The Nobel Committee gives its literature prize to a left-wing activist, British playwright Harold Pinter. Didn’t see that one coming. According to the NPR news readers this morning the odds-on favorites were a Turk and a Syrian, with Pinter not even in the mix. What the bookmakers failed to understand, however, was that when Pinter “retired” last year to take up U.S. bashing full time, that vaulted him to the top of the Nobel list.
This follows on the heels of the Nobel crowd giving their annual Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the inept International Atomic Energy Agency. Blogger James Lileks put it best:
This is like giving the Surgeon General the Nobel Prize for medicine after bird flu depopulates the North American continent.
