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? Email Glenn!
- You may have heard of this one, but it’s a Wednesday Walk story if ever I heard one: HitchBot was a friendly robot-slash-social-experiment that hitchhiked across both Germany and Canada. Its programmers then sent it on a whirlwind journey across the US of A, where it went all the way from Boston to Philadelphia, where it was bashed up and left on the side of a street, because of course it was. HitchBot might yet live, though. Keep hope alive.
- Historical paintings can tell us about things the artist didn’t necessarily intend to show, including what watermelons looked like before the last few centuries’ worth of selective breeding.
- Via the inimitable Jordan Duncan: we are in the wrong universe. This we have known for numerous reasons…but consider the case of The Berenstain Bears, if that is their real name. That’s, like, one of the things they changed for the alternate universe in Fringe. Also…is it spelled that way just so people won’t think they’re Jewish?
- Learn some things about cheese, BuzzFeed style, including dozens of ideas for different pasta/cheese/added flavor combinations for mac & cheese.
- Feedback time for all you Walkers out there: which animal mating style illustrated with human models will YOU be trying with your sweetums?
- There’s potential here: take on ISIS using the power of catfishing.
- RIP Jonathan Sanders, murdered by a cop spewing racial slurs. This as part of a remarkable slew of terrorist attacks by thugs bearing badges throughout July.
- A 110-year-old woman in New Jersey credits her longevity to Miller High Life. Fill in your own joke here.
- There is a new sexiest man alive, meaning that the previous one has by now been consumed by purifying fire in an arcane and bloody ritual. More interestingly, though, the syntax of the phrase “sexiest man alive” is rather unique, eh?
- Nichelle Nichols, earthly avatar of glory and starlight, will be flying on NASA’s SOFIA observatory mere months after suffering a stroke.
- The Windows Character Map has never been a particularly well-designed program, and it doesn’t really help that it hasn’t been updated in years and years.
- The annual gun-melt takes instruments of murder and turns them to a productive purpose, melted into rebar for bridges and freeways.
- Before the Swiss had an army, there was the Roman army knife.
