Usually, one of the last things announced in the run-up to the Olympics is the design of the medals.  The only thing guaranteed is that the medals will be made of gold, silver, and bronze.  Other than that, every location will have a different design of medal.  No two locations have medals that are exactly alike, and in the case of Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics, no two medals will be exactly alike.

Among the many other odd features, the scenes depicted on the 615 Winter Olympic and 399 Paralympic medals will be individual parts of a larger story.  If you could put them together, you’d get a giant pair of images.  That’s pretty cool; what’s not cool is the fact that the medals are all weirdly undulating.  They look as if someone messed up the casting of the medals, but they decided to use them anyway in spite of the warping!

You work all your life to become the best ski jumper (or whatever) and drop a fortune on training, costumes, and equipment.  When you finally ascend to the greatest heights your sport has to offer, they give you a crooked, goofy-looking medal.   Not only do you have to spend the rest of your life explaining that you won a gold medal for ice dancing, you also have to explain that your medal is supposed to look like that!

Tags: Olympics, Winter Olympics, Vancouver 2010, gold medals, unusual awards, medals, sports, Omer Arbel, Paralympic Games, Olympic Games, odd designs

Margaret O’Callaghan had a need for a new type of kitchen utensil.  The round-bottomed ladle and the spatula are just not good enough when you’re dealing with things like crock pots and serving dishes.  That’s why she invented the scrudle, a combination ladle and spatula designed to scrape the deliciousness from any sort of cooking […]

Every day, Tom Baker deals with the issue of traffic.  Given Southern California’s massive concentration of cars, it’s no wonder that Baker would get frustrated dealing with the daily traffic routine.  That inspiration resulted in these great images of Los Angeles without the cars.   Here’s the full image gallery, and it’s awesome.
I love the […]

Have you ever wondered where salt comes from?  I mean, salt is in everything from fertilizers (potassium chloride) to the dinner table (sodium chloride), but where does it actually come from?  Why, salt mines, of course!  They’re not just for horrible industrial accidents or mad scientist lairs anymore.  English Russia has a great look inside […]

For some reason, the kids these days love the Twilight saga.  Believe me, it pains me to call it the Twilight saga, because to me a saga is a great, sweeping work of masterful literature, not a teenage vampire romance novel.  Either way, the latest movie based on the Twilight books, New Moon (officially The […]

People worry about all kinds of crises as the world ends, but as the movie Zombieland taught us, sometimes it’s our snack foods that are most important to our happiness.  For Tallahassee, it was his beloved Hostess Twinkies.  If your favorite food is the humble Eggo waffle from General Mills, then you’d best head to […]

I love goofy little websites like this.  From the Wal-Martians to quality engineering, I love a nice, odd corner of the Internet to investigate.  If it’s something that can result in some comedy thanks to random word generation, even better.   That’s why when Mysterio offered to predict my holiday gifts, I jumped at the […]

Linguist d’Armond Speers is an odd bird.  How else could you explain someone that taught his son Klingon as his first language? For the first three years of his son’s life, Speers spoke to his son only in the fictional alien language Klingon from the Star Trek universe.  His reasoning?  It was an experiment to […]