy theory as there is, with different Those Peoples being shuffled in as the precise targets of popular bigots come and go, even moreso now that our current cast of bigots thinks that saying “globalists” or “Soros” instead of “Jews” makes them clever and subtle.)
- A lot of us desperately need something halfway positive to hang onto right now. Some of us REALLY DESPERATELY need it, which is what Steve and I are doing on the ol’ podcast from time to time. But that can take many forms. Sometimes it’s comforting to know that there may be hope for us, because if this cast iron skillet can be saved through hard work, determination, and the judicious application of pent-up aggression, maybe I can too.
- Another heartwarming note: In Southampton, 250 people banded together to form a human chain to move a local bookshop to its new location.
- It’s time for the Wednesday Walk Update Section! Last week you thrilled to the mystery of the stolen colon. Well, friends, it has been recovered.
- A long time ago, it was relatively standard to have a slot in a bathroom wall or medicine cabinet for old razor blades — when they got too dull to shave with you’d just toss them through this slot and they’d sit inside the wall. You can probably think of some reasons why it eventually became less common to just toss trash inside your walls. Apparently, some old-timey dentist’s offices did the same thing, except with teeth they’d pulled.
- The Vatican released a game styled after Pokémon Go where you collect saints and characters from Bible stories (if you’re in Italy or Spain) and didn’t call it Popémon Go. What are the Christians even DOING?
- RIP Dorcas Reilly, the inventor of the green bean casserole.
- As we all know, Chinese restaurants almost always have the best chicken wings. One Chinese place in Philadelphia is going viral because of a menu that, to anyone willing to do a little bit of math, is kind of bonkers.
- This Week in Interior Decorating: If you’re looking for some fine textiles to adorn your floors and/or walls, I would suggest a celebration of beautiful molds and fungi.
- This Week in Direct Action: In Germany, a busy little beaver chewed through a poplar tree, tipping it over directly onto a yacht. This is the best thing that’s happened to a yacht since someone untied Betsy Devos’ yacht and cast it adrift.
- Gizmodo’s list of 100 sites that shaped the internet is actually a pretty good encapsulation of a lot of internet history, from cat memes to commerce sites to social media to flash animation to, yes, Goatse.
- This Week in Halloween Costumes: This group of friends who coordinate a set of costumes to celebrate a different actor’s career every year are doing Halloween right.
- When I first got my cat, I was not sure I could keep a living thing alive. It’s been more than five years now, though, and I am so happy I didn’t chicken out and try to get a robot cat.
