Here we are again, it’s yet another lazy lockdown Sunday and what better pastime could there be than to make a cup of tea (although as an exception I made coffee today) and open the new Crate of Curios. Let’s get to it!

1. Clowns tend to be more a matter of phobias than a hilarious stage act these days (looking at you, Stephen King), but there are still interesting things to discover about them. For instance, since 1946 all members of Clowns International get to have their personal stage makeup immortalized on an egg in Clown Egg Register. Originally these were actually emptied-out chicken eggs, but now for practical reasons they have moved on to ceramic eggs.

2. The Guardian has gathered a lot of interesting facts about Emily Brontë and “The Wuthering Heights” into a handful of nifty charts. However, if you see her compared to an emperor penguin somewhere, they are actually talking about her sister Charlotte.

3. Living in the city it’s sometimes easy to forget where our food comes from. OneSoil has gathered data about different crops grown in the US and Europe and made a fascinating map of it. Check out their Random beautiful fields feature!

4. How do Hollywood filmmakers know how the dwellings on desert planet Tatooine should look like in order to provide shelter for its inhabitants? Now they might Google, but first of all they visit the Michelson Cinema Research Library. In December 2020 it was taken over in its entirety by the Internet Archive, so after a period of uncertainty, it has finally found a forever home.

5. In a time period of pervasive employee surveillance, it’s rather refreshing to see the animation studio owners William Hanna and Joseph Barbera taking a stance on time clocks.

And that was it for this time. Happy reading and until next week!

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