What I saw on the tail ends of cars as I drove to Boone yesterday ...

... one was a bumper sticker that said "Uncle Sam Wants you to speak English!" If you stop and think about - it's a dumb message. To have any effect on its target audience, it should be in Spanish! (I also think the message itself is historically inaccurate, philosophically repugnant, morally unsound and generally icky).

And while I was heading through the most twisty and dangerous part of the trip up the mountain I noticed the vanity tag on the big boxy SUV in front of me:
DEATHBOX.

I broke several speeding laws getting around that one and as far away as possible.

Remember the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin?

No, I thought not. Remember the Sacagawea dollar coin? Both flopped. Mainly because the treasury refused to call in all paper $1 bills, and so absolutely no pressure was put on vending companies to upgrade their vending machines.

And the banking industry itself paid no attention to it. The last time I went into the State Employees Credit Union here in Wilkesboro to ask for a role of Sacagawea dollars --
they didn't know what I was talking about!

So the US Mint is coming up with yet another dollar coin for your entertainment.

And if you want to read all about it, along with a brief history of coinage from day one, click here. If you are not interested in coins, click here.


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An unfortunate story for the big port city to the south ...

... that we often visit. It's from The Week, Carmen's favorite magazine.

"Obviously, any policy that allows a sexual-battery victim to spend a night in jail is a flawed policy." [Port City] police spokeswoman on a college student who was jailed for an outstanding warrant after telling authorities she had been raped. A jail worker refused, for religious reasons, to give the woman behind bars a dose of the morning-after contraceptive pill.

There's always something going on in the big port city. At least this time they had the brains to realize it was a boneheaded move, and the honesty to admit it.