Now for the real Nobels

OPINION: The Nobel Prize for Peace has gone to Barack Obama, writes Joe Bennett this week.

The prize committee said that the choice of the leader of the nation currently waging more and bigger wars than any other nation was an obvious one.

"When nominations closed in February President Obama had been in office for a full two weeks, so he had had plenty of time to show what he was made of. The committee was specially impressed by his plan to bring peace to the Middle East. It involves bringing peace to the Middle East.

"Such an approach is long overdue. In the last 30 years no American president has tried to bring peace to the Middle East with the exception of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Carter. President Obama's plan is different, however, in that it has yet to fail. The committee therefore considered this a propitious time to award him the prize for good intentions."

The committee stressed that the award was in no way an attempt by a small, left-leaning and earnest Nordic nation to suck up to a superpower.

Nor was it a snook cocked at President Obama's no-good predecessor. Nor yet was the award in any way influenced by pigmentation.

The Nobel Prize for Science went to a team of geneticists in the US.

"We don't pretend to understand exactly what they're doing," read the citation, "but it's got something to do with conquering the problems of ageing and its side-effect death. Ageing has been upsetting people since they first learned to get upset, and death has been identified by the UN Committee on Death as an affront to human dignity and an infringement of human rights. So if these boffins can crack it, they will usher in a glorious future of fat people from rich countries playing golf for ever."

The geneticists were nominated by the Indoor Bowls Association of America. Objections to the nomination were received from the Vatican and the Society of American Embalmers.

The Vatican was especially strident. It described the researchers as on a moral par with condomists.

In a year of spectacular economic developments, the Nobel Prize for Financial Innovation was fiercely contested. It went in the end to the New Zealand arms of four Australian-owned banks.

The committee was unanimous in its praise of all four banks, which, without collusion, had arrived at the same neat solution to the problem of corporate tax. By routing hefty sums of money through the Cayman Islands and other centres of financial excellence they had managed to effectively choose their own tax rate. The rate they had chosen had in each case been substantially below the one everyone else paid. Thus they had not only inflated their bottom line, but they had also kept a lot of money away from the Treasury, which would only blow it as usual on schools and hospitals.

The Nobel Prize for the Advancement of Idolatry went to an auctioneer in the US who sold a lock of Elvis Presley's hair. According to the citation, the auction was a model of its kind. "The hair, obtained from Mr Presley's former maid, was authenticated by DNA analysis. Auction notes described both the texture of the hair and the precise chemical composition of the dye employed by its late owner, a formula which several companies have since replicated and rushed to market. Being so well run, the auction attracted a record number of bidders, whose collective IQ has been estimated by official Nobel estimators as 0. The estimation has a margin of error of plus or minus 0 per cent."

The Vatican submitted an objection to this nomination as well, and proposed itself as a suitable recipient for the award.

Alfred Nobel made his fortune from dynamite, so the Nobel Prize for Destructive Bangs was particularly dear to his heart. This year's award went to Nasa.

"In its bid to discover water," said the citation, "Nasa fired a rocket into the surface of the moon at a speed of approximately 900kmh. This created a bang that would have brought tears to the eyes of our founder. Nasa then fired a second rocket to pass through the plume of dust and analyse it before itself crashing into the moon. The committee especially commends the way Nasa had strewn a substantial area of the planet with rare metals and other pollutants that are guaranteed to screw up future scientific experiments."

Accepting the award on behalf of his team, Commander Dennis T Menace said they had still to analyse the data collected.

"But we sure hope we find water," he added, "cos if those anti-ageing boffins come up trumps we're going to have to grow golf courses up there for a whole bunch of fat people in shorts who just won't die."

» Joe Bennett is an English-born travel writer and columnist who lives in New Zealand with dogs. His columns are syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand.

- © Fairfax NZ News