¨rë¨n¨kë…nah, that’s too messy to be German!
(Apparently no amount of code – that I could find – will put an umlaut directly over a consonant.)
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I guess “Spending Legal Currency While Black” is now a crime.
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UTF-8 to the rescue!
Üm̈läüẗ
What? No LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH DIAERESIS? That’s outrageous!
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I’m sure if you handed them off to any competent Dungeon Master, they’d be able to do something with them. 
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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!
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I wish the US would just follow Canada’s lead and simply stop using the damn things.
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hey, you mailed me only 165 DM or ~ 85 EUR!
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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 €!
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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!”
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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.
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Now you have me imagining that with a sign taped on that says “Chip reader not enabled.”
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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.
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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.
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There are stripper horses? American Pharaoh-oh-oh! 
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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.
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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?
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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.
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bits of interesting trivia mixed up with a whole lot of dubious politics.
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