Wednesday Walk Around the Web – 12/03/2014

richard-III-skeleton

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. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Wednesday Walk? Email Glenn!

  • Radio Shack is continuing its inexorable decline, and sounds like it treats its employees about as well as any large corporation. Be nice to retail workers, folks. Be nice to workers.
  • Pianogram displays bar graphs for piano pieces. You can run statistics on all your music!
  • Half memoir and half celebration of basketball, this piece on NBA Jam is fascinating.
  • Steve Rogers brings to our attention Lars Von Trier’s existential crisis over whether he can create art now that he’s sober. “No creative expression of artistic value has ever been carried out by former alcoholics and drug addicts.” Uh huh. The idea that recently-sober people can’t make good art looks a lot like the idea that because a lot of great artists have been mentally ill, mental illness must have made them great. (It ain’t a super-power, and it’s not +2 when you roll for creativity. At most it gives you some perspective.) If his addictions are too well integrated into his movie-making process, of course, that’s different, but again that’s specific to him and his struggles.
  • Also from Steve Rogers: care of Eye of the Tiber, your home for some prime Thomas Aquinas goofs (haven’t name-dropped him in the ol’ High Spot yet!), comes word of the 72-part adaptation of The Silmarillion. Suck it, Christopher Tolkien!
  • From Jason Krowe: either the current theory of star formation no longer fits the data, or the stars are going out and someone needs to bring The Doctor back to life again.
  • BACK TO STEVE ROGERS: the University of Texas is missing a whole lot of brains. Crap, they’ll be on to me any minute!
  • They just don’t punctuate like they used to.
  • New England got its name in 1616.
  • Supposedly you can eat a bunch of yeast before drinking to avoid getting drunk. After some unofficial testing it seems to work if you pace yourself…but if you pace yourself even more you won’t get drunk anyway, so I don’t really get it.
  • If you don’t imagine Mario running around the walls of your house, did you know this was an available option??
  • Meanwhile in Madagascar, there’s an outbreak of bubonic plague. There’s got to be something we can do about that.
  • The Guardian provides a batch of historical figures photoshopped into today’s fashion. Of course Shakespeare is a hipster.
  • Kamala has lost both of his legs to diabetes, and is apparently on very shaky financial ground.
  • This Week in Recontextualized Music: “Killing in the Name” sounds pretty good coming from an orchestra.
  • Also in recontextualized music, Naughty by Nature, just got an upgrade.
  • Genetic analysis shows even more prehistorical interbreeding to create the melange that is us, including a population of ancient ancestors previously unknown.
  • Also in genetic analysis, long-time readers of the Wednesday Walk will remember the fateful day in 2012 when the skeleton of Richard III was found underneath a parking lot in England. At least, it seemed a lot like Richard III, and had a lot of characteristics that we’d expect Richard III’s skeleton to have. Now, in the oldest successful DNA identification, we’re sure it’s him. We’re also sure that there’s been at least one “false-paternity event” in the intervening generations, which is just a delightful euphamism.
  • This Week in Medical Miracles: we can transplant arms now. This guy can hug his partner again, and eventually regain other abilities. It’s a beautiful thing. I definitely hope someone gets my arms when I die.