Awards You Don't Want to Receive Quiz

Answer: Turnip Prize

The Turner Prize is given for the year's best piece of modern art. The Turnip Prize, however, is given for a best deliberate attempt at bad art. The prize itself is mold of a turnip nailed to a block of wood. Previous winners include "Nothing" (literally nothing visible), "Birds Flew" (an empty nest with Flu medicine), and "Pole Dark" (a pole painted black).

As you see, bad puns in the title of the work merit extra consideration.

Answer: Wooden Spoon

The wooden spoon, as a mock award, is said to have originated at Cambridge University and was given to the person with the lowest passing score in a math examination. The lowest score of those receiving second class honors was the silver spoon. The golden spoon was received by the person with the lowest score of those receiving first class honors.

In some sports leagues, notably in Australia, the wooden spoon is given to the team with the worst record. Tennis has an interesting variant, sometimes called the "anti-slam". If one works backwards from loser of the championship round and takes the loser in each match in that bracket, the loser of the first round gets the wooden spoon. That is, each winning player in that list lost the next round.

Answer: Golden Fleece

William Proxmire, a curmudgeonly senator from the state of Wisconsin, named a monthly winner of the Golden Fleece Award for wasteful or frivolous spending by the U. S. Government. He gave the award from 1975 until he retired in 1988. Some of the nominations were for research projects and studies that he didn't think were worthwhile, and some nominees were quite irate.

In fact, Proxmire was sued by one and settled out of court.

Answer: Golden Raspberry

The Golden Raspberry (or "Razzie") Awards are given out the day before the Oscars in the main categories of the Academy Awards. The award is a golf ball size raspberry on top of a Super 8 film reel, both spray painted gold. The award was started by a UCLA film class, but is now awarded by the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation.

In many cases actors and films have been nominated for both a Razzie and an Oscar, and the movie "Wall Street" won both awards the same year.

Answer: Ig Nobel Prize

The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded in several scientific areas by the magazine "Annals of Improbable Research". The intent is to identify areas of research that one can laugh about and are not "bad" research. The awards are given at Harvard University to the recipients by Nobel prize laureates.

Some previous winners discussed the utilization of SPAM (meat product), a mathematical survey of Alabama counties to identify the percentage of people doomed to go to hell if they don't repent, a study showing pigeons could be trained to differentiate between paintings by Picasso and Monet, and a poster of the anatomy of penises throughout the animal kingdom.

Sir Andre Greim holds the distinction winning both an Ig Noble Prize ("Levitation of Frogs by Magnetism") and a Nobel prize for research on graphene. The Ig Nobels are given for unusual or seemingly trivial research, but generally the research is sound and may prove valuable. In 2006 one award was given for showing that certain mosquitoes could not differentiate between human feet and Limburger cheese (how embarrassing). After a period of chuckling, a successful mosquito abatement program in Africa used Limburger cheese as bait.

Answer: Lanterne Rouge (Red Lantern)

The Lanterne Rouge is awarded to the last place finisher in the grueling Tour de France. The name of the trophy derives from the custom of placing red lights on the last car of the train. The French railway workers would check that the lights were still present and that part of the train had not been decoupled.

The TDF consists of 21 days of racing (stages), and cyclists must complete each stage within a certain time after the winner to be allowed to continue. The cyclists are ranked by their cumulative time. The riders with the slowest times usually are support riders (domestiques), those battling injuries, or sprint specialists who lag on the mountain stages.

Riders winning this award have received positive publicity and sometimes bonuses from their team sponsors. So steps have been taken to try to keep the "competition" honest.

For a short time, the Giro d'Italia race had a similar award called the Maglia Nera (Black jersey).

Answer: Mr Irrelevant

Every year the National Football League selects players from the college ranks to join their team. The draft consists of 7 rounds of selections by the 32 teams, nominally in reverse order of their finish the previous year. The last player selected has been called Mr. Irrelevant since 1967, when a California businessman Paul Salata treated that player to a week in Newport Beach and other benefits. (It's now run by his daughter). The player is given the "Lowsman Trophy", a takeoff on the Heisman Trophy awarded to the best player in college football.

The trophy itself resembles the Heisman statue, except it shows the player fumbling the ball.

Answer: Bent Spoon

The bent spoon is awarded by the Australian Skeptics for paranormal or pseudo-scientific fraud. The trophy is a piece of gopher wood, supposedly from Noah's Ark, connected with a spoon attached on top, which supposedly was used at the Last Supper. Past winners include promotion of homeopathic vaccinations, the Paleo Diet, and water divining.

The name of the award references bending of spoons by supposed psychics.

Answer: Bulwer-Lytton Award

George Bulwer-Lytton was an English author known for his ornate writing style, often referred to as purple prose. One of most famous opening sentences was "It was a dark and stormy night ...".

The San Jose State University English department offered an award for a worst sentence that could be used as the opening sentence of a novel. The award had been expanded to include a number of different genres of literature.

Answer: Carbuncle Cup

The Carbuncle Cup takes its name from a famous statement by Prince Charles, a critic of modern architecture. He called a proposed expansion of the National Gallery as "a monstrous carbuncle on a much-loved and elegant friend". The award is given by "Building Design" magazine for the ugliest building completed in the U.K. during the previous twelve months.

Answer: Darwin Award

Darwin noted that species prosper by survival (and propagation) by the fittest. The Darwin award is given to people who "have removed themselves from the human gene pool by foolish actions on their part" that lead to death or self-sterilization. Typical winners are a man who sought to relieve his constipation by inserting an eel in his recturm or the man who avoided bee stings by covering his face in a plastic bag, both incidents leading to death

The award was first given by a small internet group in 1985, and a website devoted to the Darwin awards has arisen. The leader of this website, Wendy Northcutt, has written a number of books about the phenomenon.

In fairness this is a somewhat macabre award, and we should remember that living people have been affected by these events.

Answer: Mr Blackwell List

Richard Blackwell, a noted fashion designer and fashion critic, published a list of the "Ten Worst Dressed Women" in January from 1960 until his death in 2008. Blackwell's firm, the House of Blackwell, designed clothes for many of the prominent Hollywood starts and for Nancy Reagan, when she was First Lady of California. Blackwell's lists not only mentioned famous women, but included acerbic comments about their styles or bodies.

Answer: Pokey Award

Slow bus service in New York City led to the Strap Hangers Union, whose purpose in life is to point out abysmal bus service. The Pokey is awarded to the bus line with the slowest average speed. One recent winner averaged 3.1 miles per hour, which is slower than a turtle's average speed of 4 MPH.

The group has a second award, called the Schleppie, for the bus line with the most unreliable schedule. Most bus lines in the city seem to merit serious consideration for this award with consecutive buses very close together, followed by an extra long gap before the next bus on the route.

Answer: Ernie (also Warney plus other) Awards

Hopefully you solved this obscure award by process of elimination or you recognized the reference to Shane Warne, a bad boy of Australian cricket. The Ernie is named after an Australian union leader Ernie Ecob well known for his negative attitude towards women. The initial award has been expanded to include sports figures (the Warney), clerical or culinary (the Fred), unfavorable comments by other women (the Elaine), and a special award for repeat offenders (the Clinton). Now there even is a Good Ernie award for good actions.

The awards are voted on by a group of 300 women who have been chosen from those who applied for a seat at the award selection dinner. The winners are selected by the nominees who receive the loudest boos.

Answer: Academie de la Carpette Award

This award, which can be loosely translated as the English Doormat Academy, is given in France to politicians and authorities who promote the use of English over French. Awards since 1999 include publishing untranslated articles from the New York Times by Le Monde, FrenchTelecom for printing English descriptions in the phone directory, and the Socialist party for using slogans in English.

The ultimate no-no was for the President of Rwanda for replacing French with English as the official language of the countries and dropping out of Organization of French Speaking Countries to join the Commonwealth.