May 7, 2012: "Party Animal"

Author:
J. Kiernan

Concept:
Our 1st time guest author succinctly (and memorably, in our view) highlighted what we believe is the most compelling feature of this neat medal, namely the enormous bear on the obverse having lunch and a drinking a beer from a big stein.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
There were a whole bunch of possible options this week, including "It bears noting that this medal was designed by Bela Lyon Pratt." As you may know, Mr. Pratt was also the designer of the US $2.5 and $5 Indian gold coins, but ultimately we decided that while interesting and historically accurate, this approach might be seen as too dry by CW readers.

So we then went for the muuuuuch lighter "We long for the days when you could win a medal for drinking a beer."

But that seemed like it was going too far in the other direction, so we stepped back to the slightly tamer version in our final ad.