I had high hopes for this book, coming from the founder of the Ig Noble Prizes, but alas it wan’t quite the chatty, easy to read format I’d expected. This is, in fact, a collection of his columns from The Guardian, slightly expanded upon and cited out the wazoo. This makes it an excellent reference for those times when you’re specifically looking for bizarre, twisted or otherwise outlandish research, but rather less excellent if you’re looking for an enjoyable sit-down read.

Still, it’s a comprehensive (one would hope) collection of some of the most head-scratching research being done out there in the name of science, and if you’re willing to read through the dry reportage, a few amusing facts. My two favourites were the patent issued in the USA in 1977 for the comb-over – yes, the one you’re thinking of, that oh-so-sexy and not-at-all-obvious disguise for male pattern baldness. And an Australian patent in 2001 for a “Circular Transportation Facilitation Device”. Which is, you guessed it, the wheel.

A more timely and relevant invention for us in these pandemic days is the US patent awarded in 2007 for a “Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks”. A/K/A a bra, that in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks. It was awarded an Ig Noble prize in 2009 for Public Health, but one has to wonder just how Ig Noble the invention remains? ( )

(ebook edition) nonfiction. I was hoping for something more like 'freakonomics' but these were inconsequential little blurbs, summaries of off-the-wall studies. I only skimmed the first chapter or so, but it wasn't catching my interest at all. ( )

Marc Abrahams was the founder of the infamous and hilarious Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded each year for research that "first makes you laugh and then makes you think." Which probably gives you a reasonable idea of the contents of this collection of short pieces, all of which originally appeared in The Guardian. Each one is a little glimpse of some odd, amusing, or hard-to-believe piece of research. (E.g.: a study of people's reactions to someone walking around with a shoelace untied, an analysis of the history of Soviet underwear, or a look at the attitude of measurement experts to cheap plastic rulers.) Some of the subjects are clearly just bad science, others are perfectly legitimate research into offbeat topics, and a lot seem to fall somewhere in between. It's entertaining to dip into -- which is probably better than reading it all in a lump -- and Abrahams writes with a pleasantly sly sense of humor. I didn't find the collection, overall, to be quite as much fun as I was hoping for, though, I think mainly because each piece is so short that there's not a lot of room for the "thinking" part. Mostly, I get the sense of him pointing a finger at some scientific oddity or other and basically going, "Here's a quirky thing! Did you see it being quirky? Great, then, bye!" ( )