Hoopes-la

Remember when you considered writing that thesis? Now's the one day a year you can feel bad about taking the easy road to drunken senior spring. Yes, it's the 2009 Hoopes Prizes! The list (here, quick read it so you can congratulate that friend of yours that everybody knew was going to win it!) contains some of the most arcane paper titles we've seen this side of a neuroscience convention. And of course, we've got lots of the standard "Colorful Quote": Boring Description of Paper Title Construction (The thesis we always wanted to write was "From Russia With Love: The Cuban Missile Crisis").

But even if predictable, a few of them struck us as things we'd totally read! So, below, take a look at our top five Hoopes prize winners, based not on scholarly contribution or some such thing, but on ability to capture our fleeting attention.

1) "More Dead Than Dead: Perceived Mind of the Persistent Vegetative State"

We don't know what this means. But it sounds way deep!

2) "Defining Herpes: Pharmaceuticals, Physicians, and Patients in the Post-Antiviral Era"

We, uh, know what this means. We'd define it as socially stigmatizing. It's a long story...

3) "The Great Wall of Bacteria: Discovery of Intrisic Glycan Chain Length Biases in Penicillin Binding Proteins"

This was our winner until we got past the colon. All downhill from there.

4) "The Anatomy of the Iron Fist: Police Violence in Democratic Latin America"

Simply baller. The first part actually sounds like a Jackie Chan movie. And if anyone could have pulled down a Hoopes, it's Jackie Chan.

5) "My Empty Top Hat: A Memoir"

We have a hat fetish. Seriously.