Grey room, big microphones and three bespectacled people = a bright club podcast

April 28, 2011 / claireyross / Leave a comment

A few weeks ago now, I went along, terrified, to the UCL Ear Institute to record a section of the hilariously good Bright Club podcasts. Four excellent academics (including myself) went along to chat with Steve Cross and David Morgan about Happiness. You can hear me talking in quite a surprisingly un-Geordie yet lispy way about digital humanities, digital things in museums, QRator and twitter. I mean what else I would talk about!? Very many thanks to Steve Cross, David Morgan, Martin Austwick, and Miriam Miller for making me sound half way decent!

Also talking about Happiness were:

Dom Furniss who does fascinating things with Human Computer Interaction.
Katherine Woolf who was wearing a fabulous dress was talking about trainee doctors
Jason Dittmer who was comparing Captain America with Captain Britain.

What I really like about the bright club podcasts is that in between the bouts of giggles you actually hear some heavy intellectual stuff.

Some other bright club podcasts I can recommend are:

Benedetteo De Martino
Valerie Wallace
WARS part one and two (hilarious but you need have a good sense of humour and not take offence very easily)
Joe Flatman

Matt Pope

As you can tell I do like a bit of the old bright club, they are surprisingly good to listen to on a run!

Bright Club Hidden Treasures: poodles, picasso and exploding corpses

October 29, 2010October 29, 2010 / claireyross / 2 Comments

So Bright Club.

Wow. Really. Wow.

I’ve been to a few of the monthly Bright Club, and it has always been brilliant.

Bright Club, run by UCL’s Public Engagement Unit, breaks down the barriers about stuffy incomprehensible beardy weirdy academics and says, no. Academics are clever, witty and really like sweeties.

Tuesday saw the biggest Bright Club yet, as Steve Cross pointed out the audience was large enough to constitute an angry mob. The theme was hidden treasures (lots of museum and archaeology goodness involved) and it was great. So in between the fits of giggles and accidently kicking the poor person in front of me in the head when I laughed too hard I learnt some stuff too. And that’s what is great about bright club ‘its educational’.

I learnt that archaeology and in fact the whole human condition comes down to sex, death and violence. Indiana Jones was a trader in illicit antiquities and UCL has a cultural property policy that involves a lot of lists. Some philosopher dude, I think it was Schopenhauer, hated everyone and everything, but really liked poodles. Turns out lots of genius people like poodles (there’s a website dedicated to it) Some librarians are stupid and organise their collections by colour. Victorian lead line coffins often lead to exploding corpses. Museum audience development officers as a rule have bigger breasts than Lara Croft. The British Museum should actually be renamed the National Museum of Cool Stuff we Won in the Wars,oh and the only difference between a museum curator and a serial killer is a lab coat. And Picasso wanted to take women to the ‘4^th dimension’ and his friends girlfriend was a very naughty girl called Alice.

Also Kudos to Anne, who managed to stun the audience into silence, that’s no mean feat.

bright club: bio film, ‘primitive tribes’, stripy icebergs, world cinema and why nitrate wont wait.

February 17, 2010February 17, 2010 / claireyross / 1 Comment

Last night I went to Bright Club, run by UCL’s Public Engagement Unit, In a nut shell it aims to prove that underneath the tweed jackets and elbow patches, academics can be quite funny. You can find out more about it here. I didn’t quite know what to expect. I went along to support my colleague Anne, who is funny in real life, so I imagined she would be manage to be funny on stage. And boy was she!

Not only was it hilarious, and I was not at all bribed to have a good time by the free lollypops and retro sweeties on the tables, no. I learnt quite a bit too.

Did you know that the glass roof at St Pancras is self cleaning? I didn’t and it all because of some clever bio film. Thanks to Charlie Dunnill,for that gem… I will be championing the quiz team soon, I can feel it! I cant remember the difference between hydrophobic and hydrophilic bio film but one of them bounces right off!

A marvelous anthropologist/film maker/digital filmographer Mike Yorke told us about his time with some pretty cool tribes, contracting devils grip, going into trances and increasing your power…a little bit, by doing some very painful yet spiritual things with a big stick.

Peter Mullany, was also talking about bio film, but he focused on stripy icebergs and 1000year old bodily odours from polar bears.

Matthew Gandy told us all about world cinema, now I haven’t retained any snazzy quiz facts from this apart from its really easy to insult people in Korean by saying they have a bun shaped face. Matthew was just really funny. Either that or world cinema is really funny… maybe I’ve been watching the wrong films.

Then there was Anne.

She taught us that librarian’s, not only are chic but that they work not just with books, but exploding films too! And why Nitrate just won’t wait. Whatever you do, don’t take a nitrate film into a smoking carriage of a train, because disaster is sure to strike. Not only was Anne funny from start to finish, but she managed to plug the new Centre for DH, my work (also noting that I’m not a librarian), and her boss being on the BBC’s virtual revolution. Represent.

So all in all, a great night. Thanks to all involved!

Claire Bailey-Ross

exploring museums, digital technology, higher education and user experiences

bright club

Grey room, big microphones and three bespectacled people = a bright club podcast

Bright Club Hidden Treasures: poodles, picasso and exploding corpses

bright club: bio film, ‘primitive tribes’, stripy icebergs, world cinema and why nitrate wont wait.