Where the second best is the bestest!
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.
01/28/2018
Updated 10/08/2018
Last May, SM did a blog post on a team of mountain climbers from Poland who were going to attempt a winter ascent on K2, little did anyone know that those same climbers would end up being heroes. A multi-national climbing party was attempting to summit Nanga Parbat, the second-highest peak in Pakistan at 26,660ft (8,125m), and the ninth-highest mountain…read more
01/25/2018
Updated 10/08/2018
A celestial event will occur in February 2018. The event may not be as exciting as say, an eclipse, or a comet, or a good meteor shower. In fact, it’s not even an event per se, but more an oddity of the calendar. For ease of language we’ll just call it an “event”. So the event about which I am…read more
01/20/2018
Updated 09/19/2022
After the fifth installment of the James Bond movie series You Only Live Twice hit the theaters, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, the producers of the lucrative franchise, had a problem. Their Bond didn’t want to be Bond anymore. Indeed after spying, killing, and sexing his way through five James Bond movies, Scottish actor Sean Connery was ready to…read more
01/20/2018
Updated 08/05/2020
Dick Sargent is one of those actors who had roles in almost every major network TV show over the course of his career, which lasted just under 40 years from the 1950s to the 1990s. His resume included appearances or starring roles on Dr. Kildare, Gunsmoke, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Hazel, Wagon Train, The…read more
01/09/2018
Updated 09/20/2022
I’ve probably been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art about 60 or 70 times over the years, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every gallery there, but I haven’t always given pieces the proper attention they deserve. Then again, how could I? There are millions of pieces from all over the world and from all different time periods, nine times…read more
12/05/2017
Updated 10/13/2018
There are many dozens of programming languages that exist in the tech universe today. In no particular order, Assembly, BASIC, C, C++, C#, Fortran, Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, PHP, SQL, Delphi, Visual Basic, Lua, Lisp, Go, Objective-C, Swift, ColdFusion, R, Actionscript, COBOL, Erlang, ABC, Haskell, ASP, A, B, D, E, F, F#, F*, G, Pascal, Tcl, YAML, SALSA are some of…read more
11/19/2017
Updated 10/08/2018
History was made on November 13, 2017, when a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, sold for $450.3 million at auction to an unknown buyer, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction1. Dating from around 1500, the oil on walnut panel painting depicts Jesus Christ against a dark background holding a very unrealistic glass orb. Despite…read more
11/14/2017
Updated 09/06/2022
When Pac-Man came out in 1980, it was big. I mean really big. Like “stand in a 10-person line to play for just a few minutes” big. For the price of 25¢, you could guide Pac-Man — a little, binge-eating, yellow, three-quarter circle — through a maze loaded with tasty little white pellets while being chased by four colorful little ghosts…read more
11/11/2017
Updated 11/11/2018
The armistice1 that ended the fighting in World War I was signed by representatives from Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, at 5AM on 11/11/1918, in a railroad carriage in Compiègne, France, but the agreement didn’t go into effect for another six hours. WWI would end at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, which was fine for those who…read more