Saturday, October 3, 2009

Ig Nobel Stargate

Well, I tuned in the SeeFee channel last night and sat through the premiere of Stargate Universe, even though I'm not much of a fan of the franchise. (As far as I'm concerned it's like a tedious combination of pulp sf cliches and military recruiting commercial.) This was always going to be Stargate: Voyager so I wasn't too surprised to realize within the first few minutes that I was watching Lost in Space. The show starts with the stargate equivalent of a plane crash, with people and luggage flying everywhere; they're stranded in a mysterious location far from home; we get to know the main characters through a series of flashbacks; etc., etc. Weak, too say the least. I usually watch at least three episodes of a show before I form a judgement, but SGU is so unoriginal I don't plan to waste anymore time on it.

More enjoyable is the fact that the Ig Nobel Prizes were recently awarded which "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The corporate media only seem to be focused on the "gas mask bra", by which they mean the Public Health Prize awarded to "Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander." A far cry from a "gas mask" if you ask me. But my favorite was the physics prize awarded to a team of researchers "for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over." Science!

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