THE FOURSCORE CAMPAIGN

Here's something that's been taking up braincycles, off and on, for a while:

The military has medals and ribbons. The various Scouts have merit badges. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a group somewhere in charge of handing out medals just for life itself?

From my cursory examination of various sources,* medals, ribbons, and badges seem to fall into two categories: "I am exceptionally good at X" and "I was at Y/I am in organization Z." Let's work with this.

How about medals for things like

- Being a parent
- Being a single parent
- Being a dog owner
- Having knowledge of more than 5 public transit lines

Or for

- Having your cooking complimented (unprompted) over X times (broken down by type of cuisine)
- Parallel parking consistently on the first try
- Making over X successful modifications to your house / bike / car / other thing
- Having been told by X people that you're a good kisser

Medals are handed out by an independent board of accreditation, and you wear them on a special sash or jacket that everyone is required to put on for certain formal occasions, or for one day every season. It would give people something to talk about, at the very least, and maybe reason to respect each other more? Man, I told you this idea was only about 2/3 baked.

Incidentally, I updated the Dogblog.

* aka "trying to avoid the wikihole"