What's brown and sounds like a bell?

DUNG!

That is my favorite joke. I heard it on "The Young Ones" back in the late '80's.

And it's appropriate not only to Mayu Yamamoto's Ig-Nobel-Prize-winning accomplishment, but to the fact that I am still getting letters about poop!

Here is one that arrived via snail-mail today:

I really thought someone else would alert you and your readers on this indelicate bathroom subject, but if it's not too late, I'll chime in on the matter.

The answer lies in one word--vegetarian!

I've been retired for 24 years, and I only wish I'd known then what I know now.

Thank you, vegetarian retired lady who shall remain anonymous on this blog. May I also say that I think it is extremely cool when an older woman chooses to go by Ms., as you do.

And to the rest of you, a solemn vow--starting Monday, no more poop and no more Ig Nobel blogging. I promise.

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Miss Conduct at Toscanini's, today 11:00 am

In honor of this year's Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize winner, Toscanini's in Central Square (899 Main Street--NOT Harvard Square) will be giving away free samples of their new flavor, Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist, at 11:00 am today. I'll be there, along with 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize winner Kees Moeliker, and of course--

Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for developing a way to extract vanillin--vanilla fragrance and flavoring--from cow dung.

If you'll be in the area at 11, and have a free moment and a taste for adventure, stop by and say hi! (They'll be giving away ice cream samples all day, I just discovered, so if ante meridian ice cream isn't your thing, you can come by later, too.)

(P.S. We will return to normal, non-Ig-Nobel related blogging next week. I promise.)

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Ig Nobel Prize ceremony online

The tickets to the Igs have sold out, but if you want to watch the ceremony online tonight, you can do so here. The live webcast begins at 7:15 and the show proper (such as it is) begins at 7:30. I'm not one of the winners, presenters, opera singers (for which we should all give thanks), or Nobel laureates, but I am one of the show's photographers, so look for the woman in a black evening gown with a digital camera hovering on the edges and snapping all the photos she can.

Or should I wear the leopard-print evening gown this year? I can never decide ...

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Chat today!

Morning, everyone! I'll be chatting today from noon to 1, so cancel them lunch dates, send the intern out for sandwiches, and hunker down with me at boston.com. See you at noon!

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Hire learning

According to today's Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard University is looking for a "Professor of Lantin American Studies," MIT is looking for an "Assistat Professor of Chemical Engineering," and Suffolk University is seeking to fill an "Endoed Chair."

There were no copyediting positions advertised.

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The doc, the cat, the friend and her lover

The New York Times science section seems to want to emphasize the softer side of science today. Here's an interesting article on the functions of doctors' masks. Not the germ-prevention functions, the social/theatrical functions--masks, apparently, do for doctors much what mirrored sunglasses do for cops.

Another article talks about the difference between losing a beloved pet and losing a family member or friend. It's not quite as focused as it could be, but it's an interesting meditation nonetheless. Pets, with their love of habit and routine, outline and punctuate our daily rituals in a powerful way. The loss of that emphasis, that color animals provide, can be disorienting--more so than people expect. You drop a piece of food on the floor and call for a dog who is no longer there to come clean it up. Months after your cat has died you still block the door with your body when signing for a package to keep her from running out. This is what mourning for pets is like.

And in other news, social scientists have discovered that "friends with benefits" are friends, with benefits. Glad they cleared that up!

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10 things I love about Boston

6. The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony

I mean, I kind of have to, don't I?

Because it's not just that my husband invented, produces, and MC's the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony--it's how we met. Seven years ago I was working at Harvard and the Gazette had run a little squib that the Igs were looking for volunteers. So I called Mr. Improbable, and we met at the Algiers Coffee Shop to discuss the show, and I was wearing that red dress, and he didn't know how to work a teapot with loose tea instead of bags, and we talked for three hours, and here we are.

But that's not the only reason I love the show. The Igs are given--10 of them every year--to achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The winners are invited to come to the ceremony and accept, and most of them do. From all over the world, often bringing co-authors, colleagues, spouses, children, and translators in tow.

They start pouring in the Wednesday before the show, or the Thursday of it (the Igs held are on the first Thursday in October--yes, as in this Thursday, and tickets are still on sale), showing up at the theater with no idea what to expect. Inventors hoping to strike it rich. Academics a little dazed that anyone actually read that paper they published fifteen years ago, let alone gave it a prize. Doctors and engineers all too eager to explain their unusual techniques. After the show they are exhilarated and slaphappy, and we shove a lot of snacks and wine into them and send them home. Saturday we round up all the winners again and bring them to MIT, where they get a little bit more time to explain themselves at the Ig Informal Lectures. And then we have a wonderful party Saturday night.

And it matters. It is a silly, silly thing, these prizes, this ceremony with mock debates and mini-operas and a "Win a Date with a Nobel Laureate Contest," but it does matter. 2001 proved that to me. The ceremony that year was a little less than a month after September 11--enough time that it seemed okay to laugh again, but we were laughing in a shadow and we knew it.

The world felt very bad then. And it mattered--oh, it mattered so much--to be in that room with those people, those good people doing laughter-and-thought-provoking things. As though despite all the darkness, the fear and ignorance and hatred, there was a bright sparkling web all over the world made up of people--in India, Lithuania, Canada, Australia, and more--who wanted to laugh, and to think, and to make others do the same.

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A good book

As noted, I like the dark side in the narrative arts. Which doesn't mean that I can't get into a good, optimistic, life-affirming story--it's just that so often such attempts are, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid. But if you want a book that will warm your heart without numbing your brain, you can't do better than Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother.

I was somewhat embarrassed that I didn't know Haddon had written a second novel, because his first, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is on my very short list of favorite books, ever. Curious Incident is so powerful that it took me a while to accept Spot of Bother on its own terms, and really appreciate it. Haddon does the near-impossible in Curious Incident, writing in the voice of a teenager with Asperger's syndrome determined to solve a very odd mystery. People with Asperger's don't usually think in story form, the way the rest of us do, which makes the novel quite the genre-busting tour de force.

Spot of Bother couldn't be more different. It's a traditional family melodrama crossed with farce, and there's almost no way of relating the plot that doesn't make the novel sound like a hopeless cliche. If Curious Incident was a voyage to a brainspace most of us could never occupy, Spot of Bother is an almost aggressive celebration of normalcy, culminating in a big family-reunion sort of event filled with slamming doors, heartfelt reunions, apologies, embarrassing speeches, missed phone calls, mistaken identities, and dancing past midnight. I mean, blech--you just know they're trying to line up Hugh Grant for the movie version.

But the book is brilliant, and so very much fun. Again and again, Haddon skirts right up to the edge of mawkishness, of predictability, and leaps nimbly over it and does something hilarious and unexpected and wise.

Here is my favorite quote from the book:

"And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought."

Isn't that wonderful? That really is what it's all about, isn't it? I gave up my early dreams of becoming a novelist when I realized I would rather tell than show. (You're supposed to do it the other way when you write fiction, everyone says so.) But if I ever had written a novel, I'd wish it were A Spot of Bother.

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