Whatever You Do, Don’t Land in 1348

Posted on February 15, 2024 by admin

An online ad today made me laugh. For an airline offering service to Dubrovnik. The tag line:

The mind boggles. What does United have, a fleet of Tardises? I think you’d be at some risk of landing smack dab in the Black Death, but if not that, a generally unhealthy destination for us moderns, even with all our shots. That’s not all. This might be a direct flight, but does another route offer a stopover at the Enlightenment, or maybe the Belle Époque?

I get it. The copywriter – he, she or it – is trading on the romance of Dubrovnik, which by all accounts is a picturesque yet modern place. But still I laugh. What currency did they use in 14th-century Dubrovnik anyway, which would more properly be the Republic of Ragusa? Surely they don’t want dollars, so maybe you’d have to take silver or gold specie. And good luck finding anyone that speaks English there or even decent wifi.

I had to look it up. The currency would have been the tallero, one new to me, but from the right period. Numisma also gives the following table:

Figuring out the purchasing power of any of these would be a real chore, so I’ll pass. But be careful that you don’t get hundreds of follari in change.

Brass But Not in Pocket

Posted on September 21, 2023 by admin

I haven’t had a lot of success taking photos of coins with the otherwise terrific old iPhone camera, with the images coming out distorted in one way or another, or at least bad looking. Today I had a slap-my-forehead moment: I’ve been doing it wrong. The thing to do is take group shots.

Such as group shots from the five-pound box of foreign cheapies, that is. Many of which have long ceased to be legal tender in their countries of origin.

The shiny one with a hole in the center is a Japanese five-yen coin, my favorite among the pocket change of Japan when I lived there. Brass. Roughly the equivalent of a U.S. five-cent coin, so they didn’t have much monetary value, even in the 1990s. But they were good-looking coins when new. Even when older and dull yellow, there was a charm of that hole.

The 50-yen coin had a hole was well, but it was a wafer of cupronickle, which might be sturdy material for circulating coins and all-around useful alloy, it doesn’t have the luster of gold or silver, or the shine of copper or brass.

Ollie & Whitman

Posted on September 5, 2023 by admin

Just ahead of Labor Day weekend, an ad for Ollie’s popped into my YouTube feed. Ollie’s? Then on Sunday, as I was driving along near home, I spotted an Ollie’s where vacant retail had been until recently. Coincidence? No, not at all.

“Ollie’s is now America’s largest retailer of closeout merchandise and excess inventory,” the retailer’s web site says. “The chain currently operates 492 stores in 29 states.”

I stopped by for a look. “How long has the store been open?” I asked an employee. Four days was the answer. A new Ollie’s for Labor Day weekend, it seems.

As you’d expect from that description, it’s a hodgepodge of a place: canned and boxed food, books, personal care products, cheap furniture, clothes, toys, pet supplies, mattresses and on and on. I found a few items to buy, mostly food, but also a book: the 2023 edition of A Guide Book of United States Coins, the Red Book published for a long time (since 1946) by Whitman. Remaindered: the 2024 edition is out now.

Still, ’23 is mostly current, and it’s packed with information. The Red Book an almanac for U.S. coinage. Moreover, it’s a sturdy volume, with strong binding, meant to be opened an closed a lot. List price: $19.95. Ollie’s price: $2.99. Nice, Ollie, nice.

The recto-verso of a real book makes it easier to thumb through, I believe, than a similarly informative web site, and chance on interesting things. Or look them up. I already had the vague idea that I’m unlikely ever to own a Brasher Doubloon, for instance. Whitman quantifies that for me. One sold for about $9.36 million at auction in 2021. Other examples have sold in the millions as well, and one version is so rare that the Smithsonian has the only one.

The doubloon counts as a post-colonial issue, but before the U.S. mint was established in 1792. Since I bought the book, I’ve been thumbing through the entries on colonial and post-colonial coins. A fascinating array I didn’t know much about: Willow Tree and Oak Tree and Pine Tree coinage, Lord Baltimore coinage, American Plantation coins, Rosa Americana coins, Carolina Elephant tokens, Gloucester tokens, Higley coppers, Nova Constellatio coppers and the mysterious Bar coppers, among many others.

“The Bar copper is undated and of uncertain origin,” the Red Book says.

Marathon to Sault Ste. Marie by Way of Wawa

Posted on August 21, 2023 by admin

I was pumping gas not long ago, and spotted what I took to be shiny penny on the pavement near the pump. A closer look told me it wasn’t a U.S. cent, but I didn’t ID it until I’d picked it up and eyed it when I got back in the car. Ten won, it turned out to be.

It’s the smallest currently circulating South Korean coin, both physically and in value. In theory, 10 won is worth 0.75 U.S. cents. A whopping seven and a half mills. The structure depicted is the Dabotap pagoda, a southeast-coast relic of the ancient kingdom of Silla, which lorded over most of the peninsula more than 1,000 years ago.

Back-and-forth between Korea and the U.S., and more specifically northwest suburban Chicago, is no unusual thing in our time, but still I was mildly surprised to find it — like I felt finding a New Zealand 20-cent piece. Made my day.

On the morning of August 3, I left Marathon, but not before a look at the one-room Marathon Museum, and a talk with a lanky young man who said he’d been hired just three weeks earlier to run the place, his first job out of college. He had grown up in the area, gone away for school, and only now was beginning to appreciate the history of the place, he said, as he read more and more.

Pretty refreshing, finding someone that young with an interest in history. That is an old man thing to say, of course, but anyway I was glad to hear a bit about the town, such as its origin as a prospective wood pulp mill whose development accelerated in the early 1940s when Canadian raw material extraction was deemed important to the Allied war effort. A postwar boom made Marathon into a genuine town; a wood pulp mill town that prospered until the crushing blow of the mill closing in 2009.

A public tank in Marathon.

Here’s a story of early Marathon: POW logging camps were built in the area after Canada entered the war in 1939, and on April 18, 1941, 28 German prisoners made a break for it, and many more attempted it, in a tunneling scheme worthy of The Great Escape or rather the real incident of the 1944 escape from Stalag Luft III. The goal of the prisoners at Camp X, Angler was to cross into the still-neutral United States. None made it. This article, which is serious need of an editor, nevertheless tells the tale of the long-abandoned camp not far off the modern road.

“Travellers on the Trans-Canada highway would not notice the dirt track leading south from the highway some four kilometres west of Marathon, Ontario,” the site says. “There is no sign to indicate where it leads, and no historical marker to record what happened along that track.”

This part of the Trans-Canada has more visible abandoned sites. Making a go of a business must be tough up there.

White River, Ontario has a claim on the origin of Winne-the-Pooh.

All well and good, but why do we see the Disney iteration and not one based on the illustrations by E. H. Shepard? Do you think Winnie wore a jacket at the London Zoo? No, she did not.

Wawa has more than its steel goose statue. There’s a pleasant lakeside path, for example.

On the relatively small Wawa Lake, not Superior. Just an everyday relic of the last ice age.

St. Mary Margaret Cemetery in the town (closed 1954) includes the remains of old-time Wawa-area miners. Most unmarked.

I sought out lunch at Philly Wawa Hoagie. A few days earlier, I’d heard the owner interviewed on a CBC radio show. Why not, I figured. I ordered the shawarma poutine.

How Canadian is that, eh? It was good and I barely needed to eat dinner.

Wawa features a bit more public art than the goose. Including figures all labeled “Gitchee Goomee” just on the other side of the visitor center from the goose.

A few miles out of Wawa, down a dirt road, is Magpie Scenic High Falls.

Not that high, unless you’re about to tumble over the edge. It’s the overflow spill weir of the Harris Hydroelectric Generating Station, which has a capacity of 13MW. Signs at the sight are emphatic about not climbing the thing, since spillway volume is notoriously fickle. (I’m paraphrasing.)

Nice falls, but the glory was getting there and back.

My goal for the day was Sault. Ste. Marie, Canadian side, so I pressed on. More abandoned Ontario.

A plaque about the road itself.

From the plaque, it was only an easy walk to Chippewa Falls, so I went.

Closer to Sault Ste. Marie, near the entrance of Pancake Bay Provincial Park, is a small complex of tourist shops on the Trans-Canada. I took a good look around, and confirmed that stores in this part of Canada offer a woefully small number of postcards. Too bad, there’s a lot of scenic raw material for postcards in this part of Canada.

1 Dollar, Singapore

Posted on February 23, 2023 by admin

Every time I woke last night, which was a few times, I could hear drizzle, but not the tip-tip-tip of frozen drops hitting hard surfaces. I must have slept through the wind gusts, which were reportedly strong in the wee hours. While out late this afternoon, I noticed a number of large tree branches that had been knocked down, as well as a tree completely uprooted and on its side, about a half mile from where we live.

The day was windy and raw, but we had no precipitation after dawn, liquid or otherwise, and the tree and bush branches were no longer tinged with ice. This NWS map from this morning shows how we in northern Illinois dodged the worst of the snowstorm.

What does it all mean? Its snows in the North in winter. Except when it doesn’t.

One more banknote for now. This one does have some Roman letters, prominently featured, and is worth more than a few U.S. mills or cents: the Singapore dollar. The languages on the note include English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil, the four most common ones spoken there.

Also, it’s one that I picked up myself in 1992 or ’94, since these notes – part of the “ship series” – were current at the time, and worth about 60 U.S. cents. These days, I understand that S$1 trades for about 75 U.S. cents, so my note has gained some value, at least in nominal terms. That is, if it can be used as currency at all, since the city-state phased out dollar notes in favor of coins more than 20 years ago.

The ship on the obverse is a junk, common in the waters around Singapore and its predecessor settlements once upon a time. In the ship series, the larger the denomination, the larger the ship, beginning at S$1 and up to the S$10,000 note featuring a general bulk carrier, Neptune Canopus (that note has also been discontinued).

The S$1 reverse features Singapore’s national flower, the Vanda Miss Joaquim, and the Sentosa Satellite Earth Station.

The flower is also known as the Papilionanthe Miss Joaquim, or the Singapore orchid, and apparently there is a Singaporean drag queen called Vanda Miss Joaquim, which I have to say is a pretty good name for a drag queen.

As for the Earth station on Sentosa, that was the city-state’s first one, operational since 1971. Sentosa is a two-square-mile island just off the southern shore of the main island of Singapore. Formerly a military facility – under the British and then the Singaporeans after independence – the island is better known these days for its recreation, development of which began about 50 years ago.

Back in ’92, I took a cable car over to Sentosa for a look around, though the Earth station wasn’t among the things I saw. Unlike the facility at Tidbinbilla near Canberra, I don’t think it was open to the public.

Sentosa wasn’t nearly developed then as it seems to be now.

Universal Studios Singapore, for instance, didn’t open until 2010, and S.E.A. Aquarium (South East Asia Aquarium) not until 2012. Even the Sentosa Merlion wasn’t there in ’92, since it was completed three years later – and taken down in 2019.

The cable car offered nice views of the island, which isn’t really captured in my snapshots.

I believe this dragon-fountain was fairly near the cable car station on Sentosa, but I haven’t been able to confirm its continued existence, though this is a more recent image.

I walked over the Fort Siloso, a former coastal artillery battery.

I also visited the Sentosa Wax Museum that day, mostly I believe to get out of the heat. Most of the wax figures had to do with the history of the city-state (I think), including figures showing two surrenders: the British to the Japanese in 1942 and the Japanese to the Allies in 1945. Not something you’re likely to see anywhere else.

There’s a Madame Tussauds on the island now, so I suspect the old wax museum was replaced by it. The current wax museum’s web site says the place has an “Images of Singapore” exhibit, but I suspect the real action is at the “Marvel Universe 4D” and the “Ultimate Film Star Experience,” and the “K-Wave” zone. Exactly something you’re likely to see somewhere else.

Obviously I haven’t been Madame Tussauds Singapore, but I did pay money, entirely too many pounds sterling, to see the one in London. The place wrote the book on tourist traps. That isn’t to say that wax museums can’t be interesting; the one included in the admission to Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen was charming indeed, even a little surreal sometimes, such as the setup in which wax Einstein was playing chess with wax Hitler.

Möngö Notes

Posted on February 22, 2023 by admin

The winter storm blasting the upper states showed up in my neighborhood today first in the form of a lot of rain, but cold enough to leave a coating of ice on the bare trees and bushes. Then the rain itself started to freeze.

More currency with no Roman letters on it (well, not many). Three bits of currency, each measuring a diminutive 1¾ by 3½ inches, roughly the size of a business card.

I didn’t have to do any looking around to know who issued them: Mongolia. I’m familiar with Mongolian notes, ever since I picked up a few of them in Ulaanbaatar.

Besides, the Mongolian national symbol – the Soyombo, which appears in the national flag – is a certain giveaway.

“The Soyombo is… attributed to Zanabazar, the 17th-century leader of Mongolian Lamaism, a great statesman, and the father of Mongolian art and script,” says the University of Pennsylvania, including an interpretation of the ying-yang that’s new to me.

“The yin-yang symbol means that men and women are unified. During Communist times it was interpreted as two intertwined fish, which symbolize vigilance and wisdom, as fish never close their eyes.”

Not having eyelids isn’t quite the same as being vigilant, I’d say, and I don’t much associate fish with wisdom, but I suppose that’s just anthropocentric bias, isn’t it?

I didn’t pick up the notes in country. They came with the grab bag of international paper money cheapies, and are 10-, 20- and 50-möngö notes.

A möngö is one-hundredth of a tugrik (tögrög), the base unit. Considering that U.S. $1 fetches about 3,500 tugrik these days, even 50 möngö isn’t going to be worth much. Indeed, Wiki says of the notes, “Very rare in circulation. Abundant among collectors.”

The möngö notes depict Mongolian sports: archery, wrestling and horse riding. Those are known as the “Three Games of Men,” the Mongolian embassy to the U.S. tells me. It also says that “nowadays, track and field sports, football, basketball, volleyball, skating, skiing, motorcycle racing, mountain climbing, chess and other sports are widely played in Mongolia.”

Also, there’s a Mongolian American Football Association. Learn something new every day.

1 Ruble, Transnistria

Posted on February 21, 2023 by admin

I’ve looked at enough ruble-denominated currency to know what “ruble” looks like in Cyrillic, namely, рубль. This is somebody’s one-ruble note.

Not Russia, nor Belarus, which are the two nations that currently call their money that. Not the defunct Armenian ruble, Latvian ruble or Tajikistani ruble, either.

Instead, this is a Transnistrian ruble. To the naked eye, and not the scanner, those black rectangles are shiny silver, which I take to be an anti-counterfeiting measure. That inspires the question: who would counterfeit these notes? Perfidious Moldovans?

In news reports, Transnistria is inevitably referred to as a “breakaway” territory from Moldova that’s “Russian backed.” A polite way – and why do we need to be polite? – to call them Russian stooges. The map accompanying this article shows how that might be a geopolitical concern these days.

In any case, internationally unrecognized Transnistria has its own currency, with the one ruble sporting the famed Russian military commander Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov, who did so much to facilitate his nation’s imperial expansion under Catherine the Great.

Field Marshal Suvorov has a more direct connection with Transnistria, however, since he’s considered the founder of modern Tiraspol, capital of the breakaway territory. He ordered fortifications built on the site late in the 18th century, though the city had antecedents going back to Greek settlement around 600 BC.

The reverse features an uninspiring image of a monument in Transnistria to one or both of the Jassy-Kishinev offensives of 1944, probably the second, since it was a smashing success for the Red Army and (remarkably) the U.S. Army Air Corps.

“On August 20, 1944, the Soviet Second Ukrainian Front, under the command of General Rodion Malinovsky, and the Third Ukrainian Front, under the command of General Fyodor Tolbukhin, launched a two-pronged attack against German Army South Ukraine…” the National World War II Museum explains.

“By August 23, the German Sixth Army had been surrounded by the two converging Soviet fronts. German air support was nowhere to be found, because it had been eliminated by the United States Fifteenth Air Force.

“While it does not receive a lot of attention, the offensive was one of the most successful joint operations of the war. It was quite an achievement, considering this was only the second time that the Americans and Soviets worked together. Yet you would have to look hard to find literature on the offensive. Perhaps it is time to give the Second Jassy-Kishinev Offensive the attention it deserves.”

2 Taka, Bangladesh

Posted on February 20, 2023 by admin

“Presidents Day” is here again, but no holiday for me. George Washington’s birthday isn’t until Wednesday, anyway. It’s all very well to honor the father of our country, but, like Dr. King, why couldn’t he have been born in some warmer month?

Here’s another banknote of mine without Roman lettering that I decided to identify over the weekend.

No Cyrillic, either. It turned out to be relatively easy to pin down, since most notes tend to feature one or the other, even if a country’s dominant language(s) are in another script. Another useful clue are the Hindu-Arabic numerals for the date, 2013.

It’s a two-taka note from Bangladesh, whose symbol is the curious ৳, which seems to suggest the Bengali script for the word, টাকা, but also a Roman t. Various sources say this note has mostly passed from circulation, replaced by coins. Also, its one-hundredth division, poysha, has evaporated in the heat of decades of inflation. In theory, a 2-taka note is worth just shy of U.S. 2 cents.

Speaking of fathers of nations, though a rather different example, father of Bangladesh Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is on the observe. Next to him is the National Martyrs’ Memorial near Dhaka, commemorating those who died for independence in bloody 1971.

In the upper right corner, the national emblem of Bangladesh. “Located on the emblem is a water lily, that is bordered on two sides by rice sheaves. Above the water lily are four stars and three connected jute leaves,” Wiki notes. Jute may yet have its day as a green fiber.

On the reverse, another memorial to the dead. In this case, the Shaheed Minar (The Martyr Tower) of the Bengali Language Movement, whose day happens to be tomorrow.

20 Rubles, Tajikistan

Posted on February 19, 2023 by admin

When I had something else to do the other day, naturally I decided it was time to find out where this banknote was from.

I’m assuming that’s the obverse. I’ve had it for a while, obtained as part of a package of banknotes from around the world that I bought for a modest sum a few years ago. They’re all of modest value. In many cases, as modest as possible: zero. This is one of those.

The first thing to look up were the nations that use Cyrillic, so I did. Then the flag threw me off, since I took it to be the Hungarian flag. Except Hungarians don’t use Cyrillic. Could there be some quasi-Hungarian entity somewhere that does?

No. Closer examination of the flag – and it is much harder to see with your eye than the scan – revealed a small gold crown topped by stars in the while middle bar. That proved to be the key. Tajikistan’s flag looks like that, so from there I took a quick look at that country’s currency.

These days, Tajikistan’s currency is the somoni, named in honor of Ismoil Somoni, a ninth-century (849-907) potentate of the region I previously knew nothing about.

He isn’t forgotten in Tajikistan. To quote Wiki: “With the end of Soviet rule in Tajikistan, Ismail’s legacy was rehabilitated by the new Tajik state. He is depicted on the SM 100 banknote. Also, the highest mountain in Tajikistan (and in the former Soviet Union) was renamed after Ismail. The mountain was formerly known as Stalin Peak and Communism Peak but was subsequently changed to the Ismoil Somoni Peak.”

So that’s what happened to Communism Peak. I’m sure I learned that was the highest mountain in the Soviet Union years ago – and that it had been Stalin Peak for a while – but hadn’t thought about it since.

The table of recent Tajikistani currency shows that I don’t have a 20 somoni note, because those weren’t issued until 2000. For a few years before that, however, the country used the Tajikistan ruble. That’s what I have.

The building under the flag is the Majlisi Oli, where the parliament of Tajikistan meets, for what it’s worth. Which probably isn’t much, considering that the nation’s strongman, Emomali Rakhmon, née Emomali Sharipovich Rahmonov, runs elections essentially the same way as in the Tajik SSR, to his president-for-life benefit. He apparently runs the country with a dash – more than a dash – of a cult of personality, too. I’m a little surprised he isn’t on the money.

“Poems were read in his honor in parliament, and the state media often compares him to the sun,” Deutsche Welle reports. “All around Tajikistan, posters with pictures and sayings of Rakhmon have been put up. In public, each person must address Rakhmon as Chanobi Oli, or ‘Your Excellency.’ “

Face to Face With a Short Snorter for the First Time

Posted on February 7, 2023 by admin

After our walk in the forest on Sunday, we dropped by an antique mall that we visit occasionally, and I saw something I’d read about years earlier, but had never actually seen. And I mean many years ago – maybe as long ago as junior high in the mid-70s, when I was browsing through one of the dictionaries we had at home, as one did before the Internet. I did, anyway.

By chance one day, I happened across the term short snorter. Occasionally afterward I’d mention it to someone else, and no one had ever heard of it. But I didn’t forget. That’s the kind of obscurity worth treasuring. In more recent years, I found mention of them online.

There under glass on Sunday – which accounts for the glare – was a short snorter.

Evidently, this silver certificate began its career as a short snorter on July 11, 1944 at Crumlin, near Lough Neagh, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

In our time, naturally, there are web sites devoted to short snorters. Even so, I’m sure that most people still haven’t heard of them, since they seem to have faded after WWII, as lost to time time as A cards.

“A short snorter is a banknote which was signed by various persons traveling together or meeting up at different events and records who was met,” the Short Snorter Project says. “The tradition was started by bush pilots in Alaska in the 1920s and subsequently spread through the growth of military and commercial aviation. If you signed a short snorter and that person could not produce it upon request, they owed you a dollar or a drink.”

Not only was it a real thing, there are short snorters with names, as the page details, such as the General Hoyt Vandenberg Snorter, the Harry Hopkins Snorter and the Yalta Snorter, among others.

The page also claims that “short snorters come to light at coins shops and coin shows where most dealers pay very little for them as they are heavily worn and ‘not very collectible.’ ”

Tell that to the antique dealer offering the note I saw. The asking price: $95. Obscurity worth treasuring, maybe, but I wasn’t inclined to pay that much.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: numismatics