J. M. Coetzee Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

The NYTimes reports that J. M. Coetzee Wins Nobel Prize for Literature.

It's not often that I've read the Nobel winner's work (it helps that this dude writes in English), but I was forced to do so in my Freshman English class (Lit-141, Vic Brombert). I'm very glad he made me read Coetzee for two reasons:

1. I was still a Freshman which meant that I was still doing the required reading
2. I can unequivocally say that the Nobel Committee has bat-poo for brains.

I have often hated the great works of literature (just as I hate many of the "great" movies). Waiting for the Barbarians (the bat-poo in question) in no manner matched the earlier books in the class (on Modernist fiction), e.g. Primo Levi, Virginia Woolf and a whole mess o'Kafka. And all of them are superlative, none of them Laureates.

Considering that there are a bare few Nobel laureates worth reading (e.g. Winston Churchill) - I don't know why we even care.

But, for those who do, the timetable for the rest is as follows:

Medicine - Monday, Oct 6 (Yom Kippur)
Physics - Teusady, Oct 7 (Isru Chag)
Chemistry - Wednesday, Oct 8 (Nothing, really)
Economics - Wednesday, Oct 8
Peace - Friday, Oct 10 (Erev Sukkot)

In the running for the peace prize: Arafat (again, the Swedes love it when your body-count hits a new order of magnitude... it's like watching the odometer roll-over).

(And if you want to see grade-school art, check out the diplomas the laureates get)