Gratitude with attitude

Question: What prize was recently characterized by one of its winners as "mundane"?

a) Radio-Active Car Audio's "Loudest Car Stereo" contest.

b) The International Federation of Competitive Eating's World Tamale Eating Championship.

c) The Nobel Prize.

Talk about a no-brainer. The answer is "c" -- the Nobel Prize! On Tuesday, Japanese particle theorist Toshihide Maskawa, who shared this year's physics prize with two other researchers, told reporters in Kyoto that the Nobel was "a rather mundane thing."

Now, before I congratulate Maskawa by sending him a copy of "Miss Manners' Guide to Graciously Accepting Coveted International Awards," I'm going to extend him the benefit of a few doubts.

First of all, maybe there's a translation issue in play. Maybe Maskawa, who was presumably speaking Japanese, didn't say "mundane" but rather "massive" or "mega-awesome." Second, photos taken of the 68-year-old scientist during the news conference show a grinning man who looks a bit like he's trying to temper his excitement. Perhaps his use of "mundane" was simply an attempt to be modest. Perhaps he's even a past winner of the Loudest Car Stereo contest and didn't want to appear elitist by making a fuss over the smarty-pants Nobel.

It should be said that Maskawa, if he was being as dismissive as he sounds, isn't alone. Nobel Prize recipients have not always exhibited enthusiasm on the level of winners on "The Price Is Right." Jean-Paul Sartre found himself at such existential odds with the prize that he rejected it in 1964, famously stating that "a writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution." In 1973, the Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Henry Kissinger but turned it down on the grounds that peace not had yet been established in his country.

And last year, in a scene immortalized on YouTube, the reliably cantankerous Doris Lessing greeted the news that she'd won the Nobel Prize in literature by telling a mob of reporters at her doorstep that she "couldn't care less." (Later, Lessing was courteous and obliging, though earlier this year, in a London Telegraph article, she referred to the prize committee as "a bunch of bloody Swedes.")