The IgNobel yearly fun

Always worth a good laugh, even if some of the winners actually researched truly interesting, albeit bizarre things.

While the winner that seems has caught the media attention has been a group of Chicago people who have developed the apparently absurd bra-gas mask (not just one but two!), I find that there are others more interesting and also funnier:

The IgNobel of Veterinary Medicine went to a couple of British researchers who demonstrated that named cows produce more milk. Love pays off and we all love that fact, right?

The Peace IgNobel was won by a Swiss team who researched what is better: to be hit on the head with an empty or full bottle of beer. Better to dodge it, right? Anyhow, according to an old friend and namesake of mine the best strategy is to break the bottle at the bar and put the remaining pointy half-bottle by the neck of your opponent, who will quickly admit defeat. If you don't have a beer bottle at hand, then maybe grab a stool and wave it over the opponent's head wildy (similar effect probably). Also, another self-defense trick is to use your home keys as improvised pointy knuckles and hit right to the eyes, though this applies more for an empty street than a crowded tavern. But well, my brawler friends are not IgNobel winners, so guess I'm just ranting.

The Medicine IgNobel was indeed well deserved: a Californian, Donald L. Unger, researched a possible cause of arthritis by cracking his left hand knuckles systematically every day for 60 years, while keeping his right hand untouched. Quite admirable sense of self-discipline, really!

The Physics IgNobel is quite weird too: a team of the University of Texas got it for determining why pregnant women do not tip over. Wonder why, really.

But the best is maybe the Chemistry prize that went to a team of Mexico University for creating diamonds out of nothing less than the national liquor: tequila! Diamonds may be forever but they are not anymore what they used to be, that's pretty clear.

For the rest, read the source: BBC.
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Lesbians, lesbians, the Greek island and Sappho.

Ridiculously enough the Lesbian authorities, those of the Greek island of Lesbos, near the Turkish coast, have begun a crusade against lesbians in Greece and around the World. They want to banish the use of the term lesbian, to refer to female homosexuals.

But the fact is that the term is much older than modern homosexual liberation movement: it dates from antiquity, because of the quite apparent bisexual tendencies of the island most famous poet ever: Sappho. Ironically, Sappho herself also suffered from that Lesbian (that not lesbian) intolerance in her life, as she was exiled to Syracuse c. 600 BCE.

Sappho as imagined by Charles Mengin

Her romantic poetry (preserved only fragmentarily) makes allusions to male and female lovers and crunches indistinctly. For that reason, since classical times, the terms sapphic and lesbian became synonim with female homosexuality, meaning that is still in use in many languages.

Well, considering all the trouble Greeks are making on terminology (see the absurd dispute on the name of Macedonia), any day the very use of the nouns pitagorean, Alexandria, aphrodisiac, olympic and even strategy will be challenged on grounds that they are "historical Greek terms that nobody else has the right to use". Are you unlucky enough as to have a Greek name like Alexander or Hercules? Maybe you will be prompted to change it. Do you follow some approximation of an ancient Greek philosophy like Epicureism, Stoicism or Platonism? Maybe you have to redefine your ideology in non-Greek terms. What about telephone and all other common neologisms construed on Greek words? Maybe an acronym for long-distance-talk-device, like LDTD, will have to be used instead...

Pathetic. Instead of being proud of their most famous citizen, Lesbians, or at least some of them, are making a fool of themselves.