Recently, there’s been an awful lot of stories online about this years Nobel Peace Prize nominees. Including one site that actually posts odds and lets you place bets. Though the real list of nominees will remain secret until October, all the media leaks confirm that Bono will be nominated again, this year going up against the sitar player Ravi Shankar, who, besides helping victims of the tsunami disaster, is also Norah Jones’ father (serious props).
Poking around the official Nobel Peace Prize website, I noted the following interesting factoids:

1. Information about who has been nominated is kept secret for fifty years. (Unless leaked, of course.)

2. Despite 12 nominations between 1937 and 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was never awarded the Nobel Prize.

3. The backside of the actual medal depicts three naked men embracing with private parts exposed.

Hmmm, I suppose if George Bush, Kim Jong-Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took off all their clothes and gave each other a big group hug, the world would be a more peaceful place.

On this day in 1945, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrite, August Wilson, was born. He’s best remembered for his plays, Fences and The Piano Player – part of a larger work called The Pittsburgh Cycle, which chronicled the African-American experience in Pittsburgh all through the 20th Century (each play set in a different decade).

Other well-known Augusts in history include:

August Wenzinger – cellist and conductor

August Vollmer – criminologist extraordinaire

Augustus (aka Gaius Octavius, aka Gaius Thurinus) – first Roman emperor

Augustus Gloop – world famous nincompoop

At least that’s what the headlines are saying. In reality, there are now more than 1 billion “entries” in the huge language research database, which is managed by the Oxford English Corpus, publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary. That’s still pretty amazing. These entries contain unique words and combinations of words that have unique meanings, as well as multiple entries for many words when those word have different meanings. With words like wiki, podcast, blog, offshoring and supersize being added all the time, the database is getting bigger by the minute. The corpus is the world’s best-funded language research project, costing about $100,000 a year. You might be curious how they’d use that money. Well, they do really important things, such as track the evolution of phrases like “buck naked” to “butt naked.” The staff for that one alone probably cost them $25,000. We’ve yet to convince the corpus to add “flossified,” which is an adjective meaning “a really cool fact and one likely to appear in mental_floss.”

If you’re the sort of awful cook who refuses to sample your own pudding for fear of chipping a tooth, then MIT has just the gadget for you. Still in development, the cats at the prestigious university are busy creating an intelligent spoon that hooks up to a computer to evaluate your cooking as you’re doing it. While it works just like a regular spoon (for stirring and whatnot), it also calculates the salinity, viscosity, acidity and temperature of what you’re making. Then it advises you to add a little more flour, or sugar, or put it on a flame, or whatever. According to the website, it can even tell the user “if there is not enough salt in the brine prepared to make pickles.”

When I am 85 (or whatever the life expectancy is by the time I’m old enough to worry about it) and lying on my deathbed with my past flashing before my eyes, one of the highlights I will surely see will be the night I went swimming in the stars. Not under them, in them. I was still in college, camped out with friends in a rickety rented beach house in the Outer Banks, on the coast of North Carolina. After a barbecue one night, someone got the idea to run fully clothed into the ocean – alright, it might have been me – fine, it was me – and the dozen of us all eventually jumped in. Until we were all flailing about in the warm waves, none of us noticed we had company. Then I lifted my arm out of the water and saw that everything – my arm, the water, our clothes, our skin – was sparkling, a mirror of the vast clear sky above. We had jumped right into a crowd of bioluminescent plankton, and though we were just a bunch of boisterous, slightly drunken kids, we all suddenly fell silent in awe of the universe.

90 percent of deep-sea marine lifeforms produce some kind of bioluminescence, but humans rarely get to experience it in such a fantastic fashion. That is why I am fiercely jealous of the people of Toyama Bay on the west coast of Japan. Not only are they graced with mirages on a regular basis thanks to accidents of temperature – the ocean, filled with snow, is so much colder than the warm air above it that people see forests of shimmering silver “trees” on the horizon – from now until June they can take sightseeing boats into the bay to see the famous cobalt-blue bioluminescent Firefly Squid rising to the water’s surface. I don’t believe in God, but if I wanted to argue for his existence, I’d hold up these exquisite glowing creatures as Exhibit A.

For all you folks who identify with that old Shakespeare chestnut, “Hell hath no fury like an overprotective mother discovering a tattoo on her kid’s arm (or worseth still, lower back),” stop yer worrying. There’s a new type of semi-permanent tattoo hitting the market that might just be the semi-rebellious rush you’ve been looking for. Created by the brilliant folks at Mass. General, these “smart tattoos” can be erased with a single, non-scarring laser treatment.

The process is actually pretty ingenious: the ink is encapsulated in tiny polymer beads measuring just 1-3 micrometers in diameter. The tattoos come out looking great, meaning that, unlike say a henna tattoo, it won’t induce sneers from the other bikers in your gang. But when you finally decide that you don’t really need that dolphin on your ankle, or the Chinese symbol for “trite” on your left shoulder, a laser treatment will slice the microbeads open, releasing the FDA-approved dye into your skin where it quickly (and more importantly, safely!) fades away.

(<– This is the tattoo my overprotective parental unit refused to let me get.)

I tried to come up with a witty title taken from a Stones song (“Don’t Lie to Me?” “Just My Imagination?”) but I really couldn’t, because I was too flabbergasted by the fact that Mick. Jagger. Is. Making. A. Sitcom.

And here’s the really amazing part: It sounds like it might actually be funny. The premise: Donal Logue, the lovable schlub from The Tao of Steve, is a resentful janitor who decides to take revenge on a greedy celebrity by robbing him blind, with some help from a ragtag band of criminal misfits. (May I helpfully suggest that the theme song be “Cops and Robbers?”) Jagger apparently loved the idea. But I just don’t feel like I can trust this news report. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a journalist was wrong about Sir Mick:

- It’s often reported that Jagger majored in economics. Not true. He attended the famous London School of Economics, but he probably didn’t calculate many cost-benefit ratios; he studied history and dropped out after two years.

- After the Altamont controversy, in which Hell’s Angels beat a black fan to death at a Stones concert, tabloid journalists reported that Jagger had encouraged the violence by singing “Sympathy for the Devil” (“just call me Lucifer, ’cause I’m in need of some restraint”) while it occurred. Way not true: Concert tapes show him trying to calm the audience down, and besides, the band was playing “Under My Thumb.” The rumors were so pervasive that the Stones had to stop playing “Sympathy for the Devil” live for several years afterward.

- This one’s my favorite: In 1967, a News of the World reporter told a lurid tale of hanging out in a London club with Jagger, who waxed poetic about taking drugs and invited the group back home “for a smoke.” Drug use among rockers was still enough to shock people in those days, and the report made headlines. The only problem was, the reporter had the wrong Stone. He had spent his scandalous evening with Brian Jones, the band’s then-guitarist.

The lunar cycle begins all over again today, with a new moon appearing on the horizon at 19:44 UT, or “Universal Time.” So what is Universal Time, besides being the time to pitch that big movie you just thought up to Universal Pictures? (”That’s right baby, it’s Universal time!”)

Well, Universal Time serves as the basis for the worldwide system of civil time. While a lot of frat boys would argue that Miller Time is the most accurate way of telling time, Universal Time is kept by time specialists around the world, including the U.S. Naval Observatory, and is based off a series of precise atomic clocks, which are supposed to be accurate to a nanosecond. It’s debatable whether the same could be said for Miller Time.
Our “Standard Time” here in the U.S., is an integral number of hours offset from Universal Time. For some countries, of course, such as Iceland, Morocco, and Senegal or the United Kingdom during winter months, Universal Time is the same as civil time.

For a table to convert our Standard Time to Universal Time, go here.

For a live, up to the nanosecond, UT time clock, check this out.

And, okay, fine, why not: for a closer look at Miller Time, go here.

Ok, ok… so the fact is the highly-touted, newly created “world’s most-expensive sandwich ever” can’t be found on any Golden Arches value menu. That’s partially because a) at $151.81 it’s hardly a value (even with fries), and b) because it isn’t really a fast food product. The wallet-slimming gourmet item is actually the creation of one Scott McDonald, a chef at the London Department store Selfridges, where the finger food is offered. But what exactly makes these sammiches so darn expensive? Evidently, it has nothing to do with the black truffle mayo or the fresh lobe foie gras, and everything to do with the layers of Wagyu beef packed on.

That’s because the Japanese cows are raised on a special beer and grain diet, and massaged regularly with sake (the Japanese rice wine!) to make their flesh that much more succulent. And while all this bovine prep work does absolutely *nothing* for the Hindu vegetarian in me… I gotta admit, all this talk of sake and beer does make an alcoholic’s mouth water. You can read more about the sandwich here.

A few years ago, Kaavya Viswanathan, a hard-driving Indian teenage girl who wanted to go to Harvard, scored a huge book deal at age 17 for “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” a sparkling little novel about… a hard-driving Indian teenage girl who wants to go to Harvard. As documented by the Harvard Crimson this week, it seems that K.V., now a sophomore at her beloved university, didn’t take her inspiration solely from her own short life – she also apparently lifted a good bit of her book from two novels by Megan McCafferty, “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings.” My initial reaction was as follows:

scha·den·freu·de

Pronunciation: ’shä-d^&n-”froi-d&
Function: noun
Usage: often capitalized
Etymology: German, from Schaden damage + Freude joy
: enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others

But then I realized that I am 27 and have a career that is just fine and therefore shouldn’t be jeering at some poor teenage kid who made a dumb mistake, even if her first book deal was way bigger than mine will ever be, aaaaarrrrrrgh.

So, anyway. K.V. may feel a bit friendless right now, but she’s in good company:

- Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism as a young girl for a school composition. Mortified, she determined to have all future compositions screened by her friends before submission.

- According to a Boston University investigation into academic misconduct, Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized over one third of the chapter of his doctoral thesis that summarizes the concepts of God expressed by Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.

- In 2002, best-selling author Stephen Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages which he footnoted but did not enclose in the customary quotation marks.

- In her 1987 book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Doris Kearns Goodwin interviewed author Lynne McTaggart and used passages from McTaggart’s book about Kathleen Kennedy with permission.
 

And yes, for those of you who’ve had your coffee this morning, I did in fact just blatantly plagiarize all that information from three Wikipedia entries.

John, as a novelist with a YA specialty yourself, what are your thoughts on this mini-disaster? Will K.V. write again? Should she?