The Featured Product

It’s just a small beginning, but it’s a grand product: We have finally posted the first Wiser Now Zoom Webinar, downloadable at any time and available with 2 CEU credits for activity professionals from NCCAP. Click here to learn all about the jam-packed product, Time Management.
 

The Quirky Observation

Gold as a preferred color implies affluence, material wealth, and extravagance, and on some websites, arrogance. As a metal, it’s cold, but it’s visually warm and its namesakes have many warm connotations. Think:

• gold standard
• as good as gold
• a heart of gold
• worth one's weight in gold
• golden opportunities
• The Golden Rule
• Golden Age
• Golden Hours (dawn and twilight)
• Golden Shores (Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty poem)

And do warm thoughts come when you think about golden retrievers, golden raisins, golden anniversaries, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the movie “On Golden Pond” or the TV show “The Golden Girls”?

The statuette we call the Oscar is officially named the Academy Award of Merit. According to Oscars.org, “a popular story has it that upon seeing the trophy for the first time, Academy librarian (and eventual executive director) Margaret Herrick remarked that it resembled her Uncle Oscar.” (Some sites claim it was the backside that she said resembled him.) Another story suggests it was given the nickname by columnist Sidney Skolsky in the 1930s to make the actors and the event seem a little less snooty.

The Quiz
The gold-plated Oscar statuette weighs 8.5 pounds and is 13.5 inches tall, but can you fill in these other numbers?
  1. ___ = Length of the red carpet and ___ = man-hours it takes to install
2. ___ = Seating capacity of the Dolby Theatre where the ceremony is held
3. ___ = Number of statuettes made each year
4. ___ = Dollar value of the materials in each statuette
5. ___ = Most number of nominations received by a single person
6. ___ = Minutes of the shortest telecast ceremony (1959)

The answers, along with additional fascinating facts, are at the end of this document.

The Shameless Request
1.  If you haven’t yet pressed the subscribe button so this newsletter doesn’t go to spam, please do so now.
 

The Kiosk of Resources

• I used a bunch of sources for Oscar trivia, but two that you might enjoy are https://www.liveabout.com/academy-awards-interesting-facts-1779239 and https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/entertainment/50-incredible-oscar-facts/ss-BBhjOel#image=27
   

• When I was looking up Oscar Wilde quotes, I found this one I hadn’t known before and mightily agree with: “I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.”
   
• Looking good: While looking for references to golden, I found a quote by Amy Webb which noted about golden hours, “lighting is ideal because the first and last hours of sunlight are diffuse and warm. For that reason, women with photos taken outside during those hours tended to look great.”
   
• When I first thought about this WNW, I considered focusing it on golden anniversaries and what happened in 1970. You can get an idea here: https://pop-culture.us/Annual/1970.html
   
• And, as always, check out www.WiserNow.com.

Answers to the quiz:

1. 500 and 900
2. 3300
3. 50  - In 2000, fifty-five statuettes were stolen together in an Academy shipment truck hijacking, which set off a media frenzy, but according this article, there was never any real reason to panic because the statuettes are always made a year in advance, so what was stolen was the next year’s supply. Almost all were eventually recovered, but then destroyed so that no one would receive a once stolen statue.
4. 400 – Underneath the 24-carat gold plating is a Britannia metal - a pewter-like alloy which is then plated in copper and nickel silver before the gold. However, since 1950, Oscar winners cannot officially sell their statuette without first offering it back to the Academy for $1. Statues awarded before that date have been sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
5. 59 - Walt Disney won 22 Academy Awards from 59 nominations
6. 100 – The longest ceremony was 263 minutes (4+ hours) in 2002