I laughed.  Did I think?  Maybe.

My favorites this year:

• NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.
• BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert,, and  Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.
• PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

The physics prize, in particular, is very relevant, as anyone who has ever handled a pair of headphones already knows.

I think the 2007 awards had more flair, but still.

My personal favorites:

• ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.  If they can figure it out, I’ll stop banging my head against my desk.
• LITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.”  Personally, I think Chopper should read this report.
• CHEMISTRY: Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon of the University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rosselló of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, for their study “Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature.” Now, I remember one holiday when Devin, Chopper, and I did something less scientific involving some leftover cheese fondue and my parents’ wooden fence …

I would love to see the grant proposals for these.

“What that means is that if every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.”

That’s an impact, with no more effort than screwing in a light bulb.

When I told Chopper it was a little like an audio version of Discover Magazine (another of my personal favorites), he groaned and said that Discover made his head hurt.

My dream, it seems, was shared, and real.

After my recent trip into the Francis Marion Forest with a group from the Charleston County Parks and Recreation Department, in which we spotted the rare and endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, I have a newfound appreciation for these beautiful birds, our woodpeckers. In our urban setting in downtown Charleston, we have more woodpeckers than I would have thought possible: frequently, a red-bellied woodpecker, or more recently and less commonly, a downy woodpecker, have visited our little backyard niche. I’ve heard hairy woodpeckers as well, but have not spotted one.

The Francis Marion was full of woodpeckers — the red-cockaded, a lovely little black-and-white bird with a distinctive raspy sound; the northern flicker; the yellow-bellied sapsucker; hairies and downies; and the largest in the forest, the pileated. How delighted we were to see evidence of red-cockaded woodpeckers everywhere, and then the little birds themselves, and I cannot imagine the thrill of seeing, literally, a ghost from the past fly by.

I encourage you, if you have cared enough to read this far, to make a contribution to the Big Woods Conservation Partnership, led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Nature Conservancy.