CALL ME SNAKE

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Who needs pocket protectors when you've been to every single Ig Nobel Prize ceremony? My nerd credentials are intact. And, if I'm not mistaken, the nerds are the guys getting all the girls these days, right? But I'm getting off message. A transcript of my latest IG NOBEL coverage follows...]

Here I am, packed into Harvard’s Sanders Theatre with the rest of the philistines. A paper airplane rams into my ear, followed by a moist projectile on the back of my neck. The noise is deafening: jeers, catcalls, and strange clucking noises. Have people lost all traces of civility?

Wait a minute. Nothing’s amiss after all. For this is the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony–the 17th year these shenanigans have been allowed–and such behavior is not only tolerated but applauded. Good. I’m glad glad we sorted that out.

7:35 p.m. Somebody’s on stage carrying on about restrictions against “the flying or throwing of chickens.” Really? That’s news to me.

7:45 p.m. Finally the Nobel Laureates enter the stage, albeit with some trepidation. And with good reason. They’re about to be degraded in ways they never thought possible.

7:47 p.m. Lawyers for and against Chickens parade by, trailed by representatives of the local MENSA group. Maybe I’ll tag along with that MENSA crowd. It will probably be my only chance to get in.

7:51 p.m. Master of ceremonies Marc Abrahams tells us that 10 prizes will be given for work that “first makes you laugh and then makes you think.” And then makes you cry.

7:56 p.m. The King and Queen of Swedish Meatballs take a bow. They used to walk into this place but now just bob up and down. All those meatballs, it seems, have taken a toll.

8:01 p.m. Doug Zonker of the University of Washington delivers the keynote address: “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken” –the same treatise that earned him accolades at this year’s AAAS. The talk is interesting though repetitious.

8:05 p.m. Not to be outdone, Dudley Herschbach offers his own take on chicken–this year’s theme, in case you haven’t guessed. The biggest problem to ever stump Einstein was not trying to develop a unified field theory but rather figuring out how to unscramble an egg. On this score, Herschbach succeeds where his fellow Nobel laureate failed. “You feed a scrambled egg to a hen and, in a day or two, you’ll get a nice new [unscrambled] egg,” Herschbach says. Sorry Einstein, you’ve met your match.

8:08 p.m. Dutch naturalist Kees Moeliker holds up a mallard duck and explains to those who don’t know the first thing about chickens that the thing he’s waving about is not a chicken but rather the creature that earned him a 2003 Ig Nobel Prize (for his study of homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks). “To the best of my knowledge,” he says, “this behavior has not been observed in chickens.”

8:11 p.m. The first Ig Nobel Prize is given out, in Medicine, to Brian Witcombe, a radiologist who specializes in swallowing disorders, and Dan Meyer, the U.S. record holder for swallowing swords under water, for their report, “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”

8:17 p.m. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of the Netherlands captures the Biology Prize for cataloging all the mites, insects, spiders, and other critters we share our beds with. Thirty years of research have taught her “that you never sleep alone.”

8:28 p.m. In a stunning upset, Japan’s Mayu Yamamoto wins the chemistry prize for extracting vanillin from cow dung. The Nobel laureates are provided ice cream made from said vanillin and, with 1,000 eyes trained upon them, they can’t get out of it.

8:37 p.m. Stanford physicist Robert Laughlin is dangled as bait in the Win-a-Date-with-a-Nobel-Laureate-Contest. “Laughlin likes to spend quiet evenings watching quasiparticles behave badly,” the announcer proclaims.

8:46 p.m. Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan wins in Economics for devising a net to catch bank robbers. Abrahams, who’d been unable to reach Hsieh, worries that “the gentleman may be trapped inside his own machine.”

8:52 p.m. The Argentines win the Aviation Prize for discovering the jet lag recovery properties of Viagra. Diego Golombek of he National University of Quilmes thanks his graduate students for their fine work and, more importantly, “for going to the drugstore to get the Viagra.”

8:56 p.m. The Nobel Laureates pile onto the stage for the last act of the opera, “Chicken versus egg.” They’re dressed as chickens. Or eggs. It’s hard to tell whether it’s the chicken or the egg.

9:03 p.m. A speech and photo op later, and the whole thing is suddenly over. And I still haven’t won my Ig Nobel. Which gives me a year to figure out who to bribe.