Autumn brings Floridians relief from the siege of Summer, the stuffy mornings and boiling afternoons and sleepless nights for any poor wretch without air-conditioning. The leaves fall with the temperatures, bright yellow school buses dot the landscape again, football is in the air and the mosquitos fly south for the Winter. The stores, never to dally, are decorated with spider-webs, candy corn piled high in the trick-or-treat aisles, Trump masks and tiaras for little princesses.
In Mexico, they’re gearing up for gigantic Dia de los Muertos parades, celebrating the dead. In Austin, Texas, Dave Moriarty is decorating for his annual Not Dead Yet! party, celebrating the living. In Munich, they’re shipping in extra tables for Oktoberfest and in Albuquerque extra balloons for the annual International Balloon Fiesta. If we’ve got a choice, we’re going to Moriarty’s place even though the price of passage is an ascent up several flights of stairs, a hardship which cleverly discourages overattendance and premature drinking.
It’s Autumn. The skies are clear and the air is fresh. Take a whiff on me.
The Ig Nobel Prizes
Autumn brings with it many rewards…the air cools, the humidity abates, the leaves start to change color in Chicopee, Massachusetts and the mighty Ig Nobel Prize winners are announced. You never heard of the INPs but they’ve been around since 1991, presented to “first, make people laugh, and then make them think.” Marc Abrahams, editor of Annals of Improbable Research and co-sponsor of the Ig Nobel Awards says “the prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology.” Each winner receives a 10 trillion dollar Zimbabwean bill, a hand-drawn image of a stomach and a wet wipe, not to mention increased visibility and media attention for their research. The winners for 2025 have just been determined by a panel…the envelope, please!
Aviation: Francisco Sanchez, Mariana Melcon, Carmi Korine and Barry Pinshow “for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats’ ability to fly and echolocate.”
Biology: Tomoki Kojima and company “for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra striping can avoid being bitten by flies.”
Chemistry: Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich and Frank Greenway “for experiments to test whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing calorie content.”
Engineering Design: Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal “for analyzing from an engineering design perspective how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack.”
Literature: William B. Bean “for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.”
Nutrition: Daniele Dendi and company “for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza.”
Peace: Fritz Renner and group “for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.”
Pediatrics: Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp “for studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic.”
Physics: Giacomo Bartolucci and company “for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition than can lead to clumping, which can be a cause of unpleasantness.”
Psychology: Marcin Zajenskowski and Gilles Gignac “for investigating what happens when you tell narcissists that they are intelligent.”
Altogether a distinguished but rather sedate crew, unlike Mayor Arturas Zuokas of Vilnius, Lithuania, who once won the Peace Prize for demonstrating his solution to the problem of illegally parked luxury cars. He ran over them with an armored tank.
The 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics went to Andre Geim and Michael Berry for levitating a frog with magnets. Geim followed up a decade later winning a Nobel Prize for graphene research, making him the only person to have won both the Ig Nobel and the Nobel prizes.
Much of the fun at the Ig Nobels comes from those merry men of Physics. In 2002, Arned Leike of Munich won the Physics honor by using the mathematical law of exponential decay to explain the behavior of beer foam. In 2009, the Physics prize was shared by three American researchers for their analytical explanation of why pregnant women are not constantly tipping over. The winner of the Physics prize in 2017 was Marc-Antoine Fardin, who used fluid dynamics to answer the eternal question “Can a cat be both a solid and a liquid?” In 2019, the winners were a team of researchers who sought an explanation for the long-sought poser, why do wombats make cube-shaped poop?
Ig Nobel enthusiasts are already agog about next year’s possibilities, particularly relating to the William Thacker Group’s studies involving the incredible ability of the long-tailed weasel (Mustela frenata) to evolve into the American President. Get your seats early.
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| Persephone, before the blight |
The Fact Is….
1. According to a study in the Journal of Aging Research, people who were born during the Autumn months are more likely to live to 100 than others, which is cheery news for Bill Killeen. The study found that 30% of U.S. centenarians born between 1880 and 1895 arrived during Autumn.
2. Autumn began, according to Greek mythology, when poor Persephone was abducted by the evil Hades, who needed a Queen of the Underworld. Severely pissed off, Persephone’s mother Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, caused all the crops on Earth to die until her daughter was allowed to return. When the very unpopular Hades conceded and released the girl, Spring began.
3. The massive Fall migration of birds takes place as many avians travel thousands of miles to reach warmer climates for the Winter. The Arctic Tern holds the distance record, flying about 49,000 miles round-trip each year. That’s exactly twice the distance it takes the rest of us to travel around the world along the equator.
4. Each Fall, approximately 45 million people attend NCAA Division 1 college football games. Another 20 million attend professional games, a colossal total of 65 million people in attendance at these events. Though figures are sketchy, a rough extrapolation suggests NFL beer sales at all games approaches $200 million a year. That’s enough to buy 652,465 sets of rear tires for a Dodge Demon.
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| Halloween Ball reveler |
Looking For A Hero (a twice-told tale)
The First Halloween Masquerade Ball in Gainesville was held on the University of Florida campus in 1970 and everybody went. It was a monster success, with loud local rock bands, cheap drugs and the libertine inclinations of the times. Costumes were optional and minimal. Laws were broken. Streakers raced through the streets and carefully-coiffed transvestites strutted their stuff. Rumors of colorful sex acts in forbidden places ran rampant. Before Las Vegas ever thought of the slogan, the HMB flouted it: “What happens at the Halloween Masquerade Ball stays at the Halloween Masquerade Ball.” In one fashion or another, the Ball rambled on for 22 years, but not always at the University of Florida, where the terrified gatekeepers bumped it off campus. Sissies, every one of them!
Incredibly, I missed one of the balls in the early seventies, but I have an excuse note from my mother. Just before we closed the Circus at 10, a lovely young thing named Pam Dubois came in with a couple of friends. Miss D. had been a roommate of Pamme Brewer whom I’d met earlier in the Murphy Area dorm where Pamme resided. We talked casually for a few minutes while the store employees and Pam’s friends emigrated to the parking lot, eventually walking down the three steps to the exit. Then, in Fellini-esque fashion, Pam put her back to the door, slammed it shut and kissed me like there was no tomorrow. Now, despite all those sordid tales you’ve heard about head shop ribaldry, this was not an everyday occurrence. My first thought was gee, I’m going to miss the Halloween Ball. My second thought was who the hell cares?
Discussing philosophy in the aftermath of sex, as all of us do, it didn’t take long to realize that Miss Pam Dubois was somewhat disillusioned with the world, looking for something to hold onto and reinforce her beliefs…perhaps an idealist like herself. She’d been around for the Charlatan days, saw an editor who’d challenged the UF deans, exposed nefarious university censoring of the student newspaper, beat them in court and changed the rules. “After all that, do you still consider yourself an idealist?” she wanted to know. And that’s when I was reminded once again that honesty is not always the best policy.
“Surely not a purist,” I started, recalling the punishment meted out over time by the opposition, which included a lawsuit eventually garnishing automobiles and real estate on Newberry Road now worth millions. I held the same beliefs, worked for the same goals, “but I learned the hard way that you have to choose your fights and play to your strengths.” As Dirty Harry once said and I believe, “A man has to know his limitations.”
This, alas, was not what Pam Dubois wanted to hear. She reflected on the words for a few minutes, then got up, dressed and delivered one last gentle kiss before disappearing through the doorway. The next time I saw her, she had a girlfriend.
It’s not the worst thing, of course, to sacrifice the favors of a fine lady for forthrightness and honesty. We live and love again. But gee, I felt terrible letting down the whole gender.
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| The Four Trees (egon schiele) |
That’s all, folks….
