Archive for the ‘Coins’ Category

More things I did not know…

Wednesday, July 21st, 2021

In an emergency, a potato chip bag and duct tape can be used as a chest seal. I don’t recommend this unless you have advanced EMT training, and I’m not sure which flavor of chips works best.

$10,000 face value in pennies weighs approximately three tons.

I think that entire article is interesting: it goes into more detail than you ever wanted to know about US pennies (and to a lesser extent, Canadian ones), as well as the economics of same. The only issue is that the events the author describes took place between 2008 and 2009, so it is a little dated.

Pennybullion.com is still in business, and will sell you $100 (face value) worth of copper pennies for $169.95 (plus $10.95 shipping and handling). They are not currently purchasing pennies, just in case you were thinking about getting into the copper penny business.

And you can still buy a Ryedale Sorter, but they go for about $500 now instead of $250.

Posted in Coins, Safety | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 20, 2020.

Thursday, August 20th, 2020

Ben Cross. He was “Harold Abrahams”, one of the two runners in “Chariots of Fire”. He also had a part in the 2009 movie reboot of a second-rate SF TV series from the late 1960s.

Mary Hartline. My mother actually mentioned this to me the other day. She was one of the very early TV stars:

“Super Circus,” a live Sunday afternoon series on ABC, began in early 1949, when the television industry was still laying its coaxial cables. Ms. Hartline was a striking presence with her long, wavy hair, her majorette-style costumes — including her signature uniform, with musical notes on the thigh-high hemline — and white tasseled boots.
Between the show’s death-defying circus acts, she conducted the band’s lively musical numbers, performed comedy sketches with the clowns, guided young audience members through contest segments and delivered live commercials. (Everybody did it. The future newsman Mike Wallace, also a cast member, pushed peanut butter.)
Ms. Hartline, often called television’s first sex symbol (a lot of fathers, it seems, were watching, alongside their offspring), was a master of promotion. In addition to having her face on Kellogg’s cereal boxes, representing Canada Dry beverages and demonstrating the joys of the newest Dixie Cup dispenser, she had her own merchandise line.
Those three dozen products included the Mary Hartline doll (“all hard plastic with socket head, jointed arms and legs, sleep eyes, blond wig,” according to a recent auction-lot description), which can still bring hundreds of dollars at auction.

Dr. Jay Galst. Interesting sounding guy: he was professionally an ophthalmologist. But he grew up with a dad who brought bags of coins home from the grocery store for him to sift through (pulling out the rare ones), and he continued pursuing numismatics into his adulthood and professional career.

He specialized in coins and coin adjacent objects (“…tokens, medals and similar artifacts”) that were in some way related to eyes, and co-wrote a book on the subject with Peter van Alfen.

The volume, “Ophthalmologia, Optica et Visio in Nummis,” which translates as Ophthalmology, Optics and Vision in Numismatics, was 574 pages and had some 1,700 entries.

He also specialized in coins from ancient Judea.

“The last time we were together, back in pre-pandemic February, we were in the A.N.S.’s vault looking through trays and trays of 17th-century British farthing and halfpenny tokens,” Dr. van Alfen said by email, “trying to find an example produced by a London optician who also produced a different token he had just purchased in order to compare the two. I knew very little about 17th-century British tokens before that morning. In the hour it took to find the token, I received a crash course. His pure joy in such numismatic arcana was always irresistible.”

Marvin Creamer, who sounds like another interesting guy, and died at 104. He:

…taught geography for many years at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J.
His expertise helped him become a history-making mariner, the first recorded person to sail round the world without navigational instruments. His 30,000-mile odyssey, in a 36-foot cutter with a small crew, made headlines worldwide on its completion in 1984.

…

It is daunting enough to circumnavigate the Earth with the aid of modern global positioning technology, much less with medieval and Renaissance tools like a mariner’s compass and sextant.
But Professor Creamer, in the grip of an obsession that had held him for years, shunned even those newfangled contrivances, as well as a radio, a clock and a wristwatch. He chose instead to rely on his deep knowledge of the planet and its vagaries, and be guided by nothing more than wind, waves, the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night.
Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.

…

…when the 66-year-old Professor Creamer set sail from Cape May, N.J., in his cutter, the Globe Star, in late 1982, he was widely considered unhinged: No mariner in recorded history had traversed the globe without at least a compass, used by sailors since the 12th century if not before, or a sextant, introduced in the 18th.
His 513-day journey would entail nearly a year on the sea, plus time in ports for repairs and reprovisioning. It would take the Globe Star to Capetown, South Africa; Hobart and Sydney, Australia; Whangara, New Zealand; and the Falkland Islands off Argentina before its triumphant return to Cape May on May 17, 1984 — an event that Professor Creamer gleefully described as “one small step back for mankind.”

Posted in Boats, Coins, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Random notes: August 14, 2013.

Wednesday, August 14th, 2013

Ford stopped making the police variant of the Crown Victoria in 2011. We’re now in 2013, and police departments are starting to retire the last of the Crown Vics.

Law enforcement is a practical, left-brain business of protocol and procedure. But a discussion of the Crown Vic brings out a romantic side. The traditions and symbols of life behind the badge become intertwined with its tools. Two tons of rear-wheel drive and a V-8 engine up front made for a machine that could feel safe at any speed, a reliable nonhuman partner when things got crazy.

I have flirted from time to time with the idea of purchasing a former cop car as a backup vehicle. (“It’s got a cop motor, a 440 cubic inch plant, it’s got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks.”) Problem is, the state surplus store wants nearly $6K for used DPS cars; at that price, I could go get a used Miata or Outback instead.

The 1933 double eagle is on display at the New York Historical Society. I’ve written previously about the strange history of the 1933 double eagle, and the linked NYT article contains a good summary, too.

If you have nothing to hide, why do you object to being stopped and frisked by the police being recorded by a camera?

Yet another reason why Rosemary Lehmberg should resign.

Posted in Cars, Clippings, Coins, Cops, Law, TCDA | Comments Closed

The (Double) Eagle has flown the coop.

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

We previously noted the strange legal saga involving the Federal Government and ten 1933 $20 U.S. gold coins.

(Since that time, we have also read Alison Frankel’s Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the World’s Most Valuable Coin and we think it is a better book than David Tripp’s Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed, and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle. But we digress.)

By way of FARK, we have now learned that a Philadelphia jury has found in favor of the Government. Here’s coverage from the WSJ Law Blog, and here’s coverage from the Inky.

As we noted at the time, this seemed like a case that couldn’t be won, given the events of 2002 and the attendant publicity. We are not displeased to see our prediction come true, though we will be sad if the Treasury ends up destroying the coins. At the same time, though, we suspect this is not the end of the story, and that this case will probably end up in front of Dianna Ross and the Supremes. Watch this space for updates.

Edited to add: We wish we had thought of this sooner. Here’s the story from “Coin World”, which appears to have been covering the trial in detail judging from the other links.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Coins, Law | 1 Comment »

I heartily endorse this event or product. (#3 in a series)

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Dereu and Sons Manufacturing Company (aka Spy-Coins.com).

Back many thousands of years ago, my elementary school library was full of books like F. B. I. The “G-Men’s” Weapons and Tactics for Combatting Crime and other non-fiction children’s books about the heroic exploits of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Remember, these were elementary school libraries, and this was before Hoover’s death; they didn’t have books like The FBI Nobody Knows. And I wasn’t reading Rex Stout at that time, so I didn’t enough to be able to seek it out elsewhere.)

Anyway, one of my favorite stories was the one about Rudolph Abel and the newsboy. Not because I had any real investment in catching Russian spies, but because I thought a hollow nickel was incredibly cool, and I wanted one badly.

Flash-foward mumble mumble years to DEFCON 17. What do I find at one of the vendor tables? Yes! Hollow nickels!

Since I was older and more mature, though, a few thoughts came to me. One was that I didn’t have a whole lot of cash on me at the time, and using an ATM at DEFCON…might as well go ahead and pull on the Bad Idea Jeans. Another thought was that a hollow nickel might be cool, but what are the chances I wouldn’t end up spending it by accident?

So I took some notes, surfed the web, waited until I got home and someone had a birthday, and then placed an order…

(more…)

Posted in Coins, DEFCON 17, Endorsements, Geek | Comments Closed

Under the Double Eagle.

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

The NYT offers up an update in the case of ten 1933 $20 gold pieces confiscated by the U.S. Mint; in brief, the government has been ordered either to give the coins back, or provide proof the coins were stolen.

I’ve been interested in these coins since reading David Tripp’s book Illegal Tender. The short version of this story is that the 1933 $20 gold piece was never officially issued; FDR took the country off the gold standard after the coins were produced, but (supposedly) before the U.S. Mint distributed any of them. Some of these coins made it out to the public, but the government claimed they were stolen property and, until 2002, confiscated and destroyed all of the ones that turned up. For complicated reasons (outlined in Tripp’s book) the government allowed the sale of one coin at auction in 2002 for $7.6 million.

Tripp’s book makes it very clear (in my opinion) that the government believed all of these coins that made it out of the Mint were stolen property, that the government was allowing the 2002 sale as a one-off deal, and that any future coins that showed up would also be confiscated and destroyed.  I find it very difficult to believe that Mr. Langbord and his family were not aware of this, and I have a lot of trouble siding with them.

(As a side note, I haven’t read Alison Frankel’s Double Eagle, though I very much want to. Tripp’s book is okay, but I think it suffers some from his lack of experience in writing long form narrative.)

Posted in Clippings, Coins, Geek, Law | 2 Comments »