Where we have many seconds to spare!
Where there's a first, there MUST be a second!
Welcome to SilverMedals.net — The internet's premier blog and reference site celebrating the second greatest achievements, second-best records, and the almost extremes of the world we live in!
Items marked as Second Thoughts are short blog entries. Those marked as Feature Articles are informative, long-form, heavily researched pieces. Please also have a look at the SilverMedals.net Referencepedia for some quick facts of seconds.
11/01/2017
Updated 10/08/2018
The quarterback-heavy New England Patriots the other day traded their backup (or second-string) quarterback to the quarterback-needy San Francisco 49ers for a pick in the second round of the 2018 NFL draft. Reasons for the trade are beyond the scope of this particular post, however, the trade of a valuable player who came into professional football as a second-round pick…read more
10/26/2017
Updated 09/24/2022
The National Archives today are due to release somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 never-before-seen documents along with the full versions of at least 30,000 other redacted documents that had previously been released all pertaining to the November 22, 1963, assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. As new findings emerge from these documents, I thought it would be a good…read more
10/25/2017
Updated 12/27/2018
A recent report issued by Arton Capital, a global financial advisory firm, shows that Germany owns the second most powerful passport in the world. You can see for yourself by having a look at the Passport Index. This updated index was covered by several major news publications including Business Insider, CNN, and the Telegraph, except they weren’t focusing on the second most…read more
10/24/2017
Updated 09/10/2022
Sputnik 1 was successfully launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, becoming the first artificial object to reach Earth orbit. Having been launched during the Cold War era, this tiny, beeping, ball-shaped satellite caused great concern among many paranoid red-scared Americans for whom the event was not so much a great moment of scientific achievement, but rather a disconcerting development…read more
10/19/2017
Updated 10/08/2018
Editor’s note: Please don’t be a moron. Under no circumstances should anything written in this post be considered medical advice or be used for diagnostic purposes. Doctors do that stuff. I’m not a doctor and I don’t pretend to be. SilverMedals.net is not a refereed journal by any stretch. At some point in all our lives we experience a first-degree burn….read more
10/11/2017
Updated 09/24/2022
You’d think that if finding out the first person to do something was relatively easy, then finding the second person to do something would be just as easy, right? SilverMedals finds that this is not the case in many cases, and annoyingly so. For instance who was the second person to circumnavigate the globe? Most of us American kids learned…read more
10/05/2017
Updated 10/08/2018
A little over a week ago, the Lesedi La Rona diamond, the second-biggest gem-quality* diamond ever found, sold for a whopping $53 million. Well, whopping is a relative term here, just a few years prior the diamond had failed to sell at auction when nobody was willing to meet the opening bid price, which Sotheby’s had set at $70 million. At 1,109-carats (about…read more
10/03/2017
Updated 10/08/2018
With the passing of the great American rock musician Tom Petty, SilverMedals.net would like to highlight his second-best-selling track, “Free Fallin”, which was included on the excellent album Full Moon Fever. The album was Petty’s first solo album (without the Heartbreakers, although Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell appeared frequently on the album) and included many great tracks in addition to “Free Fallin” such as…read more
09/28/2017
Updated 10/03/2019
(Editor’s Note: Kim Shattuck died on October 2, 2019. You can read more about her unfortunate passing here.) When the Pixies1 reunited in 2004, it was a huge prayer answered for many devoted fans. Having previously been disbanded in 1992 by frontman Black Francis, a.k.a. Frank Black—real name Charles Thompson (which is what we’ll call him for the rest of…read more