Our weekly round-up of outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector.

Cliterally one of a kind

Okay, so first of all, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. It's an American charity which sponsors art projects, and its name contains three nouns Diary never expected to see together.

But that’s a sideshow. It’s not the VLA which is the main event in this column, but the latest piece of artwork it's backed. To whit, a giant golden statue of a clitoris, recently installed at Sewanee, the University of the South.

It’s just the latest in a string of projects called Cliteracy, the brainchild of feminist artist Sophia Wallace. Diary’s natural reaction to this kind of thing is obviously facetious amusement, but it’s actually hard to argue with the central point of the project, which is to highlight that society has some weird attitudes to women and sex.

Plus, Diary really likes the art, which also includes Clit Rodeo, a giant model of a clitoris you ride like a mechanical bull, and a wall containing “a hundred natural laws” about the clitoris – a mixture of scientific fact, sex education and complaints about how men are crap.

Diary’s personal favourite, by quite a long way, is “Ribbed condoms for her pleasure are up there with sub-prime mortgages and hair-in-a-can as the worst inventions of our time”, although “Democracy without cliteracy: phallusy” is also pleasing to the ear.

Diary also discovered that the clitoris continues to get bigger over the course of a woman’s life, which is good to know.

How to survive a zombie apocalypse

Society Diary has spent a lot of time when bored waiting for the train or trying to get to sleep at night, wondering what the best way would be to survive a zombie apocalypse. Try it some time.

First, you’ve got to set the rules. How quick are the zombies? How hard are they to kill? How long does it take to turn into a zombie after you die? How clever are they?

And then you get going.

Diary has always felt that in reality, if people did become possessed by a sudden tendency to rise up after death, cannibalistic tendencies, and a desire to murmur “Brains!” in a low voice, we would probably still be fine.

After all, zombies might be quicker than people, and stronger, and harder to kill, but so are ostriches, and hippos, and they don’t rule the Earth, do they?

Even with the multiplier effect, where every person killed by a zombie rises again, the key point in human beings’ favour is that we are smarter, and better at cooperating. Or to put it another way, they may want the brains, but we’ve got them.

And some of the best brains are already working on this problem. It was with great pleasure that Society Diary discovered that Cornell University – which is technically a charity, and which therefore we can shoehorn into this column – has produced a new guide called Rules to surviving a zombie apocalypse.

If Diary were to attempt to summarise its advice, it would be: run for the hills, tool yourself up, stockpile food, and wait for the army to sort it all out.

No it can’t. It really can’t

Diary is not a column with a great deal of patience for the mystical, the spiritual and the ineffable. Diary prefers things it can eff, as it were. And it definitely prefers the logical to the astrological.

So initially Diary was depressed to hear of an interview in the Astrological Journal with David Tredinnick, Conservative MP for Bosworth, who suggested that astrology could be used to relieve the burden on the NHS.

Quite how is unclear. Maybe by predicting when A&Es will face peak times, the severity of future flu epidemics, or the propensity of particular hospital managers to abandon curing people and just leave them lying about in corridors.

On reflection, though, Diary was quite pleased. It’s such a stupid idea that it might help convince everyone else that those who believe in star signs are talking total nonsense.

Bizarrely, the Astrological Association, who published the interview, are themselves a charity, although quite what benefit the public obtains from them is open to debate.

But what about charities?

All the above got Diary thinking. No one seems to have ascertained the star sign of the charitable sector, but we can work it out, since the UK charity sector was born out of the Statute of Elizabeth in 1601.

Diary has been unable to ascertain the date the act was signed, but we know it was late in the Parliament, after the Poor Law. Since Parliament in 1601 sat from late October to mid-December, we can say that in all probability, the charity sector is a Sagittarius.

So we had a quick look at what this meant, and found this definition from Astrology Online:

Sagittarians have a positive outlook on life, are full of enterprise, energy, versatility, adventurousness and eagerness to extend experience beyond the physically familiar.

Sagittarians are optimistic, and continue to be so even when their hopes are dashed. Their strongly idealistic natures can also suffer many disappointments without being affected. They are honorable, honest, trustworthy, truthful, generous and sincere, with a passion for justice. They are usually on the side of the underdog in society.

On the other hand Sagittarians are reckless, careless, bad on detail, and unlikely to accept practical limitations.

Of course, that’s just the sector’s sun sign. To really know what was happening, we’d have to know not just the exact date, but also what time of day the act was signed, in order to find out the far more important rising sign, and what planets were in its house at the time.

Sadly, Diary remains sceptical. The first Diary occurred early last year, which makes it a Capricorn. And as we all know, Capricorns are the star sign which is least likely to believe in star signs.

Blue and black

It’s nothing to do with Diary, really. But That Dress is definitely blue and black.