Month: October 2020

Crate of Curios part 5

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All of a sudden it’s weekend and here we go again with the weekly treasure chest.

  1. As someone incredibly prone to overthinking any art-making, I was very happy to come across this quote by Any Warhol.

2. For those of us with less-than-green fingers, but adoration for house plants, The Laidback Gardener provides a handy yet relaxed guide on how to handle them.

3. Google is soon about to provide a way to get those earworms out of the brain with its ‘hum to search’ feature.

4. Considering how much talk there is about the benefits of eating lots of fiber, do you know what it actually does in the organism? No? Well, read here which different types of fiber there are and how each of them works.

5. Here is Betty Fox jumping rope pretty high up above the ground probably in 1949. But that was not the only thing she and her partner Benny Fox got up to – they actually did whole acrobatics and dance routines at 20 floors’ height.

And that’s it for this time – until next week!

Crate of Curios part 4

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Loads of material to choose from this week, so there’ll be a bit of everything from bad geography jokes to Covid science.

  1. This week was the first time when I heard the term ‘poetry spamming’ – meaning commenting on someone’s social media post with verses and I think it should become a thing asap. This was the verse in question (by Edna Vincent St. Millay)

2. Does sunlight make you sneeze? Ever wondered why? So do the scientists at Oxford – you can help them with their research by taking a short survey.

3. #badgeographyjoke of the week.

4. Why do some people not get sick from Covid-19? So far the leading theory has been that they simply have better immune systems. However, perhaps it is just the opposite.

5. A decrepit house in Prague has revealed a lifetime’s worth of work by Jewish painter Gertrud Kauders.

And that was it. Until next week!

Crate of Curios part 3

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Week 3 and still going… As it’s been a busy week, this one is rather light and cheery.

  1. The Awkward Yeti knows what makes us happy.

2. Hypothesis: Are carrots orange because of 17th century politics? Reply: M-m-m-maybe. Too bad that we so seldom get to see the other colors!

3. Apparently a team of scientists in University of Arkansas have developed a method of producing clean limitless energy from graphene.

4. How many porn stars pr million inhabitants does your country have? (limited to Europe, though)
Just FYI, the link is to the porn star database where numbers are from, so you won’t find more stats or maps there.

5. Tasmanian devils are back in Australia after three millennia of absence. May they live long and prosper and keep the local ecosystem in check.

Crate of Curios part 2

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Time for another dispatch of the weird and wonderful things I’ve come across on the internet this week. So let’s dive right in.

  1. Frida Kahlo’s love letter to Diego Rivera from her hospital bed while waiting to have her leg amputated. The presence of mind she has while facing the most hideous health issues is simply extraordinary.
  2. The family of puma Messi from Russia, now also has a new cheetah called Gerda. It is unbelievable how tame and friendly such a big cat can be and absolutely fascinating how they are slowly introducing her and Messi who they’ve raised since cub.

3. Anyone interested in old recipes might have despaired over the cooking temperature descriptions at one point or another – stress no more, as here is a handy little chart that converts it into temperature ranges that work with modern ovens.

4. A poetic drawing by Olivia de Recat showing our life trajectories together with others that cross our ways.

5. Art is not always in the service of good as these designs of prison cells by Alphonse Laurencic, a French architect, veritably show. He used techniques and insights from modern art and color theory in order to design some seriously harrowing spaces in Barcelona during Spanish Civil War that would now undoubtedly qualify as ‘techniques for enhanced interrogation’.