There shouldn’t be just one prize ceremony for scientists. Yes, there’s the Nobel Prize, but how many scientists win that? Every school science fair gives kids a prize just for showing up, and being an actual scientist is harder, because your parents don’t help you. And they don’t get so much as a participation trophy?
Enter the Ig Nobel Awards. The Ig Nobel Awards, which is a real thing, recognizes science that is not quite as serious and ground-breaking. So now there are two prize ceremonies.
For example, the prize for biology this year went to Thomas Thwaites of England for his work infiltrating a herd of goats and living with them for a week.
Thomas made a set of 4 prosthetic goat legs, which he wore as stilts, making it easier for him to walk on all fours, but harder to take notes.
He also wore a helmet, because stilts.
“Human life can be so difficult,” he says. “And you look at a goat and it’s just free. It doesn’t have any concerns.” Besides for the guy on stilts who keeps falling on his face.
Thomas found a goatherd in the Swiss Alps who was willing to take him in, and he spent six days mostly looking down. He found that going up the mountain was easier than going down, because it’s pretty hard to go downhill on all fours. In fact, at some point he went higher up the hill than the other goats, and suddenly everyone stopped and stared at him, like he’d made a major social blunder. And at that point it suddenly occurred to him that he’d forgotten to add horns to his helmet.
Fortunately, this one goat friend that he’d made chose that moment to walk right through the herd, diffusing the tension. At least that was how Thomas saw it. It’s possible the goat was just trying to get through. Or that it was saying, “Be nice to him. He’s obviously a nebech case.”
(I’ve never liked that term. It sounds like a case where you keep your nebechs.)
Okay, so he didn’t totally look like a goat. He did have a beard like a goat—or a goatee, if you will—but he later realized that it didn’t smell enough. Apparently, after several awkward close facial encounters, Thwaites figured out that some goats judge each other by the smelliness of their beards. His smelled like shampoo.
“I was sort of shocked at how bad of a goat I was, and I was really trying,” he said later. “I suffered quite a lot. And of course I had to eat grass.”
Because obviously, goats eat grass. Any human can eat grass too, but we can’t digest it. Even goats have to bring it back up a few times. So after several attempts to make himself a fake goat stomach, he eventually just strapped a bag to his body, and what he would do was he’d get down on the ground and take a mouthful of grass, chew it up, and then, when none of the goats were looking, he’d spit it into the bag. Then, at night, he would dump the bag into a pressure cooker and make a stew. Just like the goats do!
The goats didn’t know what to make of that.
Meanwhile, the prize for medicine went to Christoph Helmchen of Germany, who discovered that if you have an itch on one side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the other side of your body, because your body is an idiot.
But this is actually very practical. Let’s say you’re holding something heavy in one hand, which is a guarantee for that side to be itchy. It’s also very helpful if you have a cast that has not stopped itching since you put it on. How many more pens can you lose in there?
But before you start scratching yourself in front of a full-length mirror or some one-sided glass, you should know that apparently, the relief you get is only about 25 percent of what you get if you scratch correctly. And that’s just the first scratch. The second scratch will relieve 25 percent of what’s left, and so on, and you’ll never actually get to zero. It’s like bikkur cholim, where you take away 1/60th of the person’s illness, but that doesn’t mean that if he has 60 visitors they’ll take it away totally. Unless they find a way for all 60 to barge through the doorway at once. Or have everyone sneak in while the guy is asleep and then yell, “Surprise!”
Speaking of things that make you itch, the prize for literature went to Fredrik Sjöberg, who lives on a sparsely populated island off the coast of Sweden, for his autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are, “not yet dead.”
Catching flies around the house really sounds like the kind of thing a writer does when he’s trying to put off writing. But Fredrik decided to write about it.
He wrote three volumes.
The trilogy was first published in Sweden as “En Flugsamlares Vag”—“The Path of the Fly Collector,” which, if I’m translating correctly, means that there exists a word in Swedish for someone or something that collects flies. It’s flugsamlares. I got one of those at IKEA for 12 bucks, but it doesn’t work. I still have flies.
Fredrik has several techniques to catch flies, and he goes into them in detail. There are tons of ways that you can probably think of to attract flies, such as to stop washing your beard.
But Fredrik actually leaves the house to look for flies, which is a whole new level of procrastination. He has thousands of flies on one wall of his house, pinned up inside his nebech case.
Now we know why his island is sparsely populated.
By Mordechai Schmutter
Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He also has six books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].
