Our weekly round-up of interesting and outlandish information, collected from the corners of the charity sector.
Good sportsjawaship
Diary has a passing fondness for Star Wars, and takes a continued and thus far inexhaustible joy in the amazingly silly things people think of to raise cash for charity.
As a result it is with unalloyed delight that this column is able to bring you the above picture, with thanks to the Daily Dot, an online paper about stuff that they found down the back of the internet, and to Twitter, the nonsense-column writer's new best friend.
The picture features a chess-playing Jawa (you remember - the small people from the first film who capture R2D2) who recently raised $478 for the Lymphoma Research Foundation by playing the board game against all comers at Dragon Con, a gathering for hopeless nerds, who like to gather together with other nerds and be, well, nerdy.
There are those churlish souls who might suggest that dressing up as a Jawa and playing loads and loads and loads of games of chess at a fantasy convention is a lot of work for $478, but it seems the lad involved has quite enjoyed himself.
The face behind the Jawa is Stephen Eisenhauer, who as an American ninth grader is either 14 or 15, and evidently still waiting for the growth spurt that makes teenagers look more like Wookiees.
Eisenhauer seems a bit obsessed with chess and Star Wars, but the faceless scribe behind Diary cannot in all honesty hold that against him, since those charges have from time to time been levelled in this direction, too.
He’s undefeated, apparently.
“Jawas like winning,” Eisenhauer told the Daily Dot, “but we try to show good sportsjawaship by not celebrating our victories too much.
“We just shake hands and say ‘utinni’.”
That’s the nice thing about playing chess with a Jawa, of course. A Jawa don't pull people's arms out of their sockets when they lose.
Extreme will-writing
Diary was originally going to write that skydiving for charity is as old as the hills. But on reflection, it’s probably a bit younger. This column’s best guess is that it’s only worked well in the last hundred or so years, since the invention of the aeroplane.
However interestingly, it was possible beforehand. It appears that the parachute was invented before the plane, by more than 100 years. The first successful parachute jump was in 1797 by André-Jacques Garnerin, a Frenchman, who used it to leap from a hot-air balloon.
How many people tried unsuccessful parachute jumps before that is not recorded, possibly because they didn’t get to work out what went wrong and have another go.
Whether anyone skydived from a hot air balloon for charity is also, sadly, unrecorded.
Anyway, all of that is a massive aside. As with the above, the important thing is that people can’t just let it alone. Now, instead of raising money for charity while jumping, people are giving while jumping. How many, we’re not sure. But at least three.
It’s called extreme will-writing, and the idea is that you leave a legacy to charity while in the air. It’s being promoted by legacy giving campaign Remember a Charity, which we wrote a more serious story about the other day.
Far be it for Diary to suggest that on average, those who leave a legacy this way may find it arrives with the charity marginally earlier, on average, than those who write the will on solid ground.
But why are you smiling?
Shock news! Minister for civil society Rob Wilson is doing something unusual in this picture.
Is it:
- Wearing jeans and a casual jacket
- Sporting something that looks suspiciously like a beard
- Riding a skateboard
- Smiling
Congratulations. You spotted it. It’s all four.
The first is odd, but can potentially be explained by the fact that he’s launching something called Social Saturday, and has decided to dress down, in honour of the weekend theme.
(The launch event itself took place on a Thursday, Diary notes, which at first glance seems a slightly odd day to launch Social Saturday. But there’s probably a good reason.)
The second looks like an impressive five o’clock shadow in this picture, but has now transformed into a real beard.
Diary understood that we had already passed peak beard, but maybe Wilson has seen which way the political wind is blowing, and decided he better Corbyn himself up while he’s got the chance.
As to the third one – well, he’s launching an event at a skate park, and even ministers are allowed to have some fun once in a while. We'll give him that.
The fourth one, though, is a source of total bafflement. Wilson has tried to smile before in pictures, but he’s never really succeeded. It’s usually more of a spasmodic gurn.
This, though, is a genuine instance of an unforced upward quirk of the Wilson lip. Diary is in uncharted territory when it comes to explaining this one. No map. No GPS. No compass. Not so much as a sextant.
