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!
- Last Week in Thanksgiving Miracles: A couple of weeks ago, an unsuspecting grandma plugged her grandson’s number into a group chat about Thanksgiving without realizing that her grandson changed his number and she invited a stranger. Last week, the stranger actually went, and all was well. What a world.
- This Week in Cover Music: “Another Brick in the Wall” on the gayageum is pretty great.
- In the Star Trek universe, all humans are mad scientists.
- This Week in Dark Passengers in Spaaaaaaace: NASA is looking for better ways to handle human excrement. Aren’t we all. Get your suggestions in by December 20th, friends!
- Give me all of the high-res illuminated manuscripts.
- Sometimes, when you honk at a gigantic ship, the gigantic ship honks also at thee.
- Might as well pack it in. I don’t think anyone’s going to be as hardcore as the dude who made his dentures out of coyote teeth.
- In Colorado, officials have found a use for terrible one-ply toilet paper: absorbing oil from freshly-laid tar used to repair cracks in the roads, so it’s not picked up by car tires. (Warning for news writers who may or may not have waited for years to write a meaty article about toilet paper.)
- This Week in Perfect Design: good job by whoever designed Lego shopping bags.
- This Week in Headlines: Watch 167 Theremin Nesting Dolls Play Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. I think I’d watch 167 theremin nesting dolls do pretty much anything.
- Boil the new Iphone and nothing much seems to happen to it. But will it blend?
- RIP William Sims, murdered by white supremacists.
- A Polish cardinal is blessing a supercomputer cluster. Your argument is invalid. (I mean, I guess it’s best to take every precaution?)
- With the caveat that our modern categories are modern inventions, the idea of medieval Arab lesbians living happily is fascinating. (Lots of our sexual & romantic categories really are Western inventions from the 19th & 20th centuries (and folks are made fun of mercilessly for inventing new ones today), introducing ambiguity which makes it more than difficult to track these things across cultures and across history while also allowing people to read whatever they want into their favorite ancient religious text.)
- Okay, so obviously anyone whining about millennials is wrong and dumb, as well as doing the same thing that boomers did to the gen-Xers, and boomers’ parents did to them. This tradition goes back literally forever, illustrated here with pithy little editorial cartoons going back to 1615. Old folks have whined about millennials in every millennium. Go back far enough and you’ll find ancient Romans lamenting a generation of callow youth who don’t listen to their parents; go back farther and you’ll find ancient Greeks lamenting lazy kids who’re always staring into their
phonesbooks instead of memorizing poetry like good students. - A new map purports to finally show our continents in their correct proportion. Cue television’s definitive statement on maps.
- Bless the improvisational inventiveness of D&D players.
- The tiniest Game Boy lives on your keychain. And yes, like any hacked-together game system, it does play DooM.
- The cleanup of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster isn’t only ongoing, it’s costing much more than originally estimated. You can’t exactly pursue nuclear cleanup and containment on the cheap.
- This Week in Relaxation: Sometimes even Satan gets to kick back.
