One Dollar Review

There are numerous blogs and websites on which people review books and games, films and TV shows… I’m not going to do that.  It’s not like you’ll really take the opinion of some anonymous blogger into account on any of those things, any more than you’d take into consideration the rantings of some drunk homeless person who shouts about the pink rabbit chasing him for five minutes and then throws up on you.  I want to review something though, so I’m going to try to review things that don’t get reviewed so often, mainly because they are of no importance whatsoever to anyone.

First up, I’ve chosen to review a thing that I’ve been carrying around in my wallet for quite a few years now; a United States One Dollar Bill.

Incidentally, when I was small I used to collect coins and one of the coins I had was a silver dollar.  A peace dollar, in fact.  Millions of those were made in the nineteen twenties and thirties, so it wasn’t that valuable to anyone except me.  Unfortunately, my younger brother, his friends were going on holiday to the USA and, well, they stole it.  Not that I’m still bitter about it or anything, although I will say that he’s a ****ing c***.  At least I’m not forced to share my toys with him anymore.

Anyway, the one dollar bill looks like this:

As currency, it does the job perfectly well.  You can take it into a store and hand it over in exchange for goods or services, which is really all you want money to do.  You don’t want fancy electronics inside it that get George Washington to open his mouth and start suggesting what goods and services you may be interested in purchasing; that would just be wrong.  As tender there’s not really much to criticise about it.  Although, you couldn’t get much for a single dollar; a postcard or some candy, maybe.  Unless it’s a rural gas station off an interstate, in which case you might get away with purchasing everything you want in exchange for just keeping the clerk company for five minutes.

Also, it is only legal tender in the USA.  If you’re anywhere else, you’ll have to take it to a bank or travel agent to exchange it for local currency, and you won’t get very much for it to be honest.  In the UK at the time of writing this, one dollar is worth about sixty one pence.  About enough to buy one Mars bar.  Not even a king size one; just regular.

On both sides it says in big capital letters “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”, which is useful, I suppose, if you’re an American and you somehow forget the name of the country you live in, perhaps having experienced brain-melt because you’ve been forced to watch a Fox News Special about climate change.  But one thing about being in the USA is that you’re not reminded of it very often; they’re such a shy, modest folk that it can be very easy to forget that they are actually Americans and not normal people.

On the front of it there is a picture of George Washington, who is looking very stiff upper-lipped and British.  He didn’t want to be British though, so I’d have thought he would look happier, having won the war for Independence and founded a whole new nation.  Maybe he’s had an horrific vision of how it will all end?  With a mad Alaskan woman in The White House, after what she describes as a ‘squirmish’ with China.

Now on the other side of the dollar, the green side, there are actually things which are very interesting to a lot of people:

There’s a pyramid with an eye on it, The Eye Of Providence, and some writing in a strange tongue called Latin, which is creepy because it’s old and only spoken by Cardinals and Lawyers, who are all really creepy.

These are taken by some as being symbols of the New World Order, who have been secretly been plotting to take over the world for thousands of years.  Don’t know why it’s taking so long and, really, why would such a secretive organisation want to leave clues to its existence on the back of something regularly being exchanged by millions of people?

Others say the symbol represents Freemasons and their influence on the founding of the country.  In fact, Masons didn’t start commonly using the eye until a couple of decades after the United States seal was created, so who’s influencing who?

If you’re interested, the Latin bits say Annuit Cœptis (God has favoured our undertaking), and Novus Ordo Seclorum (a new order has begun), which, okay… I can see how that could be interpreted as talking about a New World Order.  But, again, why would they advertise themselves like that?  Eh?  Why?

Anyway, that just about wraps up all I can say about a one dollar bill.  Not a high monetary value, not great exchange rates, grumpy face, but within the US at least a perfectly functional and acceptable way of paying for things.

Maybe I’ll get one hundred dollars next time (pfft… yeah, I wish…)