The 2011 Ig Nobel winners,

awarded Thursday at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine:

PHYSIOLOGY: Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl and Ludwig Huber for their study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."

CHEMISTRY: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for their wasabi fire alarm.

MEDICINE: Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, Paul Maruff along with Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop for studying the effects of holding in urine.

PSYCHOLOGY: Karl Halvor Teigen for trying to understand why people sigh.

LITERATURE: John Perry for his theory of procrastination: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.

BIOLOGY: Daryll Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that certain kinds of beetles try to mate with certain kinds of Australian beer bottles.

PHYSICS: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma for trying to determine why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.

MATHEMATICS: Assorted doomsday predictors throughout history for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

PEACE: Arturas Zuokas for solving the problem of illegally parked cars by crushing them with an armored vehicle.

PUBLIC SAFETY: John Senders for his experiments in which a driver on a major highway repeatedly has a visor flapped down over his face.

My paranoia

reaches the unconscious.

A fragment of a dream, from last night. & though I probably — must — dream, I rarely, if ever, remember them, so this one quite powerful.

Our garage, in sunlight, empty of cars. But curled towards one end, a black snake.

geographies: DeKalb

The energy other-
wise emanating
       from basement
birthed recordings

is often blocked
by big red candles
       decorated with
Chinese ideograms.

100 Thousand Poets for Change

This place may be built on a floodplain, but it's a desert when it comes to ars poetica. It would have been futile to attempt to organize anything significant to mark 100 Thousand Poets for Change day.

However, my heart is fully behind Michael Rothenberg's wonderful concept, & I would feel awfully guilty if the worldwide muster only reached 999,999. So at midday, I went outside &, in the shade of a mango tree, read a couple of poems to a hovering hawk & a transient troupe of rainbow lorrikeets, all of us unperturbed at the potential gatecrashing of the event by a six-tonne NASA satellite as it falls to Earth.

Today the
postman brought
me a compendium
of investigative
studies by Shop-
Wiki & others
that report an
average of 13
people per year
are killed by over-
tipping vending
machines but less
than one every
two years is
killed by under-
tipping a waiter.

Some names

should never be.

Instance:

Acting director of AUT University's Institute of Public Policy, Associate Professor Love Chile, said he was not surprised New Zealanders rated the rugby and the election so close.

OMG. Diana Ross songs as soundtrack wherever he goes.

(This post is dedicated to all those parents, family name Head, who have chosen to call their son Richard.)

These days,

calls to his erogenous zone go straight to voicemail.

geographies: Port Alma

My dulcet tones

can be found in the just-gone-live issue #4 of Raft.

My audio & text can be heard/read here

& the full issue can be found here.

TGR 5

Bono gets up close & personal with Nelson Mandela


as does the Dalai Lama


but then the DL gains bonus points under The Great Race's Vowel Replacement Clause by being photographed with a mandala as well.

Today the
postman brought
me a sacrificial
pig. Looks
like lamb like
most red meat
these days
is too expensive
to be used as
anything more
than metaphor.

 h
wh     le
 l
 e

autodidactyl

It's
a day
for the Stones!

Bald Eagles

Have you ever listened
to the way most
drummers sing? So
regular, so pedestrian,
a freight train held captive
by its tracks. It seems
they cannot forget
that they are drummers
so sit on the rhythm
of the song as if
scared of losing it
if they let go. Welcome
to the Hotel California.