Peter Gabriel and the Polar Music Prize

Peter Gabriel is one of this year’s winners of the Polar Music Prize, which was presented today at Grand Hôtel in Stockholm. In honor of the occasion, here’s a video of Peter Gabriel performing his song Games without Frontiers while riding a Segway Personal Transporter:

Other winners of this year’s Polar Music Prize were José Antonio Abreu, a Venezuelan pianist and music educator, along with his humanitarian organization El Sistema.

The Polar Music Prize, while not quite the Nobel, is still quite prestigious in the music world. It was founded by the late ABBA manager Stig Anderson. Like the Nobel prizes, the Polar Music Prizes are decided by a committee of Swedish “experts” in music, ranging widely in styles, traditions, and roles.

Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureatte

Paul Krugman certainly deserves it for all the proper reasons, given his contributions to theories of global trade and economic geography. But I can’t help but think there’s also something to the fact that he’s had his head on straight about the current financial crisis since long before most people took it seriously.

You can read here his columns and blog, at the NY Times.

P.S. I am so going to his Nobel speech in December.

Not Quite a Brush with Fame

You didn’t really believe that was my last post on the Nobel Prizes, did you? Well it was supposed to be, but my mom added some interesting information in the comments:

Turns out you have visited the home of one of the Nobel prize winners [Leonid Hurwicz] in Economics. Really! Doris mentioned that when going downstairs in her building earlier this week, there were many news stations and personnel at the entrance. Right, the prize-winner is a resident of her condo, and the news media were there to interview him.

Doris is my grandmother (step-grandmother, technically, which is why she is “Doris” to my mother), and she lives in a retirement condo building in southern Minneapolis. My mother says she met him on one of her visits.

The Nobel Prizes: the game’s up

In my last post about the Nobel Prizes, this year’s prize in economics has gone to…

Peace

You’ve probably already read this somewhere, but this year the Nobel Peace Prize goes to the one and only…