Festival Previews Video Blog

A great read in the Time magazine this week is “The Best Inventions of the Year”. Aside from the phenomenal inventions listed, the reinvented items deserve a wee mention: the golf ball that doubles its dimples, with dimples inside dimples and the balls fly a few extra yards; the stamp that contains flower seeds; the bike with a three speed transmission which shifts gear as you pedal; and the wonderfully bizarre thin skinned frog where you can see blood vessels and organs designed to give students an alternative to dissection. As Seth Godin says “Find out what works and do it more” comes to mind.

Check out these wonderful inventions in Time; some great new material for artistically creative minds to play with here!

As a child growing up and living overseas in the Pacific our parents used to drive us around the town at Diwali. Diwali means ‘a rows of lamps’ if I recall correctly from my youth. During this five day festival homes were thoroughly cleaned and doorways festooned with torans of mango leaves and tropical flowers.

Fireworks lit the warm night air and little oil diyas, electric lights and candles were arranged up driveways, around the houses, on roof-tops, around tree bases, around flower beds, patterned on embankments, in fact just about everywhere the imagination took to display – absolutely awesome! This celebration of light was a greeting to bring the good luck goddess, Lakshm to their homes. Diwali is just one of those wonderful festivals! Happy Diwali!

The Burns Festival is a celebration of the life and works of Robert Burns and takes place in Ayrshire, Scotland in May each year. 50,000 visitors attend concerts, plays, poetry readings and whiskey tastings galore. In 2009 the festival will mark the 250^th anniversary of the bard’s birth.

An interesting article appeared in The Sunday Times today – “Fury at ‘English’ Burns Festival”. The Liz Hobs Group, the Nottingham-based company won the contract to produce the festival in Ayrshire for the next two years. Whilst causing great ongoing debate it brings excellent PR to the next Burns Festival which takes place on Saturday 17th to Monday 26th May 2008.