The Pun Also Rises(as seen in the North Adams Transcript)
"Dollars and Sense"I wonder if Snoop Doggy Dogg kept his spare change in a hat. I keep my spare change in an old helmet, and when I put it on without emptying it first, I've got my mind on my money and my money on my mind. Heck, all money is on my mind, and especially the dollar bill. Dollar bill is sort of a weird name for a dollar when you consider that it has a person on it who is not named bill. The picture is of a fellow named george, and by george, we buy things with george. We should say it's a dollar george, not a dollar bill. Rappers already refer to hundred dollar bills as benjamins. And the dollar coins are being named correctly, like the Sacajawea, of which you only ever seem to get one or two. My only complaint is that if I'm going to get a Sacajawea, I want to get a complete sack of jawea. I don't know what jawea is, but presuming it's a kind of money, I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy having a sack of it. Heck, we should add people's names to all our money. We'd have the dollar george, and the five-dollar abe (much preferable to the one-cent abe), and the quarter-george, which is conveniently worth one-quarter of the dollar george. If you hung up your dollar george with string and then pulled it apart, you'd draw and quarter george. Or if you had Gilbert Stuart and the White House, you could also draw and quarter george. Or if you're playing poker with an inside straight and the bet is 25 cents to you, you could draw and quarter george. Anwyay, you've got the quarter george, and the twenty jackson, and the two-buck tom (which everyone would call tombucktwo), and perhaps most importantly, the fifty-dollar grant. If you were going to sponsor an artist (such as a humor writer), you could say, "I'd like to give you a fifty-dollar grant." And then you could actually hand over a fifty-dollar grant. You wouldn't even have to say fifty; everyone would know that a grant is worth fifty dollars. This would save countless hours for the National Endowment for the Arts, who ought to give me a grant to work on this. Until they do, the nomenclature redesign is on hold. However, the government has been redesigning our paper money lately, in a move that makes most people unhappy. That's because most people don't like change. Then again, thanks to these redesigns, right now we don't like our paper money very much either. There's a comfort in a standard of green. Green is the color of grass, the color of Go!, telling you to keep on driving (the economy) as fast as you can. Red is the color of Stop!, which is why red money a bad idea, unless you're in China. When we changed the dollar bills, like the new 20s and 10s, we gave them more color. And the problem with this is that it made our money look more like Canadian money. As we know, the more color in money, the less valueable it is. American money is plain green, and has always been a standard of value for... well, the American dollar. Monopoly money is very colorful, and hence is completely worthless. Canadian money is sort of a halfway point between American money and Monopoly money. it's worth less than the American dollar because it's more colorful, but it's not quite as colorful as Monopoly money, so it's still worth something. When they added color to our dollar bills, they inherently reduced the value. Thankfully, so far the dollar george hasn't changed. But when people ask why American money was worth so much more half a century ago, it's because we didn't used to color everything. Nowadays we add color to everything and reduce value, from currency to classic movies. Maybe if we stop colorizing our money, we can combat inflation. Our money will be green, other countries will be green with envy, and rather than begging for bucks, we will once again hear the familar refrain: "Brother, can you spare an FDR?" ___________________________________ All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first. |