
People express surprise that there are medals beyond bronze, but of course there are. In addition to the aforementioned bauxite, potash, and mercury, there's zinc, asbestos, and cubic zirconia. Hemingway used to lie in bed with his asbestos medal on his chest and use it as an ash tray, until the day he missed and set fire to his chest hair, which Gertrude Stein found hilarious. (The chest hair; not necessarily the fact that Hemingway set fire to it.) The lead medal, for tenth place, was discontinued in 1922 when a broad-shouldered judge casually tossed one around James Joyce's neck and Joyce fell forward down three flights of stairs. This not only marked the end of the lead medal, but also of the dais upon which awards are presented being any more than two feet high. Joyce claimed the fall did him no harm, but the next thing he wrote was Finnegans Wake.