Ignobel

The Ignobel Prizes have been running since 1991 and are awarded to people who first make people laugh and then make them think. The prizes are awarded by actual Nobel Prize winners and recipients get a whole 1 minute to make their thank you speech and if they overrun they are shouted at by an 8 year old girl.

We have a friend who is an Ignobel prize winner. He won the Biology prize in 2002 for describing the sexual behaviour of ostriches towards their keepers. He is a Statistician but in his spare time he conducts experiments such as the gorilla one here. A few years ago the Ignobels came to Edinburgh and we met the man who stuffed the domino sparrow and who won the prize for describing homosexual necrophilia in ducks (he also stuffed the dead ducky victim which had flown into his window before suffering an even worse fate at the wings of his fellow.) and many other interesting people I don't have time to describe now.

The photo above is North St Andrew St and these cars are parked all over the cycle lane and on the pavement as they have been for some months. The actual road is off to the left of this picture and is also a mass of parked cars and vans. I emailed the council about it a wee while ago and got replies from the Environment Team, the Tram Team and the Tram Co-ordination Team (but not, apparently, the Email Co-ordination Team) to say that this was the result of a temporary traffic regulation order which does not control parking and which has been in place for all the years of the current tram **** up. So basically the parking is unenforceable and will be until they stop ****ing up the trams.

I won't hold my breath then.

What does it have to do with the Ignobels? Well, I was pleased to discover that this years winner of the Ignobel Peace Prize is Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars could be solved by running them over with an armoured tank. A most worthy recipient!