Russell Davies

It's funny because it's true

A neat summation of a real IOT issue.

Snooker loopy

Timehop showed me this picture, which reminded me I used to bunk off work, many years ago and play snooker with my mate Ben. A different Ben.

There's no way the snooker club could have survived the creation of the massive cross-rail hole yet, surprisingly there's little evidence of its absence on the internet.

A bit of casual googling would lead you to believe it's still there. I'm refusing to look any further, I'm going to convince myself it's still going. 

Lull! Lull! Lull!

Related to yesterday's thing. There's also a great bit in the Mark Watson interview where he talks about the 40 minute lull you often get in one hour stand-up shows. He once, apparently, specifically addressed this by giving an audience member a stopwatch and asking them to chant LULL! LULL! LULL! at 40 minutes. That is genius. Thinking about the rhythm of attention is important and not something people normally do when they're writing a presentation. They tend to assume everyone's going to be focused for as long as they're going to talk. They're not. You have to design some peaks and troughs, assume there'll be some bits where they're not listening as hard.

Trust Me, I'm A PowerPointer

I've been listening to the Comedian's Comedian podcast recently and I've chanced across the odd thing that might be relevant for those thinking about presentations.

For instance, 6 minutes into the Dara Ó Brian episode there's talk about how we always starts with a couple of 'Trust Me I'm A Comedian' jokes. Nothing complicated just guaranteed laughs before he gets into anything improvisatory or fancy. 'Trust Me I'm A Comedian' is a good way to look at it. Establish some trust. Establish you know what you're doing. That's why banging straight in with a story, or maybe even a fanfare, is useful - it shows that you've done this before.

Interesting past

It occurs to me that there might be many who are new to Interesting and might not know it has history. Well, it has, and if you'd like to delve back in time - it's here.

Tampon homework for boys

Ella's found an Interesting thing, related to Alice's talk.

Ikea: Wrath of God

Have just been to see Akira for the first time in 25 years or so. Reminded me that when the Swedish furniture giant arrived in the UK I thought it was called Akira. And that, for a large number of years, I've been confusing Akira and Aguirre.

Not interesting, but true.

An Independent Review

@undermanager Hello! I read the Kio Stark book after seeing it on your blog and really enjoyed it. Thanks for posting about it!

— Kanye Burt (@orbific) September 18, 2016

It's true. It's very good. Get yourself a copy.

Nat at Interesting

It was a brilliant talk, now it's a brilliant blog post. About flyknit. Thanks Nat!

Alice at Interesting

Here's Alice's talk from Interesting. (The audio and the slides). About Tampon Club.