journal features

sold some silver coins

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2001.11.06

Finally got 'round to pricing the coins that Oma left us in May. My Opa paid about $3 per coin, back in the early seventies. I was offered $2.75. These were silver coins. If he'd bought rolls of quarters, they would have been worth more. I sold them anyway. The price of silver is pretty stable, and I don't need the moldy things in my apartment.

[Edit from 2021.07.07: Those coins would soon be worth at least three times that. All you needed was some cleaning fluid.]

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)