WHERE DID THEY COME FROM, ANYWAY? Born in September 1957, one of
the icons of the American landscape, the pink plastic flamingo,
is over 50 years old! But where did it come from? Would you
believe a very serious sculptor and classical art student who
needed a job? Although you might believe the plastic flamingo
was a figment of the unemployed mind, quite the opposite is
true; it was actually a New England plastics company's idea!
(stuffy New England? Yes, New England.) Don Featherstone,
flamingo father, was hired to sculpt three-dimensional versions
of the plastics company's two most popular two-dimensional
products: the duck and the flamingo. While he obtained a live
duck to model for him (no, we don't know how he did that
either), he used pictures and National Geographic magazine to
sculpt his now famous flamingos. Mr. Featherstone is the winner
of a 1996 Ig Noble Prize for Art. [Each year, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, the editors of the Annals of Irreproducible
Results present their Ig Noble Awards, in a p