But Achilleus
held the people there, and made them sit down in a wide assembly,
and brought prizes for games out of his ships, cauldrons and tripods,
and horses and mules and the powerful high heads of cattle
and fair-girdled women and grey iron. First of all
he set forth the glorious prizes for speed of foot for the horsemen;
a woman faultless in the work of her hands to lead away
and a tripod with ears and holding twenty-two measures
for the first prize; and for the second he set forth a six-year-old
unbroken mare who carried a mule foal within her.
Then for the third prize he set forth a splendid unfired
cauldron, which held four measures, with its natural gloss still upon it.
For the fourth place he set out two talents' weight of gold, and for
the fifth place set forth an unfired jar with two handles.
It's the First Annual Montgomery Burns
Award for
Outstanding Achievement in
The Field of
Excellence!
In my department, we have a number of student awards thanks to kind and generous donors, often emeriti or their families. These tend to be overly narrow, as in "best paper in some esoteric area the emeritus loved but no one in the department teaches anymore."
For us, anyway, it was slow steady creep rather than a specific era. But we've finally learned our lesson, and now when a donor wants to set up a student award we work with them to make it possible to actually award it indefinitely with a minimum of work. But we're still spending down the legacy niche award funds, and it's harder each year.
1 is such a bizarre collection of prizes.
First price, a useful slave, which I suppose is nice. And! A tripod! With ears for some reason!
Second prize, a horse. OK cool.
Third prize, a big pot.
Fourth prize, a tiny chunk of gold about the size of a quarter.
Fifth prize, a slightly smaller big pot.
Even Homer was dismissive of fourth and fifth place.
Dismissive of fourth and fifth comments, too.
Second prize is a horse and a baby mule.
I just heard Karina Longworth say that the Academy Awards started off as a labor management strategy by the studio heads to keep the actors happy without having to pay them more.
They also used to kill horses during takes, just to remind the actors that life is cheap.
Omg. I just listened to the first Polly Platt episode and I am riveted.
Don't forget to oil the joints.
We have what I've heard called elsewhere "spot awards" (we have some weird acronym) where coworkers can nominate you for various levels of recognition. Generally helping out with something not your normal job. No committee, just requires approval of the recipient's boss and for higher levels the senior manager. I don't think it's something that would go on a CV though- it's mostly just a cash award, except for the very highest level that's given out annually.
What I don't get in academia is why many organizations want to give awards to people already world renowned. People who win a Nobel keep getting other awards from various places- what's the incentive to the awarding group other than maybe having them come speak? Your award is going to be listed 25th on the recipient's list of achievements and you lose the chance to recognize someone good but more obscure who'd both benefit from it and be more appreciative.
Every year, I get two or three 'you've won' solicitations, for some kind of professional excellence aware or another. They're selling a directory listing and a certificate, basically. I get repeated follow-up emails from each of them. I suppose someone must pay them sometimes.
13 Look at all the awards Ms. Yeoh has gotten for EEAAO. It makes sense, since the criteria are basically the same, and no one wants to stand out by picking Ana de Armas instead. (Although she too acted the shit out of her part.)
I hope the guy who fought with a buttplug got an award. I don't know for what.
15: For the movie with the talking fetus telling her she shouldn't have got an abortion?
People who win a Nobel keep getting other awards from various places- what's the incentive to the awarding group other than maybe having them come speak?
Award-getters are prestigious.
Prestige is transitive, i.e. you can get it by associating more with people who have it, and good to have.
One way to associate with prestigious people is by giving them awards.
Therefore, if we give awards to prestigious people, then we become more prestigious ourselves.
If there's a problem with that logic, I don't see it.
With the caveat that the prestige difference needs to be small enough that they accept the award. If no one shows up to get the prize, you look bad.
At least with the Oscars you're ostensibly giving it for one role. If we gave awards for papers released this year the. You'd get more year-to-year variety.
20. But then they spoil it by giving Samuel L. Jackson an "Honorary Oscar" for lifetime achievement, or, as someone pointed out, to remind us that he's never won a competitive Oscar. Honorary awards strike me as particularly dodgy, and legit awards which can cover a lifetime's achievement, or several decades', or one specific breakthrough like Nobels, seem more realistic.
We have an award at our University, might be the #1 award for faculty. The awardee would give a public talk and then they published a booklet, 30 pages or something, that the faculty member put together, the talk in book form. Came with $1000 check, and a friend who won it said "oh yeah, I call that the 'dollar an hour' award" (because of the time to create this publication). Eventually they stopped putting out booklets and just put the video of the talk on the internet to be ignored. I kinda liked the booklets, as long as I wasn't the one having to write them.
There should be an award for getting bitten in half by a shark.
Samuel Jackson's speech was the best part of the shark movie he was in.
13: Tim's old company used to do spot awards. Follow up to your 2nd question: why give a Nobel to someone twice in the same area, e.g. chemistry.
More generally, j went to one of those managing across the generations thing a few years ago. Allegedly boomers and the generations before like this stuff, including the awards ceremonies and recognition by their peers, whereas Gen X ers don't want to go to extra company events if they aren't compensated, preferring family and personal time.
I don't really but that, but it might be why people thought they were creating all these minor awards.
You say "family" because " I want to drink beer while playing Civ" sounds selfish.
Yeah the highest level of award that's only given once a year includes a dinner with the senior leaders but also a big payout and the joke is the senior VPs are paying you a lot to go out with them.
A team I was on won an award that came with a several hundred dollar prize, but the team was large enough that attempting to split the money amongst us would not have been feasible. It was decided to donate the money back to our employer's endowment, a decision that made me rather annoyed even though I wasn't able to come up with a better idea.
The corporation penis is hard to beat.
Speaking of minor awards, on Reddit I made a stupid joke about a local politician and I someone gave me "100 coins". What does that mean?
It was already growing so quickly I didn't think it was our job to give it a hand.
Back in the day they would give you worthless shreds of bitcoin. Kinda wish I'd held on to those.
Oh, but I did recently recruit 20 or so people to vote for me in our regional free shopper tabloid's annual "best of" awards. I haven't heard the results yet, but I'm hoping to snag the bronze in the politician category.
Just because it doesn't sound like enough for hookers and blow
My old company used to give out awards that were really mostly a transparent attempt to get winners to a) pay huge amounts for tables at the award ceremony b) do business with us and c) tell us non-public information as part of their award pitches. Given the sector we were in, it also left us with some real hostage-to-fortune award decisions in history, like the award for "Most Innovative" that IIRC went to Enron, or the award for "Best Risk Management" that went to Lehman Brothers.
My dad had an award that was "Least Coordinated Skier, 1960." I think it was his favorite.
There was a coach at the gym was coaching there when I started going, in 2013 and he was 20 years old, and then eventually left this past fall. I feel a little bit like I watched him grow up. As a going away present, I ordered him a little Amazon trophy with his name, that said "World's Longest Heebie Coach, 2013-2022". So I guess I do like awards after all.
And then also, I gave my friend N a mug with my photo that said, "I'm one of N's favorite wypipo!" after she had admitted such a thing over text message to me. (I posted about it here.) That's kind of an award, to me!
A day camp I went to made sure they had an award for every kid. I won the "designer check award" because my mom paid the camp tuition with a personalized check that had some kind of image in the background and this was the mid 80s before such things were common. I think this was also a message that I was a brat who wouldn't go in the pool for lessons or listen to my counsellors so there was nothing else for which to praise me. I did not go back to the camp the next summer.
I can't even remember what a wypipo is.
Wow, that's pretty jerky.
I went to a hippy-dippy day camp named Lotus Land that had peacocks roaming around, and so they would give eye feathers as awards. Each little group of 5-6 campers would have a winner each week, as well as by age group and by session, and I'd go there for all three 3-week sessions.
After a year or two it dawned on me that I'd never won an eye feather, and after crunching some numbers that this defied the odds. The family running the camp had a ton of kids whose names all started with J, and they'd give awards to their own kids now and then, too. Eventually I came to loathe the people at that camp.
Although I still love the peacocks. Since they'd randomly shed feathers, you could also just find them now and then, which was the absolute biggest adrenaline rush I'd ever experienced. Also the camp was wildly unstructured and you never had to do anything at any particular time. If you felt like swimming, wander over to the pool. If you felt like arts and crafts, head to the little building made of concrete blocks. I tended to like to wander off through the woods to the blackberry bushes and just spend the day eating blackberries.
(But surely eating all those blackberries deserved an award.)
When C was like 3 or so, I was looking for a way to keep him occupied, so we planted raspberry bushes on the hill behind our house. It turns out that raspberry bushes are both spiny and very spreading and shouldn't be planted in a narrow space.
I have a bunch of relatives with PhDs and want to order a bunch of "World's Best Dr.LastName" mugs. Everyone would get a kick out of it but I am a slacker.
45
You went to a camp run by the Duggars?
ha. I think they were Jewish, actually.
40: ours bought Aviation Week, so as a result we came into possession of a honest to goodness SWORD that the mag had been in the habit of presenting to whoever it thought had done the most for "Anglo-American aviation" that year. It has past winners engraved on it - some completely obscure ones and a couple of very famous ones, like Whitney Straight and Hap Arnold. It just turned up lying around a boardroom in our old offices*, I pretty much tripped over it going to get coffee during a meeting. We've since moved once and then given up one of the buildings we moved into, so I was really quite pleased to spot it propped up in somebody's office the other day.
*In its case, but still. it's a fucking sword!
Apparently, if one went to NRA meetings, there were door prizes and awards (which are guns) galore. I think the financial troubles might have stopped that, but I don't know anyone who goes to the meetings now.
This reminds me, I'm on my college awards committee* and have to write the commendations today for two of our award winners. Departments nominate faculty for six different awards, and reading the nomination packets (usually 20-60 pages each) makes me feel some combination of completely unproductive/loser and clearly better at doing just enough to get by than many of my colleagues.
*Entirely different from the university awards. I'm active in college governance but to stay away from university governance unless we're meeting with outside accreditors, in which case I typical have A LOT to say...