Tonight I went with two of my friends to the Oxford show on the 2008 Ig Nobel UK tour.
The best story was a vignette that appeared in a certain section in New Scientist. (The speaker was the guy who came up with and still edits that section.) Apparently, several years ago there was a married guy who met a married woman online and then really got along well. They were complaining about their current spouses and talked online for months. Eventually they decided to meet up at a local place and they would identify each other by bringing a single red rose. Of course, you can guess what happened. The two people who met online happened to be married to each other, so they were quite horrified when they saw each other at the hook-up place. They each subsequently filed for divorce on the pretext that the other was trying to cheat on them. Wow!
The sword swallowing was really cool too. (A big difference between this show and the one I saw at Cornell several years ago was that there were a lot of guest speakers, including several Ig Nobel laureates.)
The two friends who went with me are Nick, who I know from the complex systems group (he's in the physics department), and Johanna, who was the first friend I made here---and it was one of those accidental meetings (she is the medical student and MIT alum who ate dinner with the math crowd during the very first Somerville dinner of the year because there was a spill-over of one).
If you ever get a chance to go to an Ig Nobel event, I highly recommend it! (I really want to get an Ig Nobel prize, by the way...)
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