A serious guilt trip resulted in the Nobel Peace Prize?!

BANTER BITE BACKSTORY: You’d think Red, a straight-A student and lover of history, would know all about Nobel Prize Day, but it’s Black that points out the irony that a “peace” prize was created by someone who made his fortune due to war.

If you’re anything like Red, when you hear “Nobel Prize,” you may only think about the Nobel Peace Prize since that’s the “biggie” (as Red would say). After all, it gets the most attention, and each year people try to guess who the winner will be. Although Red admits that until recently, she didn’t know there were six different Nobel Prizes (besides Peace, the categories are Chemistry, Physics, Literature, Physiology or Medicine, and Economics, and here’s a list of this year’s winners) or many of the other details,

OK, I now know that the winners are announced in October, but the award ceremony isn’t held until December 10. And I’d never expect it to be like the Academy Awards, where the nominees anxiously await, with cameras focused on them, for the winners to be announced. But I do find it strange that the Peace Prize ceremony is in Norway, while the other five are presented in Sweden.

Logistics aside, Black’s fascinated that the prizes were established by Alfred Nobel's will to acknowledge "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind,” as she knows that leaves much up for interpretation. And it may explain why there have been some controversial winners. But, then again, even the will was controversial,

The creation of the awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, seemed to have been to offset Nobel’s vast wealth – earned from being a merchant of war as he was the inventor of dynamite and made other munitions and explosives. Talk about a powerful way to be remembered.