¢.

Today, the United States minted its last penny, at least for the foreseeable future.

This should probably have been done decades ago, given rising production costs and inflation. But then, what would we use to buy gumballs, or to flatten-and-stamp into souvenirs, or to toss into fountains and wishing wells? Nickels? Please.

I doubt anyone outside of numismatists and coin collectors would have noticed, except for the announcements. Pennies will still circulate for a good long while, and some cash places will round up, or round down, or keep pennies near the register for convenience’s sake.

You’ll still see prices and bills ending in $.01, or $.02, and so on, just like we have gasoline and property taxes priced to the mill– a thousandth of a dollar– despite not having a mill coin since… ever.

Of course, you’ll also occasionally run into cashiers or vendors claiming that since physical pennies aren’t being minted anymore, abstract pennies somehow don’t exist anymore, so we have to round everything up. And then you’ll point out that they could just as easily round everything down. And then you’ll remind them of gasoline and property taxes, and they’ll act confused– or maybe they’ll actually be confused. New rounding schemes and new rounding scams will emerge, and… we’ll get used to them.

Anyhow. It disturbs me to think that the penny is rolling faster down the way of the dodo. I suspect that’s a little bit of worry about inflation, and a whole lot of shaking my fist at the clouds. To think that the obverse of the 1943 steel penny once served as favicon and graced the background of this august journal.

…

I am reminded of an open letter I wrote many years ago to then-President-elect Obama, in hopes of winning a patronage job:

7. Announce that pennies now count as nickels, and then slowly take them out of circulation, replacing them with real nickels. Put Lincoln on new dollar coins the size of the old Ike dollars. Also, start printing $500 bills again. I am not a crackpot.

–Me, “Advice as promised.”

Inflationary? Yes. As inflationary as anything else the feds have done in the meantime? No. Self-serving, given the countless rolls of pennies I’ve stashed in caches and safehouses all over the country? Possibly.

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Vent’anni!

Today marks twenty years since I started blogging. I bought viscariello.com in May of 2005 with the intention of making it a bit easier to keep in touch with friends and family after I moved to Chicago. In September, I decided to play around with the WordPress blogging software that came with a StartLogic site. Sitting at a small writing desk in my three-flat apartment in Wheaton, I tapped away on an old laptop, and produced the following:

Testing. Testing. This is my first attempt at a “web log,” or “blog,” as it were. Blog blog blog. Blog blog.

–Me, “First post,” September 1, 2005.

I look back on these last two decades of blogging– which was really ten years of blogging and ten years of occasionally remembering that I have a blog– and think:

…I forgot that “blog” was short for “web log.”

…it was so much trickier to run the website and blog back then. I would repeatedly accidentally erase everything by somehow screwing up the WordPress updates. I’d panic for a few hours, finally figure out how to restore it, make an ugly mess of the whole thing, add a “Part II” or “Part III” to the end of the blog title to indicate a restart before abandoning the practice because it technically didn’t make sense because it wasn’t an nth volume because all— not some— of my posts were still present, curse StartLogic and WordPress for not making the whole thing much easier, realize a few days later that they had, in fact, made it easier and I just hadn’t read the instructions closely enough, and then carry on writing. Then I just switched everything over to WordPress hosting and everything got much easier.

…I don’t write often enough to justify calling it a “journal,” which suggests something written daily, or at least more regularly than “whenever I feel like it.” Maybe a fifth or sixth name change is in order. Or maybe I should write more.

…the blog was a new and different way to connect with people. That way was quickly eclipsed by social media, messenger apps and groups, and real monetizable subscription platforms. Ah well.

…it once rekindled the embers of a long-lost love, but there’s been some upside, too. It opened dialogue with distant relatives the world over. It helped me get and keep in touch with old friends, colleagues, students, and so forth. And if Akismet and Jetpack are to be believed, I make hundreds, sometimes thousands of new bot-friends every day. They’ll come in handy post-singularity.

…it revealed, and reminds me, that what I find amusing is not the same as what others do, and that I don’t care.

…it is nothing profound, but it is fun.

Posted on by VDV 0

Questionnaire 21.

Haven’t done this in a while. The following attempt to make gypsum of the old writer’s block came from this hyperlinked oh wait it’s not there anymore. Probably should have finished writing this a year ago, when I first started.

https://www.tinypulse.com/blog/sk-questions-to-ask-employees

1. WHO INSPIRED YOU TO PURSUE THE CAREER YOU HAVE TODAY? Whoever tinkered with the brakes on the industrial tugger that nearly killed me. That guy inspired me to get a marginally less dangerous job.

2. WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC GENRE? Soundtracks. 

3. DO YOU HAVE A PET? WHAT’S HE/SHE LIKE? Now I do. I discovered a mouse– possibly a rat, possibly a really tiny nutria, didn’t get that good a look at it before it got away– in my classroom closet the other day. Can’t say I’ve known it long enough to comment on its personality.

4. RECOMMEND A BOOK YOU RECENTLY READ. The White Pill. Largely but certainly not exclusively a history of Soviet communism, its engineers, and its полезные дураки.

5. WHAT’S YOUR SECRET TALENT THAT NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT? Nice try, FBI.

6. WHICH MOVIE HAVE YOU SEEN RECENTLY OR WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING ON NETFLIX? 3 Body Problem. I loved the novels and was prepared to be disappointed by the occasional minds that brought us the last few years of Game of Thrones. There is some naughty language and a scene of horrifying nudity, but aside from that the disappointment has not yet materialized. They’ve made some good choices about what to trim, modify, and gloss over from the novels.

7. WHAT’S THE CRAZIEST THING YOU’VE EVER DONE OR SEEN BEFORE? Too many things come to mind. I’ll go with switching to strawberry jelly for PB&Js. Thank God everything turned out OK.

8. WHAT’S THE BEST MEAL YOU’VE EVER HAD? This is tough. I’ll have to go with the ribeye dinner I had for my 40th birthday. The steak is still ranked just third on the list of all steaks I’ve ever had, but the lobster bisque and risotto elevated it to the top spot in the Meal category. And this ranking doesn’t even include the birthday cake, which was top-5 all-time.

9. WHAT ARE YOUR PET PEEVES? …Nice try, FBI.

10. DO YOU HAVE TRADITIONS IN YOUR FAMILY? Yes.

11. WHAT WAS THE FIRST THING YOU BOUGHT WITH YOUR OWN MONEY? This is tough, for a few reasons. First, it depends on what you mean by “your own money.” Certain cynics, philosophers, ancestors, and federal officials would contend that none of my money is actually my own money. And there might be a distinction between money I earned and money given to me as a gift. But the earliest thing that I absolutely know I bought with my own earned money was a six-nugget combo at a KFC on San Jose. That was in 1992, and I want to say it was about $3.19.

12. IS THERE SOMETHING THAT HAS MADE YOU SMILE RECENTLY? The “check engine” light turning off for no apparent reason.

13. WHAT’S THE BEST ADVICE YOU CAN GIVE TO SOMEONE WHO JUST STARTED THEIR CAREER? It’s easier to find a job when you already have a job than when you don’t. So if you hate your job, then (barring egregious harassment or abuse) keep it until you get your new one. Probably not the sort of advice you wanted, but it’s the best I can do.

14. WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE VIDEO/BOARD GAMES AND WHY? My favorite video game is Pac-Man because I understand it. My favorite board game is chess because I don’t understand it. Great subject-verb agreement, by the way.

15. DO YOU COOK? WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE RECIPE? Yes. Take steak out of fridge. Salt both sides. Wait an hour. Cook in oven for a little bit, then sear both sides in a hot pan for a little bit. Do this until it’s right. Then stop. Then wait five minutes. Then eat it.  

16. PINEAPPLE PIZZA. YAY OR NAY? Nay. I don’t think less of anyone for wanting pineapple on pizza.

17. WHAT IS THE STRANGEST MEAL YOU’VE EVER EATEN? Eel sushi. It wasn’t bad at all, but… jeez, burger place was right next door. I couldn’t help but wonder what the point was, and what it meant about where my life had taken me.

…

Just thought of another one: apples and sliced garlic. Not terrible, but strange.

18. WHAT’S YOUR WEIRDEST HABIT? I started crossing my 0s, 7s, and Zs to be ironic, and now I can’t stop.

19. ARE YOU A BEER OR WINE PERSON? No.

20. WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE BAND 10 YEARS AGO? 10 years ago, might’ve been The The.

21. IF YOU HAD A YACHT, WHAT WOULD YOU NAME IT? e24.

22. WHICH FICTIONAL FAMILY WOULD YOU WANT TO BE PART OF? The House of El.

23. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR JOB TO A BUNCH OF FIVE-YEAR-OLDS? “I teach big kids.”

24. SHOW THE BEST MEME YOU HAVE IN YOUR PHONE. I don’t store memes in my phone. I store photographs of credit card receipts and regular household items whose locations I might forget.

25. HOW WOULD YOU SPEND A MILLION DOLLARS IN 24 HOURS? Pay off my mortgage and buy as much real estate as possible.

26. WHAT’S THE COOLEST THING YOU’RE WORKING ON RIGHT NOW? This.

27. HOW DO YOU LIKE TO GET FEEDBACK? From downrange, for the sake of a quick retort.

28. WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB? Lining (back before it was called “A-R-ing”) youth soccer for literally a couple bucks a game. But my first tax-paying job was as a clerk selling shoes and other soccer-related sundries at the Soccer Stop on San Jose.

29. IF YOU COULD GET A NEW SKILL IN 10 MINUTES, WHAT WOULD IT BE? Breathing properly while asleep. That would undoubtedly provide the fastest improvement to my life.

30. WHAT ARE THE TOUGHEST CHALLENGES YOU’VE HAD AT WORK? …Nice try, DCPS.

31. WHAT UPCOMING TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION WILL DRAMATICALLY IMPACT THE INDUSTRY IN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS? AI. More specifically, the increasingly rapid developments in AI are forcing us to determine what students need to have in their brains vs. what they need to know how to look up, or use AI to find.

32. WHAT SKILLS DO YOU THINK EVERYONE SHOULD LEARN? Digital-age critical thought. Car repair. Home repair. Cooking. Weightlifting. Stretching.

33. HAVE YOU TAKEN A HUGE LEAP OF FAITH AT WORK? DID IT PAY OFF? I do not take huge leaps of faith at work. My God, man, I work with humans in loco parentis. They aren’t to be gambled with.

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Fourth of July, 2025!

Happy 249th birthday to the United States, and happy 153rd birthday to Calvin Coolidge! One year to the quarter-millennium!

…

In Boston, in the years leading up to the Revolution, there was a prominent “Liberty Tree,” to which Thomas Paine wrote the following ode in 1775:

In a chariot of light, from the regions of the day,
The Goddess of Liberty came,
Ten thousand celestials directed her way,
And hither conducted the dame.
A fair budding branch from the gardens above,
Where millions with millions agree,
She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,
And the plant she named Liberty Tree.

The celestial exotic stuck deep in the ground,
Like a native it flourished and bore;
The fame of its fruit drew the nations around,
To seek out this peaceable shore.
Unmindful of names or distinctions they came,
For freemen like brothers agree;
With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued,
And their temple was Liberty Tree.

Beneath this fair tree, like the patriarchs of old,
Their bread in contentment they ate,
Unvexed with the troubles of silver or gold,
The cares of the grand and the great.
With timber and tar they Old England supplied,
And supported her power on the sea;
Her battles they fought, without getting a groat,
For the honor of Liberty Tree.

But hear, O ye swains (’tis a tale most profane),
How all the tyrannical powers,
Kings, Commons and Lords, are uniting amain
To cut down this guardian of ours.
From the East to the West blow the trumpet to arms,
Thro’ the land let the sound of it flee;
Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer,
In defense of our Liberty Tree.

…

God bless America!

Posted on by VDV 0