I wrote it on a couple of fifties this weekend.

I have done this off and on for a long time. For a while I was leaving scraps of paper with this website's hand-written URL in library books at the Donnell library in midtown, and at the Lincoln Center public library. I left dollar bills with this website's URL written on them in some of those library books. I have done this since 1994, though never in a very systematic or consistent way.

Maybe I will get a rubber stamp and ink pad made so that it is not so much work to write the whole thing out. I have such a hard time writing the letter J so that it looks like an actual J, and writing on money is a hassle anyway. I also have a tough time writing the letter W so that it does not look breasts or a butt.

After the rubber stamp I could develop a line of coffee mugs, bumper stickers, post cards, and other www.sorabji.com detritus.

The pile of bills accumulated into a fair amount of money, and there came a day when I needed to buy groceries, so I scanned most of those bills, intending to put the pictures up on some website somewhere. I spent the bills. But all the scans were lost when my computer crapped out once and for all last month. The scans may still be in there on the D: drive, but I don't have the time or energy to do combat with a recalcitrant computer any more, so I just bought a new computer and decided to forget about it.

I used to have a lot of the lore about paper money memorized. Maybe I still do. Let's see...

The $100,000, with Woodrow Wilson's face, is the largest U.S. bill ever made and is not used in general circulation. I think the same is true of the $1,000; $5,000; and $10,000 bills.

Benjamin Franklin is the only non-president pictured on publicly used paper currency (Salmon P. Chase is on the $10,000 bill).

In grade school I started a long conversation with the others about the back of the $2 bill. It depicts the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but there appears to be an African-American in the galley, and after some research we concluded that only whites were actually present at the signing (our research may have been faulty - this was the 4th or 5th grade). I think we concluded that the skin color of the person in that picture was not clearly determinable.

Digital cash is being tested in Manhattan and other parts of the country, and from what I've heard the tests are mostly failing. I suspect it is because there is no demand for getting rid of cash, and that most people like it just fine.

Mint employees can be punished with death for defacing coins.

In the 3rd Grade I found my parents' hermetically sealed Franklin Mint coin collections and broke open a few of them. I used those mint coins to buy orange juice and Eli Witt food from the school vending machines.

I guess some of that does not really qualify as "lore" but more like personal anecdote.

I had a brief interest in the work of a Tampa-based artist named J.S.G. Boggs who has made something of a career out of making artistic renditions of money and taunting the Secret Service with them by passing them off as an alternative form of currency. Well, maybe "taunting" is not the right word, but he does seem to enjoy himself.

Title 18, Section 504, of the U.S. Code states (in reference to counterfeiting and/or otherwise visually representing U.S. currency):

(i) all illustrations shall
be in black and white [...]
(ii) all illustrations [...] shall be
of a size less than three-fourths or
more than one and one-half,
in linear dimension [...]

It is illegal to replicate money in certain ways, and Boggs has evidently come very close to crossing the line. Or maybe he has crossed the line.

I heard on the news that as much as 1% of all currency is counterfeit, and occasionally I worry that a dyspeptic cashier will bust me for unwittingly trying to pass a fake dollar. I worry most when using bills larger than $50; this has been true ever since I was refused a ride on a SEPTA train from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia because SEPTA was not allowed to take bills worth more than $20.

The idea of currency and the common language of money could occupy my mind for weeks.

In certain contexts these and other matters of money and finance make my heart race. For as long as I can remember I have equated my value in the world and my desirability as a potential husband or even boyfriend with how much money I have, how much I regularly throw away, but never with how I manage it. Until I have enough money to fully and even extravagantly support another human I will not think of myself as worth being with, but at the same time I can not imagine being with someone who would expect to be supported by anyone but their own self.

I never felt as worthless as the day in January, 1991, when I reached into my jacket pockets and said out loud "Where are my dollars?" I thought I had ten or twelve dollar bills with which to buy dinner that night, but somehow I had spent those dollars without realizing it. Either that or I lost them, which is a mystery that comes back to my mind at seemingly incongruous moments.

I thought of those dollars when I got recognized on the subway by two lesbians who had seen my picture somewhere on the internet. I thought of those dollars in mid-1999 while reading a sign in the Times Square subway station; the sign stated that passengers should expect construction, inconvenience, and delays through late 2003. I thought of those dollars the last time they showed "Airplane!" on HBO and Leslie Nielsen asked that kid "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?"