The Nobel Prizes (Mk2)

[Staralfur]

A mate has just shown me this site for the ig nobel awards. They are a sort of alternative to the real ones -
"The Ig Nobel Prizes honor people whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." Ten prizes are given to people who have done remarkably goofy things -- some of them admirable, some perhaps otherwise."

These include;

• John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society.(Literature)
• Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity (Economics)
• The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!" (Peace)
• Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents (Public Health).

My favourite has to be the levitating frog, you can even watch a film of it.

[ 01-12-2002: Message edited by: Staralfur ]

[ 01-12-2002: Message edited by: Staralfur ]

[fable]

quote:

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Originally posted by Staralfur:
A mate has just shown me this site for the ig nobel awards. They are a sort of alternative to the real ones -
"The Ig Nobel Prizes honor people whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." Ten prizes are given to people who have done remarkably goofy things -- some of them admirable, some perhaps otherwise."

...My favourite has to be the levitating frog, you can even watch a film of it.

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I kinda wish the IG Nobel, and not "the real thing," had been given to Henry Kissinger back in the 1970s. The White House tapes from those years, suppoened by the US Courts and released to the public, show that he had collaborated with US President Richard Nixon to "fix" the 1971 peace talks for failure, so that Nixon had a big rallying issue to run on ending the Vietnam War. It was cold-blooded sabotage in the name of political expediency, done by two people who valued the cost of thousands of human lives on both sides of a war as being worth less than their successful political campaign.

Actually, I also think Kissinger deserved to be awarded the IG Nobel from behind prison bars, but of course, that will never happen. The politically affluent only get jailed if they really annoy the hell out of the rest of the Politically Affluent Club.

Sorry for the bitterness. I suppose. [img]graemlins/1pissed.gif[/img]