Ig Nobel Prizes: Laugh, then Think.

Marc Abrahams. The Ig Nobel Prizes 2 (2004) The Ig Nobel Prizes were devised at Harvard. They’ve grown in size and prestige. Many Nobel winners have happily participated in awarding them, and most winners of the Ig Nobels have felt honoured by the recognition of their research, which First makes you laugh, then makes you think. Traditions such as folding the event program into paper airplanes to be launched at the stage, and a rigidly enforced time limit on the acceptance speech, maintain the Goonish ambience.

Anyone can nominate anyone for an Ig Nobel. Some of the prizes are not so subtle satiric critiques of pseudoscience and other nonsense, but most are awarded for valid scientific discoveries, and many are more significant than a quick read my suggest. Like anecdotes, they may prompt deeper questions than the one they answered.

This collection is well worth whatever you pay for it. I found my copy at a yard sale, hence wildly under-priced compared to its value. A few examples:

2001 Ig Nobel for Astrophysics, to Rex and Rexella Van Impe, evangelists, for their discovery that black holes meet all the criteria for Hell.

2004 Ig Nobel for Public Health, to Jillian Clarke, high school student, for her investigation of the 5-Second Rule for food that falls on the floor. (It fails, but by how much depends on the floor covering).

2024 winners here: https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

A valuable reference work. Recommended ****

Le Carre, A Murder of Quality (1968)

 

John Le Carre, A Murder of Quality. (1968) A murder at a B-list public school brings Smiley out of retirement when Miss Brimley, a war-time colleague, receives a letter that disturbs her. The puzzle is nicely knotted and solved, but what kept me reading was Le Carre’s skewering of pseuds. Carne School prides itself on upholding standards of behaviour long past their relevance. This is the crack through which the light escapes and the darkness of murder seeps in.

Le Care’s other strength is characterisation. We want to know more about these people. Le Carre presents the characters as they present themselves, and I was deceived by the murderer and his victim as much as every other character in the story was, including Smiley himself. The final unravelling of the mystery satisfies psychologically, which is rare in mysteries that turn on deceptions that we wish to see punished. Odd, that we want both justice and justification.

Recommended. ***½

A Movie version (1991) is available on YouTube.

Guns, Guns, Guns: A History of Gun Violence (Lapham's Quarterly, 2018)

  Lapham’s Quarterly, A History of Gun Violence. (2018) A depressing read, with enough data to show that humans have generally expended more effort and skill on making effective weapons than any other tool. War has always been as much about the combatants’ ability to manufacture effective weaponry as about their mastery of strategy and tactics.

The perfection of the hand gun by Colt, Smith & Wesson and others has made gun violence almost as normal as bread. It has also made killing so easy that murder has become the default ingredient of many crimes that would be successful without it. The US Supreme Court’s misinterpretation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution has encouraged a sense of personal entitlement that has spread into all other aspects of communal life, so that conflict is for many people now the prime mode of relating to others.

As usual, an excellent overview of the subject, consisting mostly of firsthand accounts and analyses based on knowledge of the history. But a melancholy read. The cover is an interpretation of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Recommended. ****

Alligators in the Sewer (and other Folk Tales)

Thomas J. Craughwell. Alligators in the Sewer (1999) Folk tales, or real stories that happened to a friend of a friend, or FOAF. The compiler serves up relevant research into older versions of the tales. The plot generally remains the same, only details of technology and lifestyle change with the times. A first class potato-chip book, which I will dip into repeatedly as time and occasion offer. 

Recommended, if you can find a copy.

BTW, there are no alligators in the sewers of New York or any other city.

****

Darwin Awards 3 (2003)

 Wendy Northcutt. The Darwin Awards III (2003) A Darwin Awards are given posthumously to people who have removed themselves from the gene pool by means less than wise, and have thereby presumably removed deleterious genes. The tales recounted here raise a mix of laughter, astonishment, and pity, but never in the same proportions.

An example: In Finland, in October 2001, a group of friends were stranded by the side of the freeway after running out of gas. No one stopped to help, so one of them lay down the middle of the roadway, expecting traffic to stop. It didn’t, and his unwise attempt to help caused his demise. Confirmed.

The editors are careful to distinguish between confirmed cases, probably true ones, and personal accounts. Mildly amusing illustrations add to the charm of the book. And it is oddly charming: the generally high level of confidence displayed by the award winners before physics and chemistry interfered with their aims is admirable.

Recommended if you can find a copy. ***

Poppies (photo)

The oriental poppies are in bloom. They are about 10-15cm (4-6 inches) across. Photo taken after rain, 19th June 2025.

Frontier Woman (L'Amour, The Cherokee Trail)

 Louis L’Amour. The Cherokee Trail (2012) A posthumous work, prepped for publication by L’Amour’s heirs. The gaps in the story show, but don’t affect the overall impression. Unusually, the protagonist is a woman, who establishes her cred by horse-whipping the incompetent operator of the stagecoach station whom she’s replacing.  Her husband was supposed to take the job, but he was killed by a renegade rebel officer. A quiet fellow-passenger signs on to help out, and of course eventually “sparks fly”, as the current cliche has it. All in all, a workaday job of entertainment. It would make a good basis for a video, assuming the makers were willing to pick up on the hints about the self-reliance of pioneer women. Not up to L’Amour’s usual standard, but I liked it.

**½