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patfromch said...
Did you know that there is a Hotel Euler in Basel?
[the link to the Hotel Marvin Euler has been removed. See Comments below.]
I am going to walk by on Thursday and will give it a nod. Most guests probably don't even know who Leonard Euler is, that he once used to be on one of our bills or where Königsberg is. They probably just want a soft bed, room service and a wake-up call in the morning.
The heydays of BASIC were before my time, I can only remember trying my hands on a Commodore 64 and later MS-DOS and have forgotten most of it. Bill Gates still claims that he knows BASIC by heart as this video shows:
MS is still developing post-Basic stuff, check this out:
I have decided to go back to school and work for a CompTIA A+ exam, basic skills in programming languages such as Java or SQL may be inevital I fear. Apart from many other things. Oh bloody hell. The introduction lesson will be on said Thursday when I will walk past the Hotel Euler.
And I can't believe I am pulling plugs for MS. Get Ubuntu or even better, get a Mac ! You can still run Windows via Bootcamp or Wine if you really have to
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Can you walk in the lobby and see if maybe they got a pretty little free postcard of the hotel? I asked you last year to scout me up some good local hotels -- I think you just found my hotel in Basel.
(I know I owe you some postcards. I got the postcards. I got the stamps. I just haven't put the stamps on the postcards and mailed them yet. I think Freud called this kind of behavior Anal Retentive, it comes from Bad Toilet Training at Age 2 or whenever.)
Okay, I pronounce the above Extinct Banknote a tie with NL's 1000 Guilder Spinoza note.
You should have seen the Gazillion Koroner notes of the Socialist Heroes in Czechoslovakia, they had a nasty-looking Soviet-style soldier holding a Kaloshnikov with the cylindrical ammo magazine. If he had a Speech Balloon, he would be saying: Don't try anything funny, Tovarich.
A Gazillion Koroner would have bought you a cup of coffee in Prague -- if they had any coffee, which was not all the time. Edible food was also a common challenge.
I used to have a flatmate who said that capitalism was by far the best economic system, because only a capitalist economy could produce 14 competing different models of electric guitars. How could Marx possibly have refuted that? I don't think Marx even played the ukulele. (Karl, anyway, I think Groucho plays the ukulele in a couple of movies.)
Anyway, if you want to be a Successful, even a Great Sovereign Nation, you don't put a threatening soldier on your money. You put your country's greatest Philosoph on your money.
Or the world's greatest Mathematician, if he just happens to hang in your Sovereign Nation. You festoon your hard cash with the portraits of your most brilliant Dreamers.
In the little Amsterdam hotel, I asked the front-desk lady to make me a phone call to the Spinoza House because I don't speak any Dutch, and she very nicely made the phone call and found out what I needed to know about visiting Spinoza's little house (he rented the upstairs from a sympathetic surgeon) in Rijnsburg.
Later I was in the bar and she came up to me, she looked a little embarrassed, and said:
"Of course I have heard of Spinoza. But ... just who was he?"
I didn't know the Dutch word "Wijsgeer," but my father had used the word "Philosoph," he pronounced it with a pan-Euro spin, so I told her he was a great Philosoph. She nodded, she understood, she smiled. Danke wel.
The Euro was already in business and had extincted the old Guilder notes. But later I found out why she knew Spinoza's name -- and had even seen his face now and then.
You could probably have bought a used deux chevaux with a Spinoza.
The Euler, on the other hand -- 10 Suisse (old? new?) francs, this was real Straßegelt, 20 of these jumped in and out of your wallet every week. Everybody knew what Leonhard Euler looked like. In Confoederatio Helvetica he was as familiar as Elvis.
Interestingly enough, the Nasty Socialist Hero Soldier with the Kaloshnikov was a symbol of hyperinflation and worthless currency. Nobody in Prague wanted it, they asked for DM or Pound Sterling or U$, anything but the local stuff.
But with Euler and Spinoza -- this is Real Money, you can have a very nice brandy, or a short airplane flight, or a long train trip along the Rhine. I'll bet a Spinoza could have bought you Companionship in Amsterdam for the evening, and you would get change back.
I so terribly miss the Old Money. It was such a pleasant nightmare changing it two or three times a day when you crossed a border, seeing all these new faces, wondering who they were -- not just the Dreamers, but the Queens and Kings, the Revolutionaries who overthrew them, the Statesmen.
Newton made the biggest impression of all. After his nervous breakdown, his friends dragged him out of Cambridge, he bought a house in London, and eventually used his fame and connections to become England's Master of the Mint. He had to supervise a new coinage.
The old silver and gold coins kept shrinking -- people would use scissors to snip around the outsides of the coins. So Newton invented Milling -- the ribbed circumference of coins, so you can tell immediately if it's the original size or has been snipped and shrunk.
A counterfeiter and confidence man accused Newton of corrupting the currency. He probably thought Newton was a silly old Dreamer and no match for the confidence man's clever attacks.
Newton defended his new coins very effectively. When it was all over, he was still Master of the Mint. And the confidence man -- well, counterfeiting and Monkey Business with the national Money is considered High Treason, and the punishment for that was to be Drawn and Quartered. That must have hurt.
In an earlier Vleeptron post I showed the Euro coin found in Spain with Homer Simpson's image on it. This counterfeiter has a lot of talent, but I don't think he has much business sense or much of a future as a counterfeiter.
