FunctionalAmbivalent

Drat! Another Problem with Decimalism!

Swanky Conservative, getting in the spirit of Decimalism, proposes the widespread adoption of a dollar coin, but then points out a problem: You can't tip a stripper with a coin.

Every solution presents a new problem, but our momentum is building! Anyone got any suggestions?

Buffaloed by Nickels, Divided by Quarters

Oh, and my grassroots campaign to eliminate the nickel isn't going all that well. This weekend, at a Little League game, I bought a bag of peanuts for 75 cents, which in itself is an affront to Decimalism, the belief in a single decimal monetary system.

The girl working the snack stand handed me my change and appologized.

"I'm out of quarters," she said, dropping five nickels into my hand.

Forget that I now had a palm full of the enemy. (That would be a good name for a teenaged memoir, don't you think? Palm Full of the Enemy? Maybe not.) I had forgotten completely about quarters! Egad! Quarters, being 0.25 of a dollar, aren't a Decimalist medium of commerce!

This is going to be a lot tougher than I thought.

So here's my revised plan: Per highly respected and not-at-all-curmudeonly columnist William Safire, we pull pennies out of circulation. (Bonus anti-terrorism impact: Al Qaeda fund managers holding large hoardes of cash are unable to turn in pennies fast enough and take a huge financial hit.) Hey, Bill says they go, I say they go. Then, per my incredibly enlightened vision of a tenth-of-a-cent-society, we put an end to the tyranty of the nickel and, now, quarters. Get 'em out of here. Then we keep dimes and half-dollars -- wait! Do we still have half-dollars? I don't think so. I haven't seen one of those in years, except in Vegas when you hit blackjack on a $3 bet. I think all the half-dollars must be in bags in the basement of one of the casinos out there. Probably the Luxor, because it sucks and has a lot of extra space where guests aren't.

OK, so we keep dimes and bring the half dollars out of storage and then we create a new coin, called a "fifth," which is worth 20 cents and has a picture of Dean Martin on it.

I think that works. Are you still with me?

I'm The First One! Me Me Me!

Just wanted to get ahead of this thing, be on the record as the first person to call for the elimination of the five-cent piece. Can't buy a damned thing with it, and it's about time we went to a single decimal place in our financial transactions. Save a bundle on store receipt ink, I'm guessing.

So, I'm building a grassroots organization to eliminate the nickel, which is 0.05 of a dollar, in favor of the dime, which is the much neater and more math-friendly 0.1 of a dollar. I call this movement I have created "Decimalism," and expect it to rapidly gain popularity, particularly among people who have trouble dividing things by 20.

Take that, William Safire. Someday, I'll be hailed as a visionary, and you'll just be another guy who wanted to get rid of the penny.

Kill Your MTV

There's a website devoted to boycotting MTV. I've been boycotting MTV for years, so I'm clearly ahead of the curve. Granted, the boycott is an accident of taste. And, granted, I'm about three times as old as MTV's target demographic, so my unintentional boycott isn't turning any stomachs over in ad sales.

The website, BoycottMTV.com, is run by a couple of guys, one of whom runs Scrappleface, a genuinely funny blog. And they're not advocating government censorship.

It is not "censorship" to control who influences your children. It's good parenting. You will never regret denying your child access to a TV program or network. Just as you would not allow your son or daughter to peruse the pornography magazines at the local newsstand, you do not have to allow your child to watch MTV (or anything else) -- no matter what all the other kids are doing.

Sometimes people confuse organized bocotts with censorship. Censorship is something the government does. A boycott is something people do. Boycotts are a sign of healthy marketplace of ideas.

I've always hated MTV, by the way. It came on cable when I was in college, and it pretty much put an end to after-hours parties. No more going from a closing bar to a crammed apartment and getting wild. As soon as MTV came out, people turned on the tube and vedged out in front of music videos, most of which were of people partying. Partying went from being something you did to being something you watched on TV.

I stopped going to after hours parties and started going home to bed, wasting some of the best nights of my life on sleep.

I wish someone had organized a boycott of MTV back then. Of course, if someone had, I'd probably be dead now of beer poisoning.