Regular readers know how much we revel in Jewish achievement, praising even the smallest accolades. And if a Jew wins a Nobel Prize? Bring out the fanfare.

But Arno Allan Penzias? Not so much.

Arno and his goyishe cohort Robert Woodrow Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 for discovering cosmic microwave background radiation. CMB, as it's also called, proved that Big Bang existed. Sounds terrific and important, no?

Well, sure, but not the way Penzias and Wilson discovered it. They were playing around with an antenna, pointing it at various things in space. The antenna picked up a strange signal, which the duo thought was noise from New York City. It wasn't. Their next thought was that it was pigeon shit. Yes, really. So they cleaned all the feces from the antenna, and then shot all the nearby pigeons. Yes, really!

Once the poor defenseless (delicious?) birds were disposed of, the signal still remained. So the duo published a paper about it. Soon after, physicist Robert Dicke, whose device made it possible for the antenna to detect the signal in the first place, identified it as CMB. Penzias and Wilson got the Nobel; Dicke got dicked.

On the other hand, it's not like Dicke was Jewish... Hooray for Arno Penzias!?