I’ve been pondering between a couple of ideas recently. Idea #1 is a storytelling show that, ultimately, I’ve started writing and will be astonishingly good. I mean it’s better than “the storytelling set” on myth and legend so. Yeah. Idea #2 is about putting together a projection show thats based on interesting new things I’ve learnt in the last year with some sort of tenious through line. This is on the back burner at the moment, but I thought I’d write a few things down that I’d learnt recently that, for one reason or another, I find endlessly fascinating. See what you think.
Alaska is really big.
I saw a map in The Guardian this week which showed the size of Alaska compared to other places (for those interested in how our world maps are distorted please got to youtube and type “map” and “West Wing”). Alaska is seven times bigger than the UK, and is bigger than all but 18 countries. What I found most interesting was that if you put Alaska on top of the continental USA then it’s nearly one third of the land mass. It was also bought from Russia by the USA for $7.2m and only became a state in 1959. More on “statehood” later…
Swimming hurts more than rowing
I’ve started both rowing and swimming this week as part of a desperate effort to get fit and put behind me the health issues I had in 2018 and early 2019 (in short pneumonia, infection, breathing issues, feeling sad and panicking about having a heart attack – I didn’t, phew). Anyway, I bought a rowing machine for £20 and have been doing bits. The pain is mostly legs and shoulders. Swimming however feels like someone has put a tube in me and drained all the life force out of me afterwards – then the next day I feel a bit more energised. I’ve been monitoring a few things more regularly – peak flow, heart rate, O2 saturation – let me tell you, when you’re ill and you have Amazon you will buy medical equipment you don’t need and trying to get back to how healthy I was ten years ago…
Amelia Earhart was fascinating
Amelia Earhart was a pilot, famous for her feats of daring, flying around the world in dangerous planes (as they all were at the time), and, of course, for doing this in a time when this wasn’t regarded as an activity for women. She and her co-pilot went missing, presumed dead, but there’s new theory that they became stranded on an island in the South Pacific called Gardner Island. The “evidence” is rather circumstantial and not binding – part of a plane, make up and evidence of people living there. It’s also distorted by the fact that this island has a bit of a history of castaways. There’s a romanticism about being in a deserted place. I think I found it sad, that she died away from friends and family, either of injuries from a crash or from the lack of water on the arid island, after achieving so much at just 39.