Friday Random 10: Awards Edition

Pax Arcana

This week, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. According to my sources, Le Clézio is someone I’ve never fucking heard of.

Much more interesting are the annual Ig Nobel Prizes, which are awarded to those who perform feats of academic absurdity so profound that normal humans like us question whether all that grant money wouldn’t be better spent to create the world’s biggest wheel of cheese or something.

Image stolen from xkcd

This year’s Ig Nobel winners include Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino, Brazilian scientists who published a research paper called “The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach.” French scientists Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc were awarded for their work in discovering “that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.”

My favorite is the Nutrition Award, given to Massimiliano Zampini of Italy, who discovered a way of “electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.”

The full list is here.

The songs:

1,000,000 — Nine Inch Nails
No Pussy Blues — Grinderman
No Comply — Studio
It’s All in Your Mind — Beck
Passing Afternoon — Iron & Wine
Brandy Alexander — Feist
Mozambique — Bob Dylan
Friends — Ryan Adams and the Cardinals
Me and the Bean — Spoon
Knot Comes Loose — My Morning Jacket

Bonus Video:

The ’59 Sound — The Gaslight Anthem (Live at The Knitting Factory)

The Rules: The Friday Random 10 is exactly that — random. We open up our iTunes, set the thing on shuffle, and listen to 10 songs. We are not permitted to skip any out of embarrassment or fear of redundancy. Commenters are encouraged to post their own.