IgNobel Awards

We have the Nobel Prize, an award given to those who are the best and greatest in their respected fields. Though, I must admit that some of the winners in the Literature department are unknown and not heard of. Come on, I haven't heard of 3/4 of the winners and I was a freaking English major. They didn't give the Literature Nobel to some of the finest writers in any language, but they gave it to notables like Rabindranath Tagore, Patrick WHite, and Odysseus Elytis. Yes, they did honor Kipling, Yeats, and Faulkner, but a lot of the names mentioned are well...obscure. The Nobel committee had to strain to come up with a reason why they were nominated: "because of his outstanding merits as an epic writer," which is as nondescript a reason to give an award to a writer.

Anyways, what about an award for achievements that "cannot or should not be reproduced"? Those monumental achievements that defy logic and sound too bizarre, too strange, or too improbable to be true. Hence, the IgNobel Awards.

Some of the prize winners include a man who did research on the effect of Prozac on the reproductive system of clams, a woman who supposedly lives on nothing but air, and doctors who waded through hundreds of years of journals to write the seminal paper on ovjects found in the rectum. Quite bizarre. Very true. There's also the book, which makes for entertaining reading, especially when read aloud with large groups of people nearby. All in all, pretty funny stuff.

That's all for now.

The IgNobel Website/Annals of Improbable Research
www.improbable.com