Can’t hurt to ask the League to do the logical thing and take advantage of the long weekend. It’s what Washington would have wanted.
Granted, certain years it’ll make for an awkwardly early romantic lunch, but we’ll see what Saint Nicholas can work out with fellow Saint Valentine.
Merry Christmas!
I was going to save this for when it actually comes out, but who controls… never mind. Here:
“Do you know where you are, Winston?” asked O’Brien.
“I don’t know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.”
“Do you know how long you have been here?”
“I don’t know. Days, weeks, months–I think it is months.”
“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?”
“To make them confess.”
“’No, that is not the reason. Try again.”
“To punish them.”
“No!” exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. “No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?”
O’Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a level with Winston’s.
“Look me in the eyes. What is Animal Farm about?”
Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Animal Farm and that he himself had read Animal Farm. He also remembered it was about Stalin and the Bolsheviks, but whether it favored or criticized them he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any message, just a bunch of talking animals and a vague sense that the horse had been wronged.
“I don’t remember.”
“Animal Farm is anti-capitalist. Do you remember that now?”
“Yes.”
“Animal Farm has always been anti-capitalist. Since Orwell first wrote it in World War II, since the dawn of dystopian literature, since the literal beginning of time itself, it has been anti-capitalist, without a break, always the same. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Decades ago you created a legend– that a man named Cliff wrote yellow study guides about classic literature. You pretended that you read one claiming Animal Farm was an anti-Stalinist allegory, because you were too lazy to read the actual book, which was just, like, ninety pages. Even with illustrations. But no such study guide never existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
“There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?”
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.
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.
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.