Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for literature - no songwriter has ever done that before.

Oh, I don't know. WB Yeats' "Sally Gardens" is a ditty I've always liked.

nordmann wrote:

Oh, I don't know. WB Yeats' "Sally Gardens" is a ditty I've always liked.

T S Eliot - Cats!
Rudyard Kipling - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5_M9kTBmug

And the Clancy Brothers wrote most of Bob's best stuff (as he is often reminded in Ireland when he launches into "With God On Our Side" in unguarded moments).

At least over "Scarborough Fair" his hands are a little cleaner than Paul Simon's.

Yes, but when Simon wins next year's Nobel Prize for Physics having identified no less than 50 ways to leave your lover all the dirt will out, I bet.

nordmann wrote:

And the Clancy Brothers wrote most of Bob's best stuff (as he is often reminded in Ireland when he launches into "With God On Our Side" in unguarded moments).

Erm, I think Dominic Behan might feel he had a bit to do with that.

Yes I agree, this is going to end up being the most shared Nobel Prize ever.

There's a family called Sheehan who took Dominic under their musical wing too. Paddy (who fought with Connolly) would take credit for a stanza or two, I'd wager. And whatever blind fiddler came up with "The Merry Month of May" must surely have descendants queueing up for their cut too.

And I haven't even mentioned Joan B yet.

As a - slight - aside, on a radio programme I heard that a Danish celebrity tv day time queen (of whom I've to this day never heard but apparently - according to herself - very famous) had put a complaint on Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize into a blog, here translated and thus paraphrased, 'someone in an old sweater, with an old-fashioned guitar, looking just like any old man, not even attempting to make himself known through some reality show, receiving what young and famous reality celebs worked hard to get, is very unfair.'

To be fair to the radio station, they put this into a slightly ironic context.

I get all these Nobel prize winners mixed up. I thought for a while that Dylan had received his award for developing a new geometric description of the fractional quantum Hall effect which in turn introduced the "shape" of the "composite boson", which is a boson described by a "unimodular" (determinant 1) spatial metric-tensor field as the fundamental collective degree of freedom of what we now know as Fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) states.

But apparently that was another guy.

Also that some media tend to refer to the Economic prize as a Nobel one, when it actually is one given by the Swedish Riksbank - National Bank - in memory of Alfred Nobel, and like those granted by him, handed out at the end of the year, imo in order to give it some of the glitter and splendour eventually achieved by those originally granted by Nobel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences

In my interpretation, an attempt at raising 'Economics' into a science instead of sorcery.




Edited because of vague phrasing - still not satisfactory.

Which reminds me of the guy who allegedly submitted a tender to an American university in the not too distant past which was upgrading its office furniture and who included in his attached CV that he had a "degree in ergonomics". After what the university later claimed was a "mix up" (ie. blatantly thick moment) the poor bugger was offered the vacant seat of Economics Faculty head. He accepted, and wasn't found out until he submitted his first proposed seminar lecture in which the word "swivel" appeared just once too many times to square with current Wall Street terminology. They had to buy out his contract for a tidy sum, so maybe their initial assessment wasn't too far off the mark as it turned out.

Well, he couldn't easily have made a bigger botch than the genuine practitioners of the Dismal Science in recent years.