Dime Issue — September 20, 2024 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Joy🎶
Muricah🗽
Coin Sizes🪙

THE DAILY UPDATE

Three Things I Am Grateful For Today:

Dubai.
People watching.
When you finally find the thing that’s stinking up your car.

Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Five. After the second guess, there were only so many possibilities, and I waited until all were exhausted, evidently.

Wordle 1,189 5/6

🟩⬜⬜⬜🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: Seven. Boo. I got the blues easily (duh) and then stumbled around before resetting and figure it out.

Connections
Puzzle #467
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟨🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟨🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩

The song in my head when I woke up today: Don’t Let Me Down, by Joy Williams

Sept. 19: Four Stitches, by Antje Duvekot
Sept. 18: The theme song from the MEGA podcast. So that’s a new entry into my morning brain.
Sept. 17: Burn Me Once, by Bella White
Sept. 16: Follow Your Arrow, by Kacey Musgraves
Sept. 15: Burn Me Once, by Bella White
Sept. 13: It’s Not Over, by Daughtry
Sept. 12: In a radical departure from recent morning-brain songs, It’s So Easy, by Guns N’ Roses
Sept. 11: Complicated, by Avril Lavigne, who’s back in my morning brain after a one-day absence.
Sept. 10: Wide Open Spaces, by The Chicks. At least it’s not Avril Lavigne
Sept. 9: I’m With You, by Avril Lavigne
Sept. 8: When You’re Gone, by Avril Lavigne, for the second day in a row.
Sept. 7: When You’re Gone, by Avril Lavigne
Sept. 6: I Will Not Bow, by Breaking Benjamin
Sept. 5: It’s Been Awhile, by Staind
Sept. 4: So Far Away, by Staind
Sept. 3: Banana Boat, by Harry Belafonte
Sept. 2: One Love, by Bob Marley
Sept. 1: Welcome to the Black Parade, by My Chemical Romance

Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: Stranded, reaching out/I call your name but you’re not around

Baseball Practice Tunes: Songs I listened to on the way home from baseball practice yesterday were from my Hard Stuff playlist.

Wherever I May Roam, Metallica
The Beautiful People, Marilyn Manson
Sweet Child O’ Mine, Guns N’ Roses
Hangar 18, Megadeth
Institutionalized, Suicidal Tendencies
Dr. Feelgood, Motley Crew
Seek & Destroy, Metallica

Something I’m looking forward to today: The end of a busy work work.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: It’s a baseball weekend, and we better win a freaking game.

Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: People watching while working at Panera. Such an interesting cross-section of Missourah people.

What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved two stories for a Johnny Boy marketing client, one on a person who works for Adobe Firefly and another on a person who works for Plus, a company that makes autonomous driving software for trucks.

What I’ve written: Top 5 Problems America Refuses To Confront

The other day I wrote about my deep-thought question while driving home from work about who invented chairs and the wholly unsatisfying response from the rest of the Terrific Trio at the dinner table when I brought the issue to their attention.

Yesterday, while driving Boy The Younger here and there, he asked the question: “Dad, do you know why the dime is smaller than a penny and a nickle?”

Now, I can give you a million reasons why that boy is most definitely my son, but that question right there vaulted to the top of the list. Those are the types of questions spawned by a mind born of my DNA.

And the truth was, I had no freaking idea.

The fact of the matter is that BTY is right: It’s extremely annoying that all other coin currency gets bigger as the value increases … except for the goddamn dime. This issue bothers BTY to no end because he is a child who has always loved order. As a toddler, he had toys of every monster truck known to our species, but his favorite activity wasn’t driving them over fake courses or smashing them together. In that, he is not like me. No-no. His favorite monster truck activity was to line them up along the base of the couch, all of them face-in.

Which meant, of course, that when he wasn’t looking, I would turn one around. Sometimes, he would catch me, and I’d get the toddler BTY whine of, “DAAAaaaaaaaDDDD!” Sometimes, he would not catch me and he would somehow sense a tremor in the force, turn around, see the offensive monster truck, and quickly turn it back the “right” way.

The dime being smaller than the penny is somehow not “right,” yet we dumb Muricans just sort of accept the curveball the federal gubment threw at us.

So I did some research.

Turns out it involves math, which is a good indication of why I hadn’t a clue when BTY asked his question.

The U.S. Mint started producing coins in 1793, and the standard was the silver dollar. Additional denominations were made in proportion to the silver content of the dollar. That established the size of each coin, and the dime was literally one-tenth the silver of a dollar.

Of course, that doesn’t really answer the question.

Enter the nickel. The five-cent coin originally contained one-twentieth the silver of a dollar, but if you think dimes get lost easily, you never met the OG nickel. It was deemed too small to handle.

And so, some brilliant gubment bureaucrat said something akin to, “Ya know, there are other metals in the ground besides silver, and I’m sure there are some darker-skinned people living on the land above it that we could force to move to scrubland, so ….”

Thus the content of a nickel changed from silver and copper to a combination of silver and nickel. That made the coin larger and less likely to end up in couch cushions while leaving its actual value equal to one-twentieth of a silver dollar.

Ahhh, but what about the penny? The OG penny was made of pure copper and was about the size of a half-dollar, which really would have pissed off BTY. Over the years, the content of pennies changed. Nickel was introduced to the copper in 1857, and then, as we needed to bomb the hell of out the Japanese and Germans, we started bogarting all the copper we had and introduced zinc into the equation.

Again, the goal was to keep the actual metallic value of the thing in line with the silver dollar. Today, the penny is 97.5% zinc with a smidge of copper mixed in for flavor.

And so there’s no real good answer except for “math,” an argument that goes out the window as soon as you say, “Hey” to paper bills, which, of course, would have absolutely no value whatsoever if we all realized at the same time how stupid it is that specially printed paper has value.

Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?

Dime Issue — September 20, 2024

THE DAILY UPDATE

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