Friday, September 30, 2011

the Ig Nobel prizes

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From beetles screwing beer bottles to how the need to urinate affects decision-making, it's that time of year again ... the awarding of the Ig Nobel prizes.

The coveted Peace Prize went to the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania:

He was honoured with the Ig Peace Prize for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars could be solved by squashing them with an armoured tank.

Nobel prizes, from which the Ig Nobels take their giggling cue, will be handed out next week in Sweden.

It all reminds me of a time a lot of years ago when I was working for Doubleday, a book publisher in New York, and pushed very, very hard to create a paperback version of a book called "The Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown." Intelligent giggling was less hard to come by back then, but was still rare enough to warrant preservation: Intelligence seems so often to bond indestructibly with solemnity. But since ignorance does much the same, I guess things balance out.

Balance out and bring me back to the line that popped into my head a while back: If you're so serious, why aren't you laughing?
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