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the Ford nickel Wednesday, December 27 2006
Gerald Ford died today, and I found myself thinking that he sure picked a good presidency during which to die. Ford may have been the Chester Arthur of the 1970s, but when compared to the Caligulans of the American Empire he comes off as humble, reasonable, and perfectly adequate. Still, I don't expect to be seeing his face on a nickel during my lifetime.
Not that nickels are actually worth keeping in circulation. Melted down, a nickel is worth seven cents, and even a modern mostly-zinc penny is worth more than a cent. (They're the cheapest available source of metallic zinc and in the past I've routinely melted them down whenever I needed zinc for electroplating.)
Today I decided to stop spending pennies and nickels. From now on I sort them into three categories: pennies made before 1982 (which are mostly copper and worth more), pennies made after 1981, and nickels. I keep them in jars waiting for the metal to get more expensive. Though it's more intuitive to spend coins than it is to store them up for some future melt party, doing so isn't fiscally prudent. (I know, melting coins is illegal, but so is speeding, and, in Virginia at least, women being on top during sexual intercourse between married people.)
It seems Gretchen got me too much chocolate for Christmas. The best evidence of this is that chocolate has been my principle source of sustenance for the past three days. Normally I run out of candy on Christmas day and then revert back to calories of the less-empty variety. But with all this convenient chocolate, I've lacked the motivation to, say, fix myself a sandwich. Consequently my days have been a series of sugar highs followed by debilitating sugar crashes. Tonight's crash was so bad that I feared I might have wrecked my Islets of Langerhans. I resolved to clean up my act starting tomorrow, despite the fact that I still have a full box of Andes Creme de Menthe mints and an unopened bag of Hershey's Kissables.
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