The Ignobels

This year's winners: http://improbable.com/ig/winners/

You can hear the entire "ceremony" here.
http://improbable.com/ig/2010/

My 2010 fave: MANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
REFERENCE: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.

My all time fave: ASTROPHYSICS [2001]
Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. [REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the "Jack Van Impe Presents" program. [[at about the 12 minute mark).]

I love it. Academia's answer to The Onion.

Here's a passionate ;) book review of A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.

q.v. The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Did the bacteria that scientists taught to solve Sudoku win a prize?

I got a big laugh from Maureen ?Dowd? in the NYT recently. Not one of my favorites, but worth checking out once in a while when she manages to be very incisive. She called it Obama's Nobel Peace Prize awarded on layaway. So true it couldn't be any funnier.

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the world's sigh of relief that the U.S. had elected a president with real compassion and brains after 8 years of enduring the shrub and company.