Cultural currency

This is a picture of me in the Managua airport with a newly redesigned cordoba.

It has a little plastic circle and you can see right through it!

There's something about traveling that always makes me reassess our own greenbacks. And they always seem a little fusty and boring (sup, dead white guys?) compared to some of the flashier bills circulating.

New York designer Richard Smith thinks so too and has launched a campaign to get things started.

Here are a couple of my favorite submissions he's received:
From Slate: America’s ability to churn out enduring cultural icons makes a popular theme for new dollar designs. Kristofer Layon, a professor at the University of Minnesota, asked his students to design a new dollar. Many of them incorporated classically American cultural figures, such as Barbie, Superman, or, in this bill designed by Christina DiMeo, Billie Holiday.
Many designers built their dollar brands around themes, as Michelle Haft did in embodying different aspects of the economy of seven different bills, including the work force, industrial production, the Federal Reserve, and personal income. While cynics might scoff at a shopping cart on a U.S. dollar, the bright colors present an optimistic view of the economy that is rare these days.

Pick your favorite at the Dollar ReDe$ign Project.

Right up my artery

As someone who

a) lives across the street from a bar that advertises "MONDAY NIGHT ALL YOU CAN EAT BACON" and has seriously considered opening up a concurrent bread, lettuce and tomato stand on her front porch (I'm enterprising like that);

b) has been told she makes the "best bacon I've ever had in my whole life;"

c) was just made fun of yesterday for immediately making an Amy Winehouse-esque stumble/beeline (beehive?) to the bacon upon entering Jewel;

d) found her most favoritest candy bar in Mo's Bacon Bar from Vosges;

this Bacon Mania article has been my favorite of the day. So many great bacon-related links, it's even better than the one about the 71-year-old woman who foiled her daughter's attacker by offering him beer. That one's close, but sorry, bacon trumps all.

Linguistics and crap like that

A passage from the nonfiction book I’m reading:

“Do you happen to know the derivation of ‘snob’ –s-n-o-b? I used to teach linguistics and crap like that at Yale. In Italy, in, I don’t know, maybe the thirteenth, maybe the twelfth century, a lot of nouveau-riche Italians tried to get their kids into the schools where the noble families sent their children by offering the schools a ton of money, so finally what the schools did was set up a new category which the nobility called sensa nobilita—without nobility—because not only weren’t these nouveau riche noble, they didn’t even have the instincts of nobility.”

Kinda snobby, no?