NEW YORK – Weekly World News announces Man and Woman of the Year: Dr. Dylan Evans and Dr. Rossana Kennedy.
Bat Boy delivered the winners their bronze BOBBLEHEADS himself.
A lecturer at University College Cork in Ireland, Dr. Evans won a sexual harassment allegations case made against him for showing his colleague, Dr. Kennedy, his paper on the sex lives of fruit bats.
Though the case became a worldwide sensation in 2010, the original incident happened on November 2, 2009, when Dr Evans was passing by Dr Kennedy’s office and showed her his scientific paper entitled “Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time”.
Dr. Kennedy was intrigued by the concept and discussed it in great detail, and at great length, with Dr. Evans. But another (perhaps jealous) colleague made a formal complaint.
The external investigation found that while Dr Evans had no intention to offend, the incident fell within the definition of sexual harassment under the university’s policy on ‘Duty of Respect and Right to Dignity’.
Following the two-day hearing, the judge awarded costs to Dr Evans who said he was “delighted with the outcome” and was “looking forward to putting this matter behind me and getting on with the job”.
After the case was adjourned the judge joined Dr. Evans and Dr. Kennedy in a pub for a public reading of Fruit Bat Fellatio (which is now being made into a musical with Bono and The Edge composing the music).
This year the research paper – which Dr. Kennedy added significantly to after the trial – was awarded a Ig Nobel Award for papers that may have humorous content as well as serious material.
Dr. Evans and Dr. Kennedy celebrated their Ig Nobel by spending a night in a Dublin hotel with two very special fruit bats.
It was a tough choice this year. The WWN Staff met for almost half-an-hour trying to decide this year’s honorees. There were a number of runners-up: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Chilean Miners, Anna Chapman (the Russian Spy) and Steve Slater (the JetBlue flight attendant that left the plane via chute) and Anna Pfeiffer (the cosmobiologist, juggler and locomotive engineer).
But – there has never been a more thorough and complete work on the sex lives of Fruit Bats. Since Fruit Bats are the crucial biological building block to ecosystems around the world and because fellatio has never been studied on such a grand scale – it was ultimately an easy decision.
Congratulations to Dr. Dylan Evans and Dr. Rossana Kennedy – WWNs Man and Woman of the Year!!
Do you think Julie Taymor will sign on for the musical? I'm thinking Kevin Spacey and Laura Linney as the dirty doctors. Broadway will go Fruit Batty for this type of fellatio!
Elsa M… you must be a psychic!! Julie Taymor just announced that she will be directing the musical and has already begun making a gigantic mechanical Fruit Bat with the appropriate gigantic mechanical parts… Kevin Spacey has been contacted but Laura Linney is out – the female lead has been given to Swedish supermodel Anna Hofverberg.
Somewhere Oscar Wilde chuckles!
That is hilarious – Dylan Evans (who often writes about himself in the third person) does fancy himself as the modern Oscar Wilde trial and wrote "Well, Dylan Evans is certainly not the average rather bloodless academic, that's for sure. Not exactly tenure track norm. And he does mock himself quite a bit in conversation, especially about the so-called Utopia project. He has courage, hubris, but not necessarily wisdom. Let's hope he will avoid Oscar Wildes fate." http://creativeconflictwisdom.wordpress.com/2010/…
He is also bizarrely proud of this award and Twittered (also in the third degree) "Dylan Evans of #fruitbatgate fame is nominated "person of the year" – http://bit.ly/g7C1UX – by NY satirical website" http://twitter.com/evansd66/status/15321741412802…
I doubt that Evans wants Oscar Wilde's fate that we referenced: failed law suit, prosecution, two years in jail that broke his health, and early death in disgrace and exile.
But in any event, your assertion that Creative Conflict Wisdom is written by Evans is absurd. He warranted two or three postings and a few updates out of 276 postings this year, largely on topics in which Evans has no interest or expertise. We took an interest in the case because it well illustrates the futility of win-lose, positional approaches to conflict and our interest was in getting a good solution to the conflict for UCC, the complainant and Evans. The outcome has been bad for all parties because they did not look to their interests. But hey mediators are often caught in the cross fire and we are used to that. But Dylan Evans we aren't.
Get your Groupon for fellatio
Here's your person of the year: http://newslampoon.com/2010personoftheyear.htm
I thought the man of the year would have been Batboy.