A (not very) funny thing happened on the way to John Adam Street…
Are jokes pro-social acts? I guess it depends on their content and the context of their telling. It is as hard to make up jokes as design pro-social experiments. Although I love hearing and telling jokes I have only ever made up three, and one of those was this morning. Here they are:
‘Why do rabbits care about the Government’s finances?
Because they are worried about the size of the public sector burrowing requirement’
(This joke is losing its already limited appeal as HMG long since stopped using PSBR as a measure.)
Man: Doctor, doctor I am invisible until I eat my lunch
Doctor: I’m sorry, I can’t see you until this afternoon’
And this morning’s joke:
‘I have made friends with an amoeba who is into boxing and martial arts. I am trying to get him to buy my car.
It’s proving to be a hard cell’.
I know these aren’t very good but they are mine. I am intrigued as to how many other people can claim to have actually invented (rather than just rediscovered or retold) a joke.
Fellowship this week
Going greener
RSA Hospitality is very much run on environmental and sustainable principles. To give but one example; our tablecloths are not cotton, but a material which looks and feels like cotton to maintain our high standards, but which is washed at a much lower temperature, thereby saving energy on the laundry.
The offices that I inhabit upstairs have not always had such an organised approach, which is something we’ve decided to really get to grips with. A couple of colleagues and I met with the lovely people at Global Action Plan who offer free environmental audits for small and medium businesses. Now I’m itching for the report to arrive so we can get stuck in.
Lucky numbers
According to the whiteboard on the other side of the room, we now have a grand total of 26,921 Fellows. Which means only another 79 to make it to the milestone of 27,000. It’s exciting to think about the influence this resource of collective expertise and enthusiasm will have (and we’ve been promised cake to celebrate).
We’ve also recently linked up with Teach First – a charity that encourages top graduates to enter teaching – in order to recruit more Fellows, and applications from that relationship have just started to trickle through.
Until next time…
Information on how to join the RSA Fellowship, and how to nominate others here.
RSA Academy – full steam ahead
First some good news. We have agreement from DCSF to the funding agreement for the RSA Academy so it’s full steam ahead for the new school to open in September, and be in the new building early in 2010. We have recruited some really good people to the Academy – many drawn from the existing staff at what is a fast improving school. One job we still have vacant is a Director of Business and Strategy so is anyone out there up for being part of this exciting initiative (you don’t need to be a trained teacher, details on the RSA website)?
This news is timely with the first meeting of our future schools network next week. To hear more about this visit Ian McGimpsey’s RSA Education blog. And while you are cruising our site can I recommend you go to the Carbon Limited site and hear about our fantastic public engagement even in Cardiff at the weekend.
Last Friday was the RSA Xmas Party. We always have it in January as Hospitality staff are working flat out on other people’s events in December. After a knife edge vote it was decided to go to a Medieval Banquet in St Katherine’s Dock. I dressed up as Richard the Lionheart and being the only man in costume felt like a complete plonker. The night was great because RSA colleagues are fun people to be with but I will draw a discreet veil over the quality of food and ‘entertainment’.
Thanks again to Ian Gilmour for taking the pro-social interventions idea on to the RSA networks platform. Ian has loads of ambitious ideas for where we take this next but we will need to keep adding examples and growing the conversation if we are to get to a take off point.
If you heard or saw me doing punditry over the weekend on the Peter Hain resignation and the Alan Johnson allegations, I hope I managed to tread the fine line between being impartial and – as I always do – trying to counter the general view that all politicians are corrupt and dishonest. I went out on a limb by saying on Radio 4 and 5 that I thought the AJ allegations were specious. But the way this shock horror exclusive story has faded quickly from view suggests that – on this occasion – I was right.
Rowlands links
The RSA has been carefully following the upsurge in political interest in happiness. David Willets and Paul Ormerod debated Happiness, Economics and Public Policy last year. Richard Layard is a regular visitor.
Psychologists looking at happiness consistently pin the blame on consumer culture. Too much choice is bad for us, according to Psychology Today. For Tim Kasser (who also spoke here recently), materialism is the problem. It’s not clear that this metric explains national and regional differences in happiness levels, though. Or sudden shifts in national mood.
It remains an open question whether we can legislate for happiness. Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy is a tidy polemic, although the Economist review wasn’t too favourable. Maybe the philosopher Peter Singer has it right: we can’t outlaw unhappiness, but we can prevent depression.
None of this is new, of course. Of contemporary thinkers, only Daniel Gilbert has really taken on board J. S. Mill’s autobiographical paradox: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” Darrin McMahon’s Happiness: A History is a useful corrective to the present-mindedness of this debate.
Drinking with Dave
It’s been a really busy week here with an event happening every day, so we are only just now trying to draw breath. Monday evening’s RSA Screens event with Dave Gorman went down really well – he’s such an interesting guy although he was telling us in the bar afterwards that he’s trying to leave behind his wacky comic persona, and carve out a reputation as a serious documentary-maker making “proper grown-up telly”.
Also, still picking up coverage of our event with the Chancellor last week, It’s good to know that RSA events have a life beyond John Adam Street.
We’ve been getting ready for the start of our new series on education and rushing around trying to find a copy of Michael Young’s new book for Ian in our Education team, who’s going to be doing an interview with Prof Young for the RSA Journal. It should be a good start to the series.
And finally… off to Oxford this evening to attend the first event in a new series in partnership with Oxford Amnesty Lectures, looking at the very topical subject of religion and human rights with major international thinkers including Simon Schama, Ronald Dworkin and Asma Jahangir .
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