A religious ministry in Denton, TX is not feeling so much like a million bucks any more. According to a story in today's Dallas Morning News, The Great News Network had a whole mess of pamphlets printed up, designed to look like a piece of currency. Apparently, these tracts resembled American money a bit TOO closely.
The Secret Service (which anyone who has ever watched The Untouchables knows is an arm of the US Treasury Department) has confiscated these pamphlets, after becoming concerned when some nitwit in North Carolina tried to deposit one of them into his bank account.
"Good morning, sir, what can I do for you today?"
"Um, I just need to make a deposit. This check for $11.50, two rolls of nickels, and uh... this one million-dollar bill."
As you can see from the picture, the pamphlet looks relatively authentic, insomuch as the coloration, the location and size of the presidential portrait, the text and fonts, etc. According to the article, the back of the bill looks more like the back of a twenty, except that things are written around the borders, such as warnings against impure thoughts. One can only assume that the creators forgot to include, "Not intended for deposit."
So the lesson to be learned here, boys and girls, is that anything that resembles currency too much is not approved of by the United States government. This actually makes me worry about a few items in my own classroom. For one thing, I have a whole plastic tub filled to the brim with manipulative coins that, aside from being plastic, VERY closely resemble the real thing. Even more worrisome, I have given out pencils and erasers that have images of $100 bills on them. I suppose I should be expecting Elliot Ness and his men to knock on my door any day now...
One last interesting thing. The article states that Grover Cleveland's picture, which is featured prominently on the religious pamphlets, ACTUALLY appears on the $1000 bill. Did anyone else know that such a thing exists?? Does anyone actually spend $1000 bills?!? Well, I may not have anything like that, but I know I'm special because somewhere around here, I have a two dollar bill...
Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Cleveland!
3 comments:
Yes, there are $1000 bills, but the last series the US government had printed was in 1945, although they were still in circulation until 1969, when the gov't discontinued the cirulation of any bill over $100.
A while back there was a man who was jailed for some minor crime in some corrupt little town. In his possession they found 5 $1000 bills. The mayor of this town decided he wanted to keep these bills, and so when the jailed man was released he was given a check for the amount but not the actual bills back. He eventually went to court, and the mayor had to hand them over, because it was held that they were worth more than their face value as collector's items.
You unleashed the History Geek... sorry!
I also seem to recall a few years ago some lady going to her local Wal-Mart and trying to actually SPEND a $1 million bill.
Saw this link on diff blog ... "provides blogs the ability to cross-promote each other" to gain more traffic.
http://www.link2blogs.com/
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