British playwright Harold Pinter sent a videotaped diatribe of his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Yeah, right.

Oh, this was a good one. This is classic Phil Hendrie material. Take something that's emotional (attacking the United States) and stir in absurd and baseless then just keep rambling until somebody finally figures it out.

The key to the cipher was right in the first sentence of the 'acceptance speech': "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false . . ."

Then the character goes on to assert that "I believe that these assertions still make sense . . ."

Sense? In what universe does that make any sense at all?

I hope that you, like me, missed those first clues so that you could get the full flavor of the entertainment by reading the entire speech.

You're reading along and get into the cheap US bashing and you start getting really mad. It's all part of the ride. You're thinking here's a guy who's bashing the very system that would allow a loser like him to be somebody (although in the back of your mind the stifled alarms are warning you that you've never heard of the guy). You're thinking that beyond being a hypocrite, he's a fool to stand on top of his tree house and advocate burning down the forest.

Then you begin thinking, you know, for somebody who's supposed to be a writer he sure does ramble pointlessly without structure. About the time he started blathering on with the really bad poetry you had to be cluing in. Literature? This? Something's fishy here.

Then you go back and re-read the first couple of lines and smack your forehead and then shake your finger and say "Phil Hendrie . . . yooooou!" and then laugh and laugh.

Almost got you, didn't he?

For a second you almost thought that the Nobel Prize would be awarded to some complete idiot that made no contributions to the field.

Never going to happen. That would make about as much sense as giving a Nobel peace prize to Jimmy Carter or some such nonsense.