Ever since this show started, we've  said until we were sick of saying it that we're devoted to finding places where art and real life collide.

What exactly does that mean?  Well, one thing it means to us is that we really delight in improbable and surprising appearances of beautiful oddness or odd beauty, artful gestures where we're not expecting them.

Like at the convention center in Milwaukee , Wisconsin . They do present the occasional piece of familiar, straightforward entertainment at the convention center in Milwaukee -- like a production of “Oliver!” next month, and Diana Krall singing in August.

But what is really cool about the Milwaukee convention center is a big button they have next to the escalator with a sign that says: “push to play polka!” And when you push it, polka music plays. I love that button. To me it's almost a piece of  conceptual art , a kind of friendly Middle American dada.

Now the polka got its start 170 years ago, in Prague .

And today in downtown Prague – now, stay with me here -- is a gorgeous art noveau café called the Imperial, built in 1914, just as the  dada  movement was being born not far away.

And on the menu in the Café Imperial today is a $72 dish called Saturnin's Bowl, which consists of nothing but five dozen day-old jelly doughnuts -- doughnuts which the purchaser of Saturnin's Bowl is free to throw at his or her fellow café patrons.

Which is kind of insane and foreign and wonderful. And why “ Saturnin's Bowl”? Because one of the most popular books in the Czech Republic is a comic novel called “Satumin" that was published in 1943, during the Nazi occupation. And the novel opens with the division of everyone in the world into three types. According to the novel, in a café confronted by a plate of doughnuts, Type 1s just stare at them, Type 2s fantasize about throwing one, and Type 3s are "people for whom the idea of a doughnut whistling through the air is such an enticement that they get up and actually make it happen."

My third current instance of art-and-real-life-colliding delightfully is called the 1000 Journals Project.

Four years ago, a San Francisco graphic designer named Brian Singer bought 1,000 blank journals and covered them with 100 different covers that he and a bunch of his artist and designer friends created. And then he distributed the journals all over the world,  like sowing creative seeds to the winds.

Each journal contains instructions: whomever finds it is supposed to fill a few pages with words or pictures or artifacts, then pass it on, either by leaving it in a public place or giving it to a friend. As the journals circulate around the world, gradually becoming the collective works of 10,000 or 100,000 creative strangers, Singer's website 1000journals.com is trying to track them.

I love all of  these  gestures for pretty much the same reasons. They're all quixotic and quirky. None is a mass media project, none is going to make anybody rich. Each one is beautifully unnecessary.

And to me, beautiful and unnecessary things are  essential to living a civilized life.

This is Kurt Andersen.