School of Curiosity
Explore. Dream. Discover.
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Funny Fahrenheit
August 8, 2012
According to Jonathan Lynn, the comedy writer most famous for Yes Minister, If you want to make people laugh you need to have an eye for the mercury. He says “Before the audience is admitted, the temperature in the theatre should not be more than 65 degrees Fahrenheit….or maybe 68 if its really well, and silently, air conditioned. People do not laugh when they get hot. It should be cool but not cold”
Before you deliver your punchline today, check your thermometer.
Have a curious day.
Dating Indirect
August 7, 2012
Every September in the Italian town of Marostica, the inhabitants play a game of living chess in the town’s checkerboard square. The tradition dates back to 1454, when this method was used to decide which of two young noblemen should have the hand of the daughter of the local notable. Not every chess piece is a person; some are police horses.
Sounds more fun than internet dating.
Have a curious day.
Stung
August 6, 2012
Next time you want to describe someone as ‘a pain’, try to be a bit more precise. That’s what entomologist Justin O Schmidt did when he wanted to create an index showing how painful the stings of various insects were. Exposing himself to actual stings he came up with the following: -
The scale runs from 0 to 4+. The cute honeybee scores 0-2 and is described as “Like a matchthread that flips off and burns your skin”. The Red Harvester ant scores a big 3 as it feels “Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrowing toenail”
But do watch out for the 4+ Bullet ant whose sting is “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire walking over flaming charcoal with a three inch nail grinding into your heel”.
So when you say you don’t like Monday’s, is that a 1 or 4+ on the Schmidt Scale?
Have a curious day.
Fun down under
August 3, 2012
I found this in a Tokyo newspaper about three years ago. It’s an interesting idea, living in the sky, gardens on the ground and the fun down under.
Is this the future?
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What’s mine is yours
August 1, 2012
Tonight 38,000 people will sleep in somebody else’s bedroom. Thats thanks to airbnb a website that allows people to rent out a room to strangers just like a Bed and Breakfast. It’s all part of a growing movement called collaborative consumption. The idea is that rather than keep on producing more and more things, why don’t we just share what we already have? The internet makes sharing much more feasible and there are sites where you can lend people money and earn interest; use a bike for an hour; or rent out the parking space at your home to a local office worker.
Airbnb even makes it possible for you to rent Luxembourg for a night (if you have a spare £90,000 that is).
It’s good to share.
Have a curious day.
Little shops of wonder
July 31, 2012
In an age of identikit supermarkets and bland business parks, we should take some time to celebrate little shops of wonder. Those quirky independent outlets that brighten up the dreariness of the high street.
One of my favourites is The Book Truck, run by Shuhei Mita in Tokyo. He stocks over 1000 mainly vintage and secondhand books about art, fashion, culture, novels, manga, western and Japanese magazines. It’s the kind of place where you are likely to make a joyful discovery.
We would love to hear about your favourite little shops of wonder. Do let us know.
Have a curious day.
Citizens of Nowhere Island
July 30, 2012
Artist Alex Hartley found a tiny island off the coast of Norway. It had been left behind by the retreating glaciers and was the size of a football pitch. He managed to persuade the Norwegian government to let him take the island, boulder by boulder, in order to create a new nation in international waters. Nowhere Island is now located off the coast of Weymouth as part of the Cultural Olympiad. It has its own constitution and anyone can sign up to be a citizen (there are 15,000 citizens so far from 100 countries). As a citizen you can make proposals for inclusion in the constitution. So far proposals have included free pants for the over-forties and free ice cream on Fridays.
What would you suggest?
Have a curious day.
The hipster olympics
July 26, 2012
With just one day to go to the 2012 Olympics don’t fret if you didn’t get selected. Next time try out for the Hipster Olympics. It’s an annual event attended by 6000 of Berlin’s coolest cats. Events include a skinny-jeans tug of war, a vinyl spinning marathon, a horn rimmed glasses throwing contest and a jute bag race. Hipsters eh?
There’s only one entrance requirement – you have to be cool.
Get working on your cool.
Have a curious day.
See this before the library burns down
July 20, 2012
Taffy Thomas is one of the world’s great story tellers. If ever you are in Grasmere in the English Lake District pop in and see him at The National Storytelling Centre. Whilst touring with The Fabulous Salami Brothers Taffy had a stroke at the age of 36. Unable to speak he turned to storytelling as a form of speech therapy and taught himself to speak again. Since then he has collected more than 300 stories, tales and elaborate lies which he keeps in his head. They say that when Taffy dies it will be the equivalent of a library burning down.
Head off to Grasmere if you can.
Have a curious day.
A man most curious
July 19, 2012
Yugoslav-born genius Nikola Tesla died in obscurity in 1943 at the age of eighty-seven, the owner of some seven hundred patents including that for the first electric power plant.
In 1899 he discovered a way of making manmade lightning by using a copper ball atop a three-hundred-foot mast, in effect charging the whole planet with several hundred times the energy of a lightning bolt. This phenomenon created a power source that could be tapped anywhere on the globe, a fact he demonstrated by lighting two hundred of Edison’s lamps at twenty-six miles distance without wires.
Tesla invented radar forty years before World War II, developed the idea of a radio-controlled rocket in the 1890′s, and built the first world broadcasting station on Long Island in 1900. He claimed he was in contact with extraterrestials and told the press in 1924 that he could destroy objects 250 miles away with a ray and form a force field around the United States from twelve strategic beaming stations.
His eccentricities have, until recently, overshadowed his accomplishments. He had a germ phobia that led him to use eighteen towels after bathing, a belief that drinking whiskey would let him live to be 150, and a penchant for lighting lamps by subjecting his body to massive voltages. A biography, Return of the Dove, claimed that he was born aboard a spaceship en route from Venus to Earth in 1856.
Alien genius? Who Knows? Though we think the whisky idea could catch on.
Have a curious day.