Monthly Archives: February 2021

20 Cruzeiros, Brazil

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This note is worth a little as a collectable. At least, I’ve seen one like it for sale online for about 5 euros.
It’s a 1962 series 20 cruzeiros banknote from Brazil. I don’t remember where I got it, but I doubt I paid anything close to that much. The note is demonetized, long since replaced by the Brazilian real. A large selection of Brazilian currency can be seen here.

Apparently the name literally means “large cross” in Portuguese. Referring to my old friend, the Southern Cross.

Crux appears on the Brazilian flag, of course — it’s no monopoly of Australia or New Zealand (or Papua New Guinea or Samoa) — but it occurred to me I didn’t know much about the other stars on the flag. Turns out the number of stars is the same as the number of Brazilian states, same idea as with the Stars and Stripes. Stars are likewise added when states are created, and that’s happened as recently as 1992.

But unlike the U.S. flag, the Brazilian stars are arrayed in constellations you’d see in the southern skies. Also, Wiki makes this claim: “According to Brazil’s national act number 5,700 of 1 September 1971, the flag portrays the stars as they would be seen by an imaginary observer an infinite distance above Rio de Janeiro standing outside the firmament in which the stars are meant to be placed (i.e., as found on a celestial globe).”

Depicted on the note is Manoel Deodoro da Fonseca, the impressively whiskered leader, or maybe the figurehead, of the coup that deposed Emperor Dom Pedro II and ended the Empire of Brazil, becoming the first president of the Republic of the United States of Brazil.

Too bad about that, I always thought. It was a constitutional monarchy, after all, and could still be. The Americas could use at least one besides those technically British still. That might also have prevented some of the 20th-century political mischief in Brazil, who knows.

Be that as it may, this is the reverse, with a personification of Brazil proclaiming the republic, based on the painting “Proclamação da República” by painting by fluminense artist Cadmo Fausto de Souza (1901-83).

The note is another of the prodigious and expert output of Thomas De La Rue & Co. Ltd., London. The company’s still around, known as DeLaRue plc., and still designs banknotes, and a lot else besides.

1000 Won

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I picked up this 1000 won note in South Korea in 1990. (₩ 1,000)
I haven’t done well by holding on it, at least not financially. It seems inflation has been fairly consistent in that country for the last 30 years, and a handy inflation calculator for won — I’m still amazed what’s on line — tells me that you’d need ₩ 2,773 these days to have the same purchasing power.

Then again, ₩ 1000 = about 90 U.S. cents, so I haven’t lost a fortune by letting the value of my note erode over the years. It’s been worth it to me as a collector of small-potatoes banknotes, besides being a souvenir of my week on the Korean peninsula. Also, I like the aesthetics of the note.

Won is a cognate of the Chinese yuan and Japanese yen, essentially meaning “round.” The modern won is technically divided into 100 jeon, just as the Japanese yen is divided into 100 sen, but those are units about as useful as the U.S. mill.

My note is part of an older series, 1983-2002, but I can’t find any indication that it has been demonetized. The gentleman on the obverse is Yi Hwang (1501-1570), a prominent Korean Confucian scholar of his day.

That name is a McCune-Reischauer romanization, and Wiki at least says that he had no fewer than four different names: a Korean name, a pen name, a courtesy name and a posthumous name. In order, these are the names in hangul, just because I can: 이황, 퇴계, 경호, and 문순.

The reverse features, fittingly enough, the Dosan Seowon (Dosan Confucian Academy), established in 1574 in memory of Yi Hwang.

Lately (2019) the place was designated a World Heritage Site.

Moose & Squirrel Money

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More snow today. Makes me wonder about the personification Old Man Winter. He’s pretty spry this February, that old man.

Tucked away in my stash of near-worthless banknotes are a few from Belarus, a former Soviet republic that retains more than a few vestiges of the red old days, I’ve read, such as autocracy and a heaping-helping of central planning.

Its base currency is the ruble, too. In theory a Belarusian ruble is worth about 38 US cents these days, but not these notes: there was a redenomination later.

This is the obverse of the 25-ruble note, from a series that began in 1992 and lasted until 2000. The notes’ size is pretty close to that of Monopoly money. Were those dimensions an inside joke on someone’s part?
belarus 25 rublesMoose money. Belarus also used to have squirrel money.
Not 50 rubles, as I thought as first, but 50 kopecks. I suppose moose ought to be a lot larger than squirrel. Not that Belarus’ currency was ever really that large. According to Wiki, the ’92 series was “introduced in denominations of 50 copecks, 1, 3, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1,000 and 5,000 rubles.”

3? Yes. Sorry I didn’t get one of those when I bought my wad of 50 or so international banknotes for pennies apiece.

Anyway, inflation soon kicked in: “These [denominations] were followed by 20,000 rubles in 1994, 50,000 rubles in 1995, 100,000 rubles in 1996, 500,000 rubles in 1998 and 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 rubles in 1999.”

The reverse of the old ruble notes are all roughly the same. At least, mine are — different only in color.
The horse and rider is referred to as Pahonia, I understand, and is of considerable age, but I don’t want to go too deep into its history at the moment. As a symbol of Belarus, it seems to have been revived after the end of the Soviet Union, but not for long. Long enough to be on my moose and squirrel money, however.

Sinclair Dinosaur, Eastern Iowa, 2001

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Here we are in the Mariana Trench of winter. A little later than usual, but well within the scope of a normal winter.

The headline above pretty much says it all. Twenty years ago this month, when we visited eastern Iowa for a long weekend, I spotted a Sinclair dinosaur in that part of the state.Sinclair dinosaur Iowa 2001

I’d have said at the time that as advertising, the heyday of the Sinclair dinosaur was long over. But I would have been wrong. It’s just that I didn’t see them around much in the Chicago area, so that when I spotted one out of town, it struck me as a novelty, or maybe something left over from an earlier decade. That’s probably why I bothered to take a picture.

Just do a Google image search and plenty of fairly recent green fiberglass dinosaurs appear. Wiki asserts that many of the dinosaur-sporting Sinclair stations are along I-80 in our time, and while I’m not quite sure where in Iowa I took the picture, we weren’t far from that road.

“Sinclair Oil began using an Apatosaurus (then called a Brontosaurus) in its advertising, sales promotions and product labels in 1930. Children loved it,” the blog of the American Oil & Gas Historic Society says, also noting the popular notion at the time that dinosaurs decayed into the oil that mankind had found.

Of course, Sinclair Oil itself has a lot to say about its brontosaurus. I particularly recommend the short video at the Sinclair site about Sinclair at the World’s Fair in 1964.

As a small child, I had a green plastic brontosaurus bank, into whose slot I put pennies, nickels and less frequently other coins. I suspect my mother got it as a premium for buying gas from Sinclair.

The coins in that bank taught me, among other things, that some of the older ones were silver, while the newer ones — not nearly as satisfying as coins — were some weird mix of copper and nickel. I’m fairly sure I actually learned about silver and non-silver coinage from one of my brothers. But having the coins probably promoted me to ask them questions in the first place, such as, why are these different from the others?

Weekend at Home Ahead

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No picturesque sunset today. Not around here, anyway.

From the NWS recently:

WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL NOON CST FRIDAY…

* WHAT… Periods of snow through mid evening with an additional 1 to 2 inches possible. West winds will gust as high as 45 mph this evening, and this will result in significant blowing and drifting snow. The worst conditions are expected this evening.

* WHERE … Portions of north central and northeast Illinois, including the Chicago metro.

Not bad except for the wind. I expect some odd snow shapes in the yard when I go out to shovel in the morning. If only the wind would sculpt the snow into ridges paralleling my driveway, with little in it.

Not likely. Also, where’s that snow-blowing robot? Well, here. Looks like it’s still in beta, though — crowdfunding’s a giveaway — and probably costs a fortune anyway. But there’s always the hard-core solution to accumulated snow. Probably illegal in the suburbs. Something Florida Man might do, expect he’d be hard-pressed to find any snow. Maybe Florida Man’s cousin in the UP would.

What a treasure cave YouTube is. A good thing if you have to be at home, which is the way it would mostly be even during an ordinary February. First, a band that owes much to Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, and they do well with it. I’m sure the luminous Tatiana Eva Marie, the lead singer, must have been influenced by Francophone chanteuses, but I’m too ignorant to know who.

I know nothing about Armenian folk songs. If one of the comments under this video is to be believed, this sweet tune is a song of resistance against the enemies of the Armenian people, and everyone knows who they are.

Old song, young voice: Rachael Price. That’s the case for the other singers as well.

A weekend’s a weekend, and a thing to savor if possible.

Torches Light the Western Sky

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Gorgeous sunset today, this early February day in northern Illinois. Much more so for my eyes than a mere photograph indicates. More brilliant pink was mixed in than in this unadjusted shot, for instance.
But I can play with the photographic image, something I can’t do with my eyes. This strikes me as a bit closer to what I saw.
I didn’t see this, but monochrome does bring out some textures.
Luckily I didn’t see it this way, as if a nuclear device has gone off in the distance.
So eyes are the thing. That’s (one) reason to continue to send people into space. No matter how good the mechanical images are — and some are astonishing — that isn’t the same as human eyes beholding a sight.

Icicles

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After the most recent snow, temps have been close to freezing, and the sun came out. That meant the formation of icicles.
That melting dynamic won’t last long.
Don’t like the looks of that. I thought the border with Canada was closed. Anyway, we aren’t going to get away with a mild winter after all.

Ann at 18

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No more minors in the house. No miners, either, but that’s a different matter.

Ann’s birthday pie, chocolate cream, with a 1 standing in for a decade, and because we didn’t have an 8, there are eight smaller candles, one per year, to go with the decade.
Ann is wearing a birthday present, one of those hoodies you wear inside to keep warm. Lilly is watching on the screen behind the pie.
They say your kids grow up fast. Nah. It’s taken a while.