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I have now seen a sword-swallower do his schtick on stage, in front of a roomful of people, complete with "see, this is a real sword, no trick," discussions of how this works internally, and asking for an audience volunteer to help. ( cut for the squeamish )
Most people go to Coney Island for that sort of thing: I went to MIT, room 10-250.
I wasn't expecting to see sword-swallowing, but perhaps I should have been.
This was at the IgNobel Prize informal lectures, in which each of the winners gets five minutes to talk, more or less about their work, and then take up to three questions. One of the prizes this year was given, I think in anatomy, to a radiologist who decided to study the injury rate and patterns among sword-swallowers, after a literature search found him a single case report. He got to know people from the International Association of Sword-Swallowers; one of them was co-author on the paper, and came with him to the lecture. The radiologist showed us x-ray and PET pictures, and put up a slide that listed the basic results of his research, number three of which was "If must try: think again." Then they got to the questions, and this cheerful man explained why he'd started doing this, before demonstrating. I think this may have been the first public incidence of someone deliberately swallowing a pair of extra-long forceps.
That was the last of the lectures. Before that, we heard about a new source of artificial vanilla flavor. The researcher gave a very dry-sounding presentation, with very funny slides. She's not quite fluent in English, and in the question session it transpired that her translator isn't fluent in chemistry. (I declined the chance to try the special IgNobel Vanilla at Tosci's afterwards, sticking to their regular French vanilla for my hot fudge sundae.) An indexer wearing a large shirt that said "The Definite Article" talked about the different ways indexers attempt to handle "the": she's not only good, I think I may want to read her paper. (The vanillin will turn up in commerce, or not, whether or not I read the research.)
The audience volunteer for the sword-swallower's act was another of the prize-winners, a cheerful woman who has studied the mites, pseudo-scorpions, etc. that live in mattresses and carpets and such. She was mostly reassuring, noting that while mite allergies are an issue, the mites aren't going to bite people, and in fact will tend to move away from anyone sitting on the couch or lying in bed, because sweat moves away from the body toward cooler, dryer areas. One of the audience questions was about eyelash mites, and the researcher cheerfully discussed where they come from and that by age 25 almost everyone has some.
And there was the bird man. He's a curator at a museum in the Netherlands. A glass museum. All the glass walls mean lots of dead or stunned birds, which somehow led him to want a collection of famous dead birds. He showed us a slide of one that had been killed by a cricket ball at Lord's, preserved with the crickent ball, and an article about one he hadn't been able to obtain and have stuffed. He also took a minute to depict the sad case of the "McFlurry hedgehogs," animals that crawled into discarded cups to finish the ice cream and then got caught in the caps. He assured us that the packaging had already been changed in the UK, to enable innocent hedge pigs to eat ice cream safely, but Dutch hedgehogs are still at risk.
None of that is what he won an Ig for. The Ig is for a paper on the first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in ducks. In that incident, two mallards flew into the glass walls; one of them was killed, and the other showed that even a stunned mallard drake has one thing on his mind at that time of year. "First documented" because the act went on long enough that the researcher has photos to prove it. We don't know how long a mallard drake could continue having sex with a corpse, because after 75 minutes our not-so-intrepid researcher decided it was time to collect the corpse for his taxidermist and go home to lunch. The active partner was not collected, but lived to fly off in search of further partners.
Most people go to Coney Island for that sort of thing: I went to MIT, room 10-250.
I wasn't expecting to see sword-swallowing, but perhaps I should have been.
This was at the IgNobel Prize informal lectures, in which each of the winners gets five minutes to talk, more or less about their work, and then take up to three questions. One of the prizes this year was given, I think in anatomy, to a radiologist who decided to study the injury rate and patterns among sword-swallowers, after a literature search found him a single case report. He got to know people from the International Association of Sword-Swallowers; one of them was co-author on the paper, and came with him to the lecture. The radiologist showed us x-ray and PET pictures, and put up a slide that listed the basic results of his research, number three of which was "If must try: think again." Then they got to the questions, and this cheerful man explained why he'd started doing this, before demonstrating. I think this may have been the first public incidence of someone deliberately swallowing a pair of extra-long forceps.
That was the last of the lectures. Before that, we heard about a new source of artificial vanilla flavor. The researcher gave a very dry-sounding presentation, with very funny slides. She's not quite fluent in English, and in the question session it transpired that her translator isn't fluent in chemistry. (I declined the chance to try the special IgNobel Vanilla at Tosci's afterwards, sticking to their regular French vanilla for my hot fudge sundae.) An indexer wearing a large shirt that said "The Definite Article" talked about the different ways indexers attempt to handle "the": she's not only good, I think I may want to read her paper. (The vanillin will turn up in commerce, or not, whether or not I read the research.)
The audience volunteer for the sword-swallower's act was another of the prize-winners, a cheerful woman who has studied the mites, pseudo-scorpions, etc. that live in mattresses and carpets and such. She was mostly reassuring, noting that while mite allergies are an issue, the mites aren't going to bite people, and in fact will tend to move away from anyone sitting on the couch or lying in bed, because sweat moves away from the body toward cooler, dryer areas. One of the audience questions was about eyelash mites, and the researcher cheerfully discussed where they come from and that by age 25 almost everyone has some.
And there was the bird man. He's a curator at a museum in the Netherlands. A glass museum. All the glass walls mean lots of dead or stunned birds, which somehow led him to want a collection of famous dead birds. He showed us a slide of one that had been killed by a cricket ball at Lord's, preserved with the crickent ball, and an article about one he hadn't been able to obtain and have stuffed. He also took a minute to depict the sad case of the "McFlurry hedgehogs," animals that crawled into discarded cups to finish the ice cream and then got caught in the caps. He assured us that the packaging had already been changed in the UK, to enable innocent hedge pigs to eat ice cream safely, but Dutch hedgehogs are still at risk.
None of that is what he won an Ig for. The Ig is for a paper on the first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in ducks. In that incident, two mallards flew into the glass walls; one of them was killed, and the other showed that even a stunned mallard drake has one thing on his mind at that time of year. "First documented" because the act went on long enough that the researcher has photos to prove it. We don't know how long a mallard drake could continue having sex with a corpse, because after 75 minutes our not-so-intrepid researcher decided it was time to collect the corpse for his taxidermist and go home to lunch. The active partner was not collected, but lived to fly off in search of further partners.
