2010: Zygote Wins Nobel Peace Prize

(Dateline, Oslo, 2010)

It's damn cold.

And, in other news, the Nobel Committee today announced the 2010 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, a zygote in an undisclosed location, so as to keep it peaceful. The zygote could not be reached for comment, and even if it could, would say little as it's a diploid cell, and they aren't generally chatty, despite the cliched jokes that begin "two diploid cells walk into a bar." Plus, in theory the zygote will already have to forfeit the prize, as once it's taken the magical highway of life down the fallopian tube (remember when that trip used to be an E-ticket?) to the uterus, it ends up a blastocyst on the fifth day, and nothing with blast and cyst in its name gets near the Peace Prize (except for Henry Kissinger, of course).

Ulf Ulfulfsson, spokesperson for the Nobel Committee, said, "We knew we had to pick this zygote as it was the only innocent thing left in the world. A flicker of hope. A something as yet un-besmirched but all the smirchers. Let's face it, most of us are just crap."

Meanwhile in the U.S., reactions was swift and decisive from the religious right. "We find this award a total joke," claims Thaddeus Uptightus of the Christian Bomb Their Countries & Convert Their Survivors Council. "Even that zygote is born with original sin, and it gets it right at conception, which is why you can't abort it or you're ruining our ability to spread the guilt around, and you're all guilty if you're doing that conception thing and liking it, ok? This is a baby, no zygote, and therefore not a choice that the Nobel Committee can make."