UTF-8 to the rescue!
Üm̈läüẗ
What? No LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH DIAERESIS? That’s outrageous!
2 Likes
I’m sure if you handed them off to any competent Dungeon Master, they’d be able to do something with them. 
5 Likes
I did a little research yesterday after @renke set me straight… The good news is, that’s a little over 300 Euros. But I have to go to a Bundesbank HQ or branch in Germany to redeem them or mail them in, which is sketchy. I’m going to France in July to chase a few stages of the Tour de France, maybe I can hop a train and find a Bundesbank and cash them in. The 300 Euros would almost pay for the trip to redeem them!
5 Likes
I wish the US would just follow Canada’s lead and simply stop using the damn things.
2 Likes
hey, you mailed me only 165 DM or ~ 85 EUR!
2 Likes
That wasn’t all of them, just what I could lay my hands on at that particular moment. I also have some more small bills, and a 500 DM that’s pinned to the bulletin board in the office because I love the picture. (The 500 DM note has a beautiful engraving of Eltz Castle on the back.) It was art when I thought it was worthless… but hey, 250 € is 250 €!
7 Likes
I used to visit the vault at this one place that I worked and they had a “collection” of counterfeit bills arrayed along one of the walls. I was so fascinated by those bills that I wanted to “collect” some myself. Sadly, such a collection is illegal.
What particularly interested me was that the bills fell into an easy categorization: They were either hilarious (“Wow, they bothered to put in the watermark! But Andrew Jackson looks like the botched Ecce Homo!”) or awe-inspiring (“Such talent shouldn’t be wasted on knocking off a five dollar bill”). Very few of the bills were what I would call “rational.” The good ones smacked of too much effort for a long, slow return. The bad ones screamed, “I drew this! Tape it to the refrigerator door!”
3 Likes
Seriously, you can turn that in for 250 Euros? SCORE!
I wish old postage stamps hold their value.
Like a US stamp from the 30s would probably be 3 cents, and unused, it would be worth at least that as postage. Some were as high as $5 or even $10. They could still be used at that price for postage (though unused, worth A LOT more on the collectors market.)
But during the 30s the German depression and rampant inflation lead to stamps being made into hundreds of thousands of Marks, into MILLIONS. Eventually they had to just over print old stamps or blank stamps to keep up with the inflation.
2 Likes
Now you have me imagining that with a sign taped on that says “Chip reader not enabled.”
4 Likes
Also racetracks.
When I was a bobling, my family visited a racetrack for some reason, and I was allowed to make bets (despite being maybe 12 or 13, which in retrospect it seems weird that was legal (in Pennsylvania)). They had a $2 bets window which mostly dealt in $2 bills, and I was like wtf even is this.
1 Like
If only they thought to buy a couple of $499,742 Barnes & Noble cards plus maybe some clay birds. A launcher seems extravagant, though.
There are many over-the-counter remedies that claim to provide prompt relief from symptoms.
6 Likes
There are stripper horses? American Pharaoh-oh-oh! 
1 Like
in 1984, when i was a jesse jackson delegate to the texas state democratic convention, i frequently met along with other delegates and party members at the county democratic party headquarters. i was also a member of the naacp at the time. as a crossover activity between those two organizations we were changing our cash into $2 bills and using them for all of our local expenses–gas purchases, groceries, cattle feed, etc. for a week. this was followed up by a letter to the editor to the weekly newspapers in the two main towns of our county pointing out to retailers that all of those $2 bills represented a week’s buying power from the black community and that trade could go out of the county if they didn’t make sure to treat their black customers better. in the entire week, no one was accused of trying to pass counterfeit bills. how things change.
11 Likes
Surprised you didn’t get any pushback from the “Jefferson owned slaves, therefore nothing he did or said has any merit” absolutists. Maybe that wasn’t a thing yet in '84?
1 Like
Late to the party here, but the last run of $2 bills was in 2014. It’s not like they’re particularly rare, people just don’t spend them. I can’t find any confirmation that the comment that they are no longer printed is true either. The one pictured is obviously older though, with the red seal and serial numbers.
1 Like
bits of interesting trivia mixed up with a whole lot of dubious politics.
1 Like
Of course it’s Texas. “Ah done never heard o’ none two doller bee-yill. Thet there’s gotta be counterfee-it. Ahm gonna git me a permotion fer this’n - yee-haw.”
2 Likes
A long long time ago, I used to work in a fast food restaurant (or two, who can say for sure 
). But definitely not in Texas. Every so often someone would bring in a $2 bill. If I took it, no big deal. If someone else got the bill, folks reacted in dramatic ways. Not to the level of calling the cops (I don’t think any of us were the snitching sort).
I don’t know how it is everywhere else in the U.S. but it’s definitely not just Texas that’s largely unaware of the $2 bill.
As far as I can tell, it’s just like anything else. If it doesn’t happen often, a lot of people won’t know about it. Or will forget even if they do.
Hell, I hear stories (plausible ones; anecdote =/= data disclaimer) a few times a year about cops who don’t know some of the basic traffic laws particularly well.
The underlying causes aren’t a Texas thing. And I’m not bringing that up to defend Texas. If we cordon Texas off and pretend a bigger problem is just a Texas problem, it’s easy to lose sight of the same types of failings in ourselves.
6 Likes
Pretty sure it’s an education problem.
If you compare the textbooks used in Texas schools with the textbooks Texas forces everyone else to use you notice a difference pretty quickly.
Hint: The ones a lot of Texas schools use reference “the war of northern aggression” and have phrases like “the average size of the negro skull indicates…”
5 Likes
