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Posted on 02.25.09 by Danny Glover @ 9:31 am
I’ll wait for local banks to get a supply of the new pennies rather than pay a huge premium for a coin that isn’t even worth the metal used to make it, but I am eager to see it in circulation. As for the fate of the penny, count me among those who wish the government would take it out of circulation. The penny long ago lost its value as a useful tool of commerce. Filed under: Coin Collecting Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 02.18.09 by Danny Glover @ 4:54 pm
So it turns out that some of those coins advertised every hour on television, radio and the Internet leading up to Barack Obama’s inauguration are just ordinary coins with stickers on them.
I actually ordered two of the Obama coins to use as a prop in a humor video about what The One’s two mites will buy you. I lost that job before the coins arrived at my office within The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, but I knew the coins weren’t anywhere near the $20 I paid for them. Good ol’ redneck common sense will tell you that those kinds of mementos are worthless. If you’re willing to pay your hard-earned cash toward funny money, Chia pets and other trinkets of “hope” and “change,” expect to get what you pay for. And don’t whine to the rest of us who knew better from the get-go. Filed under: Coin Collecting and Culture and Just For Laughs and People Comments: None |
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Posted on 02.14.09 by Danny Glover @ 12:38 pm
I had a cheap metal detector for a few years when I was young but never found much of anything. Stories like this make me want to try again as an adult, with a better metal detector:
The searchers– one of whom was quoted as saying, “It was the find of a lifetime” — have a great attitude about the treasure they found. “All I want is to see the coins on display with my name and the landowner’s name next to it,” Fox said. “That would be fantastic, The money is not important. It is the history that counts.” Filed under: Coin Collecting and History Comments: None |
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Posted on 02.12.09 by Danny Glover @ 2:40 pm
Abraham Lincoln, America’s greatest president ever in my book for his leadership in abolishing slavery and winning the Civil War, would have been 200 today. Americans will have plenty of opportunities to think about Lincoln this year and in the future as they sift through their change because the U.S. Mint today released the first of four redesigns of the cent design initiated in memory of Lincoln 100 years ago. The Lincoln penny is the oldest coin design in U.S. history; it has been changed significantly only once, in 1959 when the reverse design was changed from wheat stalks to the image of the Lincoln Memorial. The new reverse designs will feature representations of the various stages of Lincoln’s life — the log cabin of his childhood, his youth in Indiana, his professional career in Illinois and his presidency in Washington. Here are the designs:
This momentous change in coinage, something that soon will be apparent to everyone who still buys goods with hard currency instead of credit cards, presents a great opportunity for parents to teach their children about the impact that Abraham Lincoln had in U.S. history. We’ll definitely be having some Lincoln lessons in the Glover Home School. Filed under: Coin Collecting and Family and History and Home Schooling and Human Interest and News & Politics and People Comments: 3 Comments |
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Posted on 02.05.09 by Danny Glover @ 8:34 pm
As a coin collector, I love hearing the stories of long-forgotten treasures suddenly being unearthed on the bottom of the ocean. When Odyssey Marine Exploration found the S.S. Republic off the coast of Georgia in 2003, I kept wishing I had the kind of disposable income that would have enabled me to buy one of the coins from the find. Odyssey has been in the news again the past several days thanks to another discovery — that of the famed British naval ship HMS Victory, which sank somewhere in the English Channel in 1744. Technology is so advanced these days that treasure hunters like those who work for Odyssey no longer appear to be hopeless dreamers. They’re finding ships with tons of coins and other treasures on them. I can’t wait to learn more about the Victory by watching Discovery Channel tonight. Filed under: Coin Collecting and History and Human Interest and News & Politics Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 2:49 pm
In the past decade, America has seen the bursting of investment bubble after investment bubble. The dot-com stock crash came first, teaching people that as a general rule, you’re more likely to lose a fortune than get rich by jumping on the bandwagon of overvalued companies. More recently, the U.S. economy has been hobbled by real-world lessons about real estate, the downward spiral of the stock market as a whole, and the sudden rise and fall of oil futures.
Can you say gold bubble? Wake up, America. If you weren’t investing in gold before 2008, now isn’t the time to start. The bullion market, like dot-com companies, real estate, the stock as a whole and oil futures before them, seems ripe for a crash. The same is true for silver. If I had money to spare — and I don’t — I wouldn’t be buying gold or silver with it. But I do wish I had bought some earlier this decade when prices were relatively low. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Filed under: Business and Coin Collecting Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.01.09 by Danny Glover @ 4:27 pm
And it has nothing to do with Barack Obama. The kind of change I’m talking about will be found in pockets and pocketbooks all across America — new reverse designs on the Lincoln penny, which is the U.S. coin with the longest run in circulation (100 years). The question is, will anyone notice the change to the Lincoln cent. No one has paid much attention to their pennies in decades. I’m a coin collector and I tend to throw my pennies in a jar and only look through them at the end of the year to make sure I remove the older “wheat” cents dated before 1959, which is the last time the design changed. There’s a good case to be made for killing off the penny altogether. There’s an even better case to be made for eliminating dollar bills in favor of dollar coins. Doing so would save the government money and could help the environment. I occasionally buy rolls of dollar coins and spend them to do my part in circulating them, but I suspect they end up back in a bank, piggy or otherwise, within days, never to be spent again. I’m not sure America will ever let go of its pennies and dollar bills, no matter how much sense it makes. Filed under: Business and Coin Collecting and Culture and Government Comments: None |
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Posted on 12.31.08 by Danny Glover @ 5:00 pm
The 50 State Quarters Program that began in 1999 was a stroke of marketing genius that benefited the U.S. Mint, the state histories they celebrated and the numismatic community. On a personal note, the program revived my interest in coin collecting at a time when I actually had some disposable income. I collected coins as a kid by buying rolls of pennies and nickels from the bank, searching them for the oldest dates, and exchanging them over and over again for new rolls. But that meant my collection was largely limited to a bunch of common-date wheat pennies and well-worn Jefferson nickels. I never even bought the relatively inexpensive annual sets of coins sold by the Mint back then. That’s the first thing I started doing when the state quarters were introduced. But it was just the beginning of my renewed love of coins. I paid closer attention to my change and found surprises like a 1920 buffalo nickel and two pre-1965 silver coins; I bought even larger batches of rolled coins (including half-dollars) from local banks and found even better coins; I became a regular at the local coin show every three months; and I visited estate sales, antique stores and pawn shops.
Filed under: Coin Collecting and Hobbies Comments: 1 Comment |
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