Send not to ask for whom Nobel tolls....

     There are Nobel Prizes and there are Nobel Prizes, apparently.  Everybody in Bawlmer, to which Uncle Jack  has returned after a pleasant week on the Outer Banks, is delighted by the fact that a Johns Hopkins professor named Carol Greider shared this year's prize in medicine while in Washington (just 35 miles down the road) everybody (well maybe not everybody) seems to be in a snit because President Obama was awarded the Peace prize.  While the latter seemed a bit premature to Uncle Jack he thinks he can understand where the Norwegians were coming from after eight years of  Bush's war in Iraq.  Some commentators seem to believe that it was despicable for the president to accept the award, which he did in an extremely self-effacing manner, but for the life of him Uncle Jack cannot understand why.  If he had refused it his critics would probably be jumping all over him for being an ingrate.

    Besides the recent samurai sword slaying of an alleged burglar by a Johns Hopkins student, Charm City has been in the news recently for yet another odd reason.  Two persons presenting themselves as a prostitute and her pimp visited an office of the organization known as ACORN (Association for Community Organizations) ostensibly seeking help in setting up a cathouse and shielding the profits from taxation.  Apparently the two female ACORN employees were several marbles short of a counter-top because they did attempt to offer assistance while their blundering was being digitally recorded by the phony supplicants.  The bumbling employees were promptly fired but the event was a public relations disaster for ACORN which has been a target of conservative critics for many years.

     While Uncle Jack has no axe to grind for ACORN, especially in this instance, he cannot help but notice the irony in the fact that if the two perpetrators of the hoax had gone to any number of legitimate law offices in Baltimore looking for advice on how to avoid paying income taxes they would have been welcomed with open arms and charged upwards of $400 an hour for the privilege.  They could have filmed the entire session in technicolor and nobody would have raised an eyebrow.

     A propos of  Uncle Jack's recent blog on the hazards of  football (with an assist by the Sage of Bawlmer himself) he recommends this week's issue of  the New Yorker magazine which contains an excellent article by Malcolm Gladwell on---what else---the hazards of football.  Recent research has shed more light on the kinds of brain damage suffered by football players as a result of repeated blows to the head which are all but unavoidable in the game.  This article is a real downer so if you are a diehard football fan you might want to think twice before reading it.