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So seeing as how this part of the year
is jam packed with holiday and family and travel
responsibilities, we here at Idea Channel headquarters
are taking a couple weeks off from doing full episodes.
But there was one thing that I wanted
to talk about really briefly this week,
and that is snow globes.
I realize that snow globes have nothing
to do really specifically with the holiday season
beyond the fact that in this hemisphere, when it is around
the end of the year, it tends to snow.
But I started thinking about them just kind
of as a symbol for things, and what
we tend to think of when we think of snow globes,
and what we want them to communicate.
The history of snow globes is kind of complicated,
and I think really interesting.
They were first invented around Paris in the 19th century.
But it wasn't until a Viennese machinist started making them
that they became a kind of object of art almost,
that they were these hand built, very painstakingly
made and detailed objects that presented these nice,
sort of snowy scenes.
They started to enter the public consciousness when
they were featured in movies.
Like "Citizen Kane" has a really famous scene with a snow globe.
And other movies would have them to kind of almost
evoke this dreamlike or childhood-esque,
snowy landscape.
But it wasn't until, you know, sort of a significant amount
of time later that an American managed
to patent a method for making snow globes that
was both quick and easy.
And that is what set them on the road
to what we think of them today.
Not these collectible, beautiful, hand
built art objects from Vienna that they once
were, but a kind of kitschy, bauble
that you purchase to signify that you have been somewhere,
and that you then put it on a shelf next
to all of your other snow globes.
And that's actually one of the things
that I love about snow globes is that they're not really
meant to communicate anything about the place
that they're from.
You can get snow globes for places where it never snows.
And as a matter of fact, I used to have
a really small collection of snow globes
that was exactly that.
I only have one that remains.
It's for Dallas, Texas, which experiences
a yearly average of an inch and a half of snowfall.
The average American city, for comparison,
gets about 25 inches of snow.
Rather what a snow globe does or a collection of snow globes
does is kind exact what Jean Baudrillard talks
about with his collection of objects
that we've talked about in a couple
Idea Channel episodes is that it's not about the snow globe.
It's about collecting yourself.
It's about collecting these places that you have been,
these places that you have an identification with,
and wanting to show them to people.
And so sort of in the spirit of that,
what we are going to do this year, and sort of following
the trend from what we did with the Idea Channel yule log
last year, is we are going to make an Idea Channel snow
globe.
It's not going to be an actual, physical Idea Channel snow
globe, though that would be really cool.
Just a kind of extended video that you
can put on in the background while you're doing holiday
family stuff, or download it and put it onto a moving picture
frame if you like.
However you want to, if you want to,
you can display it on a shelf, metaphorical or actual,
to indicate the fact that you have been to the place that
is Idea Channel.
And the other thing we're going to do
is, because it's the holiday season,
we want to give away some presents.
Unfortunately, we can't give presents to everybody,
so we're going to have a little contest
to give away some t-shirts.
We're going to give away three t-shirts.
Three of them.
And here's how we're going to do that.
We're going to have a little storytelling contest,
but not really.
So bear with me here.
So we have these things.
They're called story dice.
They just have little pictures of various things on them.
We're going to throw the story dice,
and six images are going to pop up.
The way that you enter into the contest to win an Idea Channel
butterfly shirt is to write a short story based on the six
images that the six dice show.
We'll collect all of the comments that use all six
of the dice images to tell a story,
and we will randomly select three to get a t-shirt.
And I will do a dramatic reading of the three
that are randomly selected.
So that should be interesting and fun.
So without further ado, let's throw some dice
and see what six things you have to incorporate
into a short story to win a t-shirt.
[CLATTER]
All right.
So there you have it.
Take those six things and write a short story
in the comments of this video.
And remember, it's all about quality, not quantity.
I would rather not have to do a dramatic reading
of a 40 page short story.
Though I guess if it is randomly determined,
there is a chance that that will happen because maybe we've
overlooked some things.
I hope everybody has happy holidays and an awesome end
of the new year, perhaps filled with the Idea Channel snow
globe on a shelf of some kind.
Which if you haven't already, you can click here.
There's also some links in the doobly-doo.
Maybe we'll put a card for good measure.
Who knows?
All over the place.
And we will see you in two weeks.
We're taking next week off.
There will be no video.
So we'll see you the first week of January.
Bye.
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