The worst of the bad pennies
In sorting through our reader Ben's 24 years' worth of pennies -- nearly 10,000 of them -- as part of our great pennies project, we encountered some interesting specimens. About 20 were Canadian, and some coins weren't pennies at all, but "silver" that got tossed into the cents bucket by mistake.
Among the pennies, some were shiny new, some were dark and old, and some -- about 10 -- were so badly trashed that we couldn't make out their years or mints of origin. Even the kids, whose naked eyes are much better than ours, were stumped, and our magnifying glass wasn't up to the task, either.
We'll try a little harder to clean them up and read their faces, but the illegible ones are worth showing on this blog simply by virtue of their exquisite states of decay:
The metal crumbling off a couple of them almost looks like fur. Ugh!
| Posted at 9:46 AM | Permalink |
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Comments (3)
Just immerse them in tomato sauce for a few hours.
Posted by Mojo | September 14, 2011 10:40 AM
White vinegar will do the job, too.
Posted by Alice | September 14, 2011 11:31 AM
Betcha a can of coke will do it as well. Did you know my bank (bank of america) will no longer take change unless it is all rolled up? Then they just put it into their drawers without counting. I purposefully went in with like 20 odd rolls of coins, some short, some heavy and they didn't even bat an eye.
Note that the total amount was correct, but not a single roll was correct.
Posted by joseph bradshaw | September 14, 2011 1:43 PM