Sunday, December 18, 2005

Change for the Better

As I mentioned here, I've been throwing pocket change into jars for 20+ years and have recently been hauling it in to dump into Coinstar machines at local merchants. There was too much to handle in one trip so I did it in three loads. The first, a small "test" bag of coins, yielded about $40. in Amazon credit. The second, last night, amounted to $273.18, which is all I could carry. That worked out to one half dollar, 681 quarters, 662 dimes, 410 nickels and 1,573 pennies...or so says my Coinstar receipt.

Today, I hauled in the last of it: 572 quarters, 466 dimes, 349 nickels and 862 pennies for a total of $216.67. I did not bother checking the machine's math. I trust it.

An odd thing: The machine sorts all the coins out and rejects foreign and unrecognizable ones. You can put them into the hopper again and sometimes, second time through, it will accept a few of them. But at the end of all this, I had about 20 coins which the machine just plain didn't want and I finally took a closer look at them. Two turned out to be old dimes made of silver. A few were foreign. There was one token to gain admittance to a pay toilet at some restaurant and one coin was one of those gold dollar coins with the portait of Sacagawea on it that no one used. But a couple turned out to be magic coins...by that, I mean coins that have been gaffed or rigged for magic tricks. I do a little magic but I can't recall ever owning or using any of these and can't imagine how they got into my jars. I may actually have received them as change somewhere — maybe the Magic Castle, even — and didn't look closely enough to note that, for example, one is a two-headed nickel and another is a dime on one side and a penny on the other. Glad the Coinstar machine kicked 'em out as they're worth a lot more than their face value, no matter which side is up.

Another thing I noticed. For years, I've been writing comic books where crooks run out of banks holding big sacks of coins. It hadn't dawned on me how much a sack of coins can weigh. I'm a pretty big guy and I couldn't carry more than $300 in coins. How did those Beagle Boys do it all those years?

Also, if you do this, do yourself a favor and either take along some moist towelettes or pick a store where the Coinstar machine is near the bathroom. In Las Vegas, people develop "coin fingers" after feeding money into slots or video poker machines for a couple of hours. After ten minutes of taking coins from a big canvas bag and throwing them in the Coinstar hopper, my right hand could have doubled for Jack Haley's in The Wizard of Oz.

One last thing I'll mention in case you never take this many coins to a Coinstar machine...as you feed them in, a little video window flashes messages like, "Feed your coins into the hopper now" and "Press the red button when you are finished." If you get too far ahead of the counting mechanism, it puts up a notice that says, "My, you have a lot of coins." Well, I used to. Now, I have a lot of credit at Amazon.

• Posted at 9:53 PM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

Tom McMillan writes that he disagrees with my statement that the American public will probably forgive some bending of the law if they buy that the wiretaps were done to catch genuine terrorists and ward off another 9/11. He writes...

Not all Americans; I, for one, do not. What is supposed to set us apart from other states (good and bad) is due process, a philosophy inherited from Anglo-Saxon juristry (the rulers of modern Britain should be ashamed of themselves). This includes following the law to spy on people — whether citizens of the U.S. or not. And why should rulers always be forced to do this? Because they abuse this power shamelessly otherwise.

But I actually don't disagree with that. By "the American public," I meant the majority...or whatever large percentage would have to buy the rationale for Bush not to lose a few more points of popularity over the revelation. I don't think the excuse will play badly with a certain segment of those who still support him. There are people out there so terrified of another 9/11 and/or so eager to see putative terrorists eviscerated that they'll excuse any trampling of laws. That was almost the Dana Rohrabacher argument in that debate to which I linked: The other guys killed 3,000 of us so we can't be worried with little things like ignoring the Constitution.

The question I'd like to see some journalist put to Bush is this: "You say the Patriot Act and other activities like this wiretapping are necessary to protect America. If your legal advisors told you these practices were illegal, would you authorize them anyway?" I suspect there are a lot of people in this country who'd think it was heroic and admirable to answer in the affirmative.

While I'm on the topic: I watched Bush's speech a little while ago. My feeling is that he's down to offering reassurance to those still on his side, and that he has nothing to offer those who've already turned against him and this war. Given how many lives have been ended or shattered by this military action — and how many more will still be sacrificed, to say nothing of the dollar cost — I find it all very sad. Every so often, I get an e-mail from someone who says something like, "You must be thrilled at every bit of bad news that comes out of Iraq." No, not at all...and I wouldn't think much of anyone who was. This whole thing's like a speeding bus and we're all trapped on it. Bush ain't the guy I would have chosen to drive, and he has yet to convince me he knows the route or even that the trip was a good idea in the first place. But either way, when he drives us off a cliff, he takes all of us with him.

• Posted at 7:46 PM · LINK

Mysteries of the World

At this very moment on Bravo, on Inside the Actors Studio, your host James Lipton is interviewing that well-known master thespian, Barbara Walters. I guess it does take acting ability to read some of that news copy and pretend it's true.

• Posted at 6:03 PM · LINK

Today's Political Musing

I'm a little puzzled (my usual state) about the new allegations that George W. Bush authorized illegal wiretaps of folks living in this country. For one thing, though all the Liberal sites tell me it was a prima facie violation of the law, there are Conservative sites (this one, for example) explaining how it isn't illegal. For another, if I read the law correctly in my layman's way, it would have been very easy to secure clear authorization for these wiretaps but the Bush administration didn't go that route. That seems to be leading some to the conclusion, perhaps erroneous, that the outrage may lie not in what was done but in who it was done to, and for what reason. The American public will probably forgive some bending of the law to go after people who could reasonably be thought to have links to known terrorists. They won't be as forgiving if it's spying on citizens whose "crime" was to oppose George Bush.

But what really confuses me is that I think I'm on the same side of this issue as Bob Barr, a man who I think twisted the law into pretzels to use it against Bill Clinton. He has somehow turned into a champion of Civil Liberties, which is a little like O.J. Simpson opening a marriage counselling service with Robert Blake. Still, there's this short debate he had on CNN yesterday with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. Here's a video link and here's a link to a transcript. It's an odd discussion since Rohrabacher is a pretty solid "those of my party can do no wrong" guy. Having Barr debate him is like having Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol argue with himself before he met those ghosts...but ol' Bob pretty handily wins the argument. In this country, we don't allow our Chief Exec to decide which laws he'll obey and which ones he won't. I think every Republican who wants to defend Bush on this one should be forced to utter the sentence, "I would not hesitate to see President Hillary Clinton have the same authority."