The other day I said “Small boys like to put spiders in jam jars and poke them with sticks. It’s not very nice but as a metaphor, don’t we all occasionally want to poke the spider in the jamjar, just to see what happens? To introduce randomness into our lives.”
The African Job is a good example, picked up by Mike at Londonist. Three blokes in a pub decide to go to Africa for Six Months… travelling in a 1961 London Bus. They convert it to a home on wheels, and donate the vehicle to an AIDS charity on completion.
Of course this kind of “madness” often turns out to have a very good point… we just don’t need to see the whole purpose at the outset…