The 2008 Honeygarlic Awards

Consisting of twelve months (tied for a modern-era record) and 366 days (ditto), 2008 was truly a year unlike any other. To celebrate this great year, I present the First Annual Honeygarlic Awards!

(Note that some of the winners are from December 2007 or January 2009. This is due to inconsistencies in the voting process.)

Our first award tonight is for Movie of the Year. This was made much easier by the fact I saw very few new movies over the course of 2008...the winner, in a landslide, is The Dark Knight!

Excellence in popular culture is also celebrated in the category of Song of the Year! To win, a song must demonstrate popularity, catchiness, and at least some degree of musicianship. This year's winner is The Offspring's You're Gonna Go Far, Kid!

Sticking with music, the award for Fastest Turnaround goes to an unknown song I heard over the Christmas break, which contained the word 'a-shoe-sination'!


The final award in the music category is the award for Best Recycling of Music! It's important to recycle - a principle the CBC should have adhered to when they were looking for a new Hockey Night In Canada theme song. Seriously, who wouldn't have loved this?

We move now to a very special award, the Selflessness Award for Acts of Saving the World. This award is not given out every year; only when somebody has saved the world on a truly major scale. I am honoured to announce that the recipient of the SAASW for 2008 is whoever pushed the Large Hadron Collider turn-on back to February.

The Innovation of the Year award goes to legal sports webcasting. During the Olympics, CBC had nine dedicated online channels for additional coverage to what you saw on your televisions - and two channels for rebroadcasting what was on TV - and they, along with other networks, have only stepped up their game since. No longer do sports fans have to rely on sites such as MyP2P to watch games online.

That's as good a segue as I'll get to move into the sports awards, starting with Sporting Event of the Year. This one was no contest, it was wrapped up VERY early in 2008. Super Bowl XLII was going to be historic no matter what, as the New England Patriots looked to become the first team to go undefeated through an entire NFL season and playoff since 1972. However, the New York Giants had other plans, and the game was back-and-forth, close throughout. Then, when it looked like everything was finally breaking the Patriots' way - all they needed was to stop NY from picking up five yards on one play - this happened. New York won.


In most years, that catch would have also picked up the award for Sporting Moment of the Year - but as I mentioned earlier, 2008 was not most years. 2008 was an Olympic year, and the Olympics were dominated by the story of American swimmer Michael Phelps going for a record eight gold medals - all of this leading to the Men's 100m Butterfly being the most exciting aquatic race I've ever witnessed.

The award for Best Published Rant from a Honeygarlic Blogger's Relative goes to this one - it's just too bad the audio doesn't work.

Longtime readers of this blog may recall my frustration with Dictionary.com's Word of the Day e-mails. 2008's winner of the award for Worst Word of the Day of the Year came in at the last possible minute - on December 31, the word was ultimate.

The award for Worst Book of the Year goes to The Futurist. It may have been 2007 when I read it, but the bittnerness remains.

This year's winners of Comedy Duo of the Year are TSN's Jay Onrait and Dan O'Toole, who pay more attention to being entertaining than talking about sports. And they sometimes wear the same suits.

The Best Question of the Year, limited only to questions asked of myself, "do you want to watch _______ sleep with me?" (name removed to protect the humiliated).


The Best Answer of the Year, on the other hand, does not need to involve me at all - and this year it doesn't. Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe, on whether there is any way his party will support the budget due out later this month: "if my grandmother had wheels, I would call her a tractor".

For the year 2008, Lifetime Achievement Awards are handed out to Brian and Chris. They qualify on the grounds that they are names people mistook for being mine.

And our final award is the Most Awkward Photo Op Award, which goes to...


Welcome to 2009, everybody.

--Ryan