Subject: Re: doom
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Mon Apr 03 2000 - 21:14:38 EDT
At 3:33 PM -0500 on 4/3/2000, you wrote:
> Ah, yes! I take my hat off to you Mattis and then notice no hat in my hands,
> just a hungry snake that's swallowed an elephant, hungry no more I gather.
> Oh well, I have a couple of volcanos to clean and a rose to water.....
Has anyone seen the French 50-franc note that commemorates Antoine de
Saint-Exupery? Almost the entire theme is from "The Little Prince,"
and it has a lot of anti-counterfeiting measures built in. There are
miniscule lines which, if you examine them with a powerful magnifying
glass, reveal themselves to be text from the book. There is a
laminated white sheep upon a white background, and my favorite detail
is that one side of the note shows the hungry snake that has
swallowed an elephant, while holding it to the light reveals that it
is also a hat covering [whatever it covered in the book]. (Forgive
my dreadful memory; I don't have a 50-FF note handy to "quote" from,
either.) The prince appears on both sides with the color of his
clothes (top and bottom) alternating dark and light, then light and
dark, on each side of the note, and if you hold it up to light you
see him in his properly colored outfit.
It's one of the most beautiful pieces of currency I've ever seen, and
it is so ... charming ... compared to our currency in the U.S., where
the glory days of beautiful coins and bills seems long gone, and
we're left with a President Jackson who looks like he has a migraine
on the twenty-dollar bill, and a Benjamin Franklin with hemorrhoids
on the hundred-dollar bill.
Obligatory Salinger reference: One of the most gorgeous pieces of
American money was the last $20 gold coin, designed by the sculptor
Augustus Saint-Gaudens who, as it happens, lived and worked ... in
Cornish -- not five minutes by car from La Casa Salinger. (It's a
museum today.)
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