Anyone who read Marvel comics in the 1970s and 1980s is familiar with the concept of the No-Prize. In a nutshell the No-Prize was a fictitious award handed out to fans who noticed mistakes in the stories, but instead of admitting them as mistakes created clever reason why it wasn’t really a mistake at all.
An example might be Wolverine in an X-Men comic being drawn in the middle of a fight pounding someone without his claws, when in the panels before and after his claws had been extended. A suitable answer worthy of the No-Prize would have been that Wolverine’s claws periodically become dulled and need to be retracted and popped out again to regain sharpness.
Intelligent? No. Possible? Perhaps.
All around us these days you will find people answering No-Prizes without even getting an empty envelope in the mail for their troubles.
—–Fundie X-tians are foiled by dinosaur bones when believing the world to be only 6000 years old? No problem! Jews buried the bones in the 1920s!
—–Government documents about Roswell show that it was indeed bits and pieces of a top secret weather balloon aren’t as fun as believing in crashed UFO’s? No problem! The government forged the documents!
—–Someone crashed a couple planes into some big buildings, but we don’t know who? Forget it! It was Saddam, and he has WOMD!
I propose that Discordians revive the tradition of the No-Prize and send them out to all the people who use specious reasoning to satiate themselves.
