DAVID ADAMS looks at the odder side of life…
PICTURE: Drew Coffman/Unsplash
• A German university is offering students grants of €1,600 – but only if they can commit to doing nothing. Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts is offering three grants for students who can engage in a specific form of “active inactivity”. Applicants are free to choose their own form of idleness and will go before a panel of school officials to make their pitch. “Doing nothing isn’t very easy,” Friedrich von Borries, an architect and design theorist who came up with the initiative told The Guardian. “We want to focus on active inactivity. If you say you are not going to move for a week, then that’s impressive. If you propose you are not going to move or think, that might be even better.” Anonymous pitches must be made before 15th September.
• A mysterious safe appeared on a New York farmer’s property this week along with a note saying that “If you can open this, you can have what’s inside”. Kirk Mathes said deputies had to disperse a crowd that gathered around the safe on his farm at Barre and used a sledgehammer in an attempt to force it open. He’s now moved it to a secret location and says he’s decided to keep it closed for the moment. “If you open it, the show is over. In these times, with the virus and the politics, it might get people a chance to set their problems or troubles aside and have a lot of fun talking about it,” he was quoted saying on a local news outlet. There are reportedly plans for the safe to be an exhibit in a proposed town museum and speculation is mounting over whether the safe’s appearance was in fact a publicity stunt.
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• A 15-year-old tortoise who has been on the run for 74 days in the US state of Tennessee has been found – just a couple of hundred metres from home. Solomon, a Sulcata tortoise, disappeared from his home on 8th June but was found last week at a home construction site nearby. While he hadn’t gotten far, he had proved elusive. “If you knew the number of searches that were launched by ourselves, and other community groups and individuals,” owner Lynn Cole told CNN. “He just eluded our ability to spot him.”
