It’s Not the Nobel Prize, But…

Awards, we are told, exist to recognize excellence. This is a comforting idea, like believing the best wine always comes from the most expensive bottle, or that the applause at an awards ceremony is spontaneous rather than inspired by a flashing “applause” sign. Somewhere along the way, a small golden object - or ribbon, or plaque, or framed certificate - became shorthand for winning, or at least the appearance of it. It didn’t matter what was being honored. What mattered was that it could be framed, cited, and, ideally, capitalized.

The Nobel Peace Prize occupies a particularly rarefied shelf in this trophy cabinet of human aspiration. It is meant to signal gravitas, restraint, and a certain monkish distance from self-promotion. Which may explain why it has occasionally attracted the sort of attention usually reserved for luxury watches and resort, beachfront property. Recently, that attention arrived in the form of loudly enthusiastic public longing – a whinning insistence, really - that the prize had somehow been misplaced and might yet be rerouted to a more… appreciative recipient.

The Nobel Committee, in a moment of reassuring bureaucratic clarity, felt compelled to explain that the current laureate could not simply hand the prize over to someone else, no matter how loudly or frequently the request was made. There would be no ceremonial passing of the torch, no handshake, no engraved envelope slid discreetly across the table. Rules, it turns out, still exist - at least in Scandinavia - and they apply even when ambition is delivered with head-splitting confidence.

All of which raises an uncomfortable but entertaining question: if prestige is so easily desired, so awkwardly requested, and so frequently misunderstood, what exactly are awards for? The answer, as it happens, lies not only in the solemn halls of Oslo but also in a far more entertaining ecosystem of trophies, titles, and honors that celebrate failure, absurdity, and human enthusiasm in its most unfiltered form. From here, we turn our attention to those awards - real ones, formally bestowed - that understand something the rest may have forgotten: sometimes the joke is the point.

The Stella Awards - Because personal responsibility is optional.

The Stella Awards were created in the early 2000s as a kind of civic service announcement - an annual reminder that the American legal system is both a marvel of due process and a lightly supervised improv exercise. Named after Stella Liebeck, the New Mexico woman who famously sued McDonald’s after being severely burned by hot coffee, the awards were intended to spotlight what their creators saw as frivolous, excessive, or opportunistic lawsuits. Never mind that Liebeck’s actual case was far more serious and less absurd than the punchline history remembers; nuance, as ever, was not invited to the ceremony.

One frequently cited “winner” involved a burglar who sued a homeowner after injuring himself while breaking into the house - arguing, with a straight face and supporting paperwork, that the environment was insufficiently safe for criminal activity. Whether apocryphal or real (and the Stella Awards often blurred that line), the point was never strict accuracy but cultural catharsis. The awards functioned as folklore with a filing deadline: stories we’d tell ourselves to feel reassured that somewhere, someone else has taken things just a bit too far - and has been officially recognized for it.

Bad Sex in Fiction Award - Proof that not everything needs to be described.

Established in 1993 by the British magazine Literary Review, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award was created to draw attention to the author who produces the worst description of a sex scene in a serious novel. The award’s mission is not prudishness but restraint - to gently shame otherwise serious novelists who interrupt their narratives with sex scenes so anatomically ambitious or metaphorically unhinged that the reader briefly considers taking up gardening instead.

Past recipients include Jonathan Littell for his novel “The Kindly Ones”. The judges - who called the book "in part, a work of a genius" - highlighted a passage likening orgasm to the scraping out of a hard-boiled egg by a spoon and another in which Aue likens a vagina to "a Gorgon's head ... a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks". The award does not claim these writers lack talent - only that, in this particular arena, talent has wandered off without supervision. It is less a punishment than a public service: a reminder that suggestion is often sexier, and that silence, too, can be an artistic choice.

Foot in Mouth Award - Because the tongue rarely checks in with the brain.

The Foot in Mouth Award is bestowed annually by the British Plain English Campaign to honor individuals for “a baffling comment by a public figure”. Established in 1993, the award was created to promote clarity and accountability in public communication - an objective it achieves by spotlighting statements by people in positions of influence so spectacularly stupid that they require one to stop and say “huh?”

Notable winners of the Foot in Mouth Award include Donald Trump, Gordon Brown, Richard Gere, and Naomi Campbell. In 2008 former US President George W. Bush received a Lifetime Achievement Award for “his services to gobbledygook”. The award’s genius lies in its restraint; it doesn’t editorialize, contextualize, or soften the blow. It simply quotes the speaker verbatim and steps aside, trusting the words to do what they were always going to do.

This is evidenced by 2003 award winner, former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s following comment during a press conference: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” 

Stinky Shoe Award - Where childhood meets advanced decay.

What began in 1975 as a modest retail promotion - designed, quite innocently, to move athletic footwear off the shelves - eventually evolved into something far more ambitious. By 1988, with Odor-Eaters assuming sponsorship, the Sneaker Contest had unlaced its commercial modesty and embraced its destiny: a national proving ground for the most aggressively neglected footwear in America. Today, it stands as a solemn reminder that children aged 5 to 15 are capable of olfactory feats most adults would consider the weaponization of footware.

Sneakers are judged with surprising rigor. Soles, tongues, heels, toes, laces or Velcro, eyelets, and overall condition are carefully examined, but odor remains the final arbiter - the invisible hand that separates the merely worn from the truly legendary. Professional judges have included NASA "Master Sniffer" George Aldrich, Chemical Specialist for NASA space missions, Rachel Herz, Ph.D., an expert and author on the psychology of smell. The winner, whose sneakers will be enshrined in the Odor-Eaters “Hall of Fumes”, receives $2,500, national recognition, and the quiet understanding that no amount of money can fully explain what happened inside those shoes.

Big Brother Award - Congratulations. We’ve been watching.

The Big Brother Awards were established in 1999 by the privacy advocacy group Privacy International to honor governments, corporations, and individuals who have done the most to erode personal privacy - often while insisting they were doing the exact opposite. Named, with only minimal subtlety, after George Orwell’s ever-present overseer, the awards exist to puncture the comforting narrative that surveillance is benign, temporary, or in our own best interest. Award categories include Greatest Corporate Invader, Lifetime Menace, Most Invasive Program and Worst Public Official.

Past recipients have included intelligence agencies, tech companies, and public officials whose policies or products made “opting out” feel increasingly theoretical. Winners are typically recognized for mass data collection, opaque algorithms, or the quiet normalization of constant monitoring, all delivered under banners reading security, efficiency, or user experience. Google, for example, received an award for tracking location on Android devices even when users thought services were turned off, while the UK Home Office was cited for mass CCTV monitoring and ID card proposals that blurred the line between security and surveillance. The Big Brother Awards document how routine privacy violations have become. In doing so, they offer a rare kind of recognition - one that doesn’t ask us to applaud, only to notice, preferably before the terms and conditions change again.

Bent Spoon Award - For science that prefers belief to evidence.

The Bent Spoon Award was created by the Australian Skeptics as an annual recognition of the most egregious examples of paranormal or pseudoscientific nonsense presented as fact. Named after the famously flexible cutlery associated with self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller, the award exists to spotlight those who promote extraordinary claims without the burden of extraordinary evidence. As the founders of the Australian Skeptics put it, the award is presented to “the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudo-scientific piffle”.

Recipients have included media personalities, alternative health advocates, and institutions willing to trade rigor for ratings or revenue. Winners are typically cited for endorsing psychic powers, miracle cures, or conspiracy-laced explanations that collapse under even casual scrutiny. Previous winners have included Fran Sheffield of Homeopathy Plus! who recommended the use of simply sugar water for deadly, life-threatening diseases and chef Pete Evans for his diet promotions, campaigns against fluoridation and support of anti-vaccinationists. The Bent Spoon Award is not aimed at curiosity or imagination, but at confidence, the kind that flourishes in the absence of verification, quietly reminding the rest of us that skepticism is not cynicism - it is housekeeping for the mind.

Golden Fleece Award - Where government spending earns its own punchline.

The Golden Fleece Award was created in 1975 by U.S. Senator William Proxmire to call out government programs that, in his words, wasted taxpayers’ money on projects so absurd, unnecessary, or badly conceived that they deserved national attention. Unlike most awards, the Golden Fleece was serious in intent but sly in presentation: each citation combined numbers, context, and a dose of public embarrassment, making the point that oversight is not just a matter of principle - it can also be funny.

Past winners ranged from studies of duck genitalia to the purchase by the US Military of a $400 hammer, to federal grants for researching the mating habits of sea slugs. One particularly infamous recipient was a NASA project that spent tens of thousands of dollars to develop a pen that could write in space - while, as legend has it, a pencil would have sufficed. The award did not mock scientific or bureaucratic endeavor itself, only poor judgment applied to public resources. Recipients were reminded, subtly and publicly, that in the world of public spending, absurdity may be impressive, but it comes with consequences.

Darwin Awards - Honoring natural selection, in extremis. 

The Darwin Awards were created in 1985 to recognize individuals who "ensure the long-term survival of the human race by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion." The tongue-in-cheek accolade celebrates those whose misjudgments, risk-taking, or sheer lack of foresight result in permanent self-elimination, leaving the rest of us marginally safer, marginally wiser, and marginally more incredulous. The award’s ethos is simple: evolutionary progress sometimes requires an exclamation point.

Past winners include a man who attempted to rob a gun store using a cucumber as a firearm, another who tried to jump from one skyscraper to another with homemade wings fashioned from garbage bags and tape, and another who tried to illuminate the barrel of a loaded muzzleloader gun using a cigarette lighter. While the Darwin Awards are presented posthumously, they are also a form of moral and biological theater - one-part cautionary tale, one-part incredulous laughter. They do not glorify recklessness so much as memorialize it, a reminder that in nature’s ledger, some mistakes are permanent, and some are unforgettable.

It's Not the Nobel Peace Prize, But…..

Awards matter because they do something very simple: they make the invisible visible. They shine a light on human ambition, folly, and occasionally brilliance - or, in the case of most of the ones we’ve explored, pure unfiltered absurdity. They remind us that recognition isn’t always about virtue, or even talent; sometimes it’s about timing, audacity, and the willingness to step onto a stage no one else would dare. In a world obsessed with prestige, these oddball trophies act as a counterbalance: proof that achievement is not a one-size-fits-all enterprise, and that failure, spectacle, and bad judgment are themselves worthy of attention.

Which brings us back to the elephant - or, rather, the very loud figure - in the room that inspired this week’s post in the first place. The same person who insists that some accolades are simply “misplaced” can himself qualify for several of the awards we’ve just toured. The Bent Spoon, for example, might be awarded for publicly recommending bleach as a potential Covid remedy, a masterclass in confidence untempered by sanity. The Golden Fleece Award could be given for his new White House ballroom, a costly monument to ambition that somehow manages to eclipse even the government’s imagination. And while his Stella Awards’ list of potential entries is long enough to fill a new ballroom, the sheer volume begins to look less like coincidence and more like a business model.

Even the Bad Sex in Fiction Award once received reader nominations on his behalf, thanks to the infamous leaked “locker room” comments - but the judges politely declined; the law of literary physics requires that the work be fiction, sadly it was reality. His own non-fiction books, How to Get Rich and Think Big and Kick Ass, contain passages where he brags about romantic exploits (claiming, for example, that all the women on The Apprentice flirted with him). Not quite erotic fiction, but certainly verbose in ways that might make a reader blush - or at least roll their eyes. Other awards could be imagined, too: the Foot in Mouth for countless statements delivered with spectacular confidence but minimal comprehension; the Stinky Shoe for the metaphorical stink left in the room after certain press events; and the Big Brother for a career spent normalizing surveillance, if only on social media feeds.

In the end, these awards function less as jokes than as pressure valves. They strip away the varnish, the speeches, the velvet ropes, and leave us with something closer to the truth: people are messy, power is sloppy, and confidence is rarely matched by competence. They remind us that prestige is often costume jewelry, that ambition, left unchecked, curdles easily, and that public life has always been equal parts theater and accident. We laugh not because it’s harmless, but because it’s familiar. Then, when the applause has gone, we push away from the table and step back into the world a little more alert, a little less impressed, and far less likely to confuse volume with virtue.