board77

Quote:

The prizes are awarded by winners of the prestigious Nobel prizes and include $10 trillion in cash. Unfortunately for the winners, the generous cash prize comes in Zimbabwean currency, which is nearly worthless.

Quote:

At a ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., the spoof awards honored people such as the late Ahmed Shafik, a professor at Cairo University in Egypt who died in 2007. He dressed rats in polyester pants to test whether the fabric made them less sexually active than rats who wore cotton or wool pants, or none at all. According to his 1993 paper, the electrostatic fields created by polyester pants could play a role in impotence.

"We have never heard of anybody else who carefully spent time examining what happens sexually to rats if you put pants on them," said Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research

Quote:

dull.jpg (43.69 KiB) Viewed 6156 times

Aberdeenshire can lay claim to two of the ten most embarrassing place names in the United Kingdom.

Brokenwind, near Newmachar, finished third in the survey conducted by family history website findmypast.co.uk.

And Backside, located between Dufftown and Huntly, came eighth in the poll, which was topped by Shitterton in Dorset.

Scratchy Bottom in Dorset, Crapstone in Devon and Golden Balls in Oxon also made the top ten.

Other Scottish embarrassing place names which missed out on the top ten include Twatt in Orkney, Gash near Fraserburgh and Butt of Lewis.

Earlier this year the Perthshire village of Dull showed it had a sense of humour by twinning with the US town of Boring.

Debra Chatfield, a family historian at findmypast.co.uk, who carried out the survey, said: “In the course of researching their family history, people can discover that their ancestors came from somewhere with an unlikely, unfortunate or downright embarrassing name.

“True, it’s not the worst thing you might unearth when tracing your ancestry.

“Nonetheless some people are unsettled to discover that their forebears came from somewhere called, say, Crackpot, Ugley or Happy Bottom. It can puncture the magic of making a genealogical discovery.”

Brokenwind is barely a speck on the Aberdeenshire map but does, nonetheless, feature in the genealogical records as the place where one Agnes Bisset died of bronchitis on September 5, 1862. Brokenwind in those days was known as Broken Wynd.