Brickbat: Legal Tender

Public Domain

Danesiah Neal, 13, said a police officer with the Fort Bend, Texas, school district told her she could face felony forgery charges after trying to pay for some chicken nuggets at school with a 1953 $2 bill. The officer apparently did not recognize the bill and because of its age a counterfeit pen did not work on it. School officials called Neal's grandmother after the girl told her she'd gotten it from her. Then cops went to the convenience store where grandma said she'd gotten the bill in change. Finally, a cop headed to the bank where someone confirmed that the bill was real.

Comments

[Adans smith]

Does every school have a cop in it now? It seems that the go to for any and all incidents is jail.Some of the pranks we pulled would get you locked up now.

[Akira]

I'm not totally against having a cop in a school in case of a shooting, but it should be made clear that the cop is there to prevent serious violence, not enforce minor disciplinary matters. Every school cop I remember was a tyrant who would threaten and belittle every kid who didn't do his homework or chewed gum in class.

[BigT]

If the fat pig is going to be there, why isn't he teaching firearms safety? (Provided they can find a suitable pig)

[See.More]

If the fat pig is going to be there, why isn't he teaching firearms safety?

Exhibit A

[Curtisls701]

Thank you. Cops are the last people I'd ask to teach firearms safety.

[Rod Flash]

I suspect that the cops they put in the schools would be either worthless or worse in the event of a shooting. He'd either be hiding in a bathroom stall, or spraying bullets all over the place. I've never seen a school cop who wasn't there as a punishment for incompetence in the real world.

[timbo]

We do need body cameras. That video would have been hysterically funny.

[Steve G]

I love $2 bills. This just makes me want to go get a stack of them and use them more often

[Adans smith]

Go to a lot of strip joints do you?

[Steve G]

Two dollar strippers?!? Who am I, Donald Drumpf?

[Adans smith]

Rolls of pennies?

[Overt]

I...have heard...that the $2 strip club tender are just myths. I had previously heard that it was the way to get extra attention from the ladies at the club. But, as near as I can tell, it is a minor interest to the dancers who get pretty miffed that what looked like a $20 was actually 1/10th the value.

[Adans smith]

Yeah,you've heard. wink ,wink,nudge ,nudge.

[Old Man With Candy]

+1 Jefferson

[gaoxiaen]

You never know. A few counterfeit million dollar bills recently showed up here in Taiwan. Some people just don't do their homework.

[SIV]

You're supposed to burn those to honor ancestors and for good luck.

[UnCivilServant]

Did the ancestors really hate fake money?

[Monty Crisco]

Can you IMAGINE the sheer stupidity of the "police officer" that was involved? Shaking down a 13-yr old girl and saying, "Yeah, you are probably gonna be doin some hard time for this funny money, little girl", simply because the chimp didn't recognize LEGAL FUCKING TENDER. Thank God he could have shot her dead and gotten away with it...

Jesus, cops are so fucking worthless it makes me want to self-immolate sometimes...

[Akira]

Funny and somewhat-related story: in my sophomore year of high school, there were a couple of "kids" who were already 18 due to being held back in previous grades, and they had their own apartment. They straight-up photocopied some large bills and used it to pay the landlord... Then the Secret Service came and pulled them out of class.

[Fist of Etiquette]

That article from the local ABC affiliate is extremely disrespectful of the educational justice system. That law enforcement professional went above and beyond the call of duty by investigating the validity of the legal tender. He could have tased the hungry little would-be counterfeiter right then and there and called it a day and been well within in his rights as a protector and server.

[Overt]

Hear hear!

How often do we see a cop go the extra mile to investigate things and get to the bottom of such MAJOR crimes?!

In a world where cops can't be bothered to show up when your house gets robbed, this guy actually went to a bank to confirm that there wasn't a $2 counterfeiting ring at the local school. He has detective written all over him.

[Overt]

Also: god damn, do you east coasters have it rough. I'm visiting our Buffalo office for the week. Usually by the time I wake up in the morning in California I have 3 or four examples of governmental perfidy to get the juices flowing. But here it is at 7am, and this small change (hah!) is all you got? Oh the humanity.

[Radioactive]

in magic marker?

[UnCivilServant]

The kind of permanant marker with the metal casing, the squeak and the solvant that gets you high just by removing the cap, even at arm's length.

[Rod Flash]

Crayon

[straffinrun]

No harm, no fowl.

[straffinrun]

I know that's offal.

[Detroit Linguist]

-1

[Adans smith]

That comment's hard to digest.

[Rich]

Not only that comment, but all it entrails.

[sloopyinTEXAS]

Meh, I think it takes guts to make comments like that here.

[GroundTruth]

The $2 bill pictured was not printed until 1976. The 1953 used red ink on the serial number and the treasury seal. This thing would have stood out in contemporary money like a sore thumb.

[Steve G]

Ha! Another -phile. I love the back of those old ones too. I've got one that's so bright you'd swear it was backlit.

[BigT]

Is that commie twosie now worth more than $2 to collectors?

[GroundTruth]

The $2 bill pictured was not printed until 1976. The 1953 used red ink on the serial number and the treasury seal. This thing would have stood out in contemporary money like a sore thumb.

[Drake]

I'm guessing it's worth more than $2 now?

[Radioactive]

actually with inflation it's worth about $.37...thank you President Obama

[Thymirus]

How spectacularly retarded must an individual be to threaten a child with felony charges for buying food at a school cafeteria?

Does this cop even wipe his ass when he takes a dump? Is dressing himself each morning a four-hour puzzle-solving labor? Eat shit, fucking pig.

[Monty Crisco]

SECONDED!!!

[UnCivilServant]

Stop insulting our porcine friends by comparing them to cops.

[Radioactive]

yeah, cops will likely never taste as good!

[Cyto]

I'm not sure on this one, but I think the way counterfeit laws work, you don't have to know the bill is counterfeit. I think just passing along a counterfeit bill will get you a conviction, should the man so desire.

If you get stuck with a counterfeit bill, the only recourse is to turn it in and claim the loss on your homeowner's' policy.

Not that it wasn't minor-league silly to think there was a counterfeit ring producing high-quality but obviously different $2 bills. It would be pretty hard to make a go of it passing those things.

[sloopyinTEXAS]

So counterfeiting is treated differently than not securing classified or other sensitive government correspondence?

By differently, I mean more seriously. Yeah, that makes sense.

[BigT]

Before too long this will be the response when someone dares to use cash. A cashless society is an easily manageable population.

[robc]

I made my first ever Craigs list sale last night. Without cash, how can you sell a used TV to a mexican immigrant in a grocery store parking lot?

[sloopyinTEXAS]

The for their EBT card?

[Zeb]

I'm sure there are a lot of people who would like that. I think that US physical currency is too important in the world economy (both licit and illicit) for that to happen, though. The informal economy is just too significant.

[Pompey]

Good grief.

[UnCivilServant]

Good insight, Charlie Brown.

That does make me want to ask. Why did the comic strip 'peanuts' stick around for so long? I means it was always there, but it was rarely funny, the characters were not interesting and there was nary a compelling story to be seen. Did it keep getting printed out of sheer inertia? People expected to see it but never bothered to read it?

[Rufus The Monocled Derp Slayer]

Yeh. It's a weird one.

It had enormous potential to be funny and Snoopy was, to me anyway, always criminally underused.

[Rufus The Monocled Derp Slayer]

I think, may I add, some characters were not completely uninteresting. Charlie Brown the loser, Lucy the bitch, Linus the perspective one, Sally the neurotic, Snoopy and Woodstock were pretty cool...

[UnCivilServant]

But nothing was ever done with even that base characterization. If they were brazen enough, they could have gotten away with cycling the same set of five or ten strips and no one would have noticed.

[Heroic Mulatto]

they could have gotten away with cycling the same set of five or ten strips and no one would have noticed.

Ah, yes. The "Dilbert" strategy.

[Old Man With Candy]

You skipped that total hottie, Violet.

[Radioactive]

only thing more boring & unfunny is Nancy

[Old Man With Candy]

Nancy was brilliant minimalist art. Brushmiller really was an amazing and influential cartoonist.

[Old Man With Candy]

Bushmiller. Needs moar coffee.

[Heroic Mulatto]

By "coffee", I assume you mean "N-methylamphetamine", of course.

[Old Man With Candy]

/tries to look innocent

[Radioactive]

she was actually a heroin addict & prostitute in her later years after her failed porn career...

[Seamus]

"Nancy" was brilliant. Every day, I used to turn to the comics page to be sure that Nancy still sucked just as bad as ever, and Bushmiller never let me down. There was never a touch of cleverness, or whimsy, or intelligence. (The graphics were pretty interesting, though.) I would guess that it's as difficult to maintain such consistent badness as it is to maintain consistently high quality. Confirmation of this comes from the fact that after Bushmiller died, some second-rater stepped in, and his strips, while bad, usually had some tiny kernel of what might inspire a smile if executed by a truly humorous cartoonist.

"Reply All," by the way, shows signs of being this generation's "Nancy." The artwork isn't as interesting, but the steadfast, inexorable avoidance of any spark of humor is quite Bushmilleresque.)

[Pompey]

Yeah, that's a pretty profound observation. I'm not sure that the printed strip ever even made an old geezer chuckle once. Likewise the holiday TV cartoon specials were boring and could never hold my attention. The baton is passed to my 5 year old, who also isn't into Charlie Brown.

[UnCivilServant]

The animated specials did have merit, which is probably why the statement of "Good Grief" reminded me of Charlie Brown.

[Zeb]

Perhaps other people have a different opinion. I like Peanuts. I wouldn't have picked it out as a particularly unfunny strip.

[Cyto]

All of the "classics" can be similarly criticized. Once you go past a few years of daily strips, it is the rare bird indeed who could maintain any sort of consistent quality. That's why the best of the best of the best quit early. Pogo. Bloom County...

I came a little late to the Doonesbury phenomenon and all I ever saw was "Republicans are dumb, m'kay?" Rarely funny. Rarely insightful. Just kinda boring and repetitive. But he had lots of acclaim, both for his politics and the quality of the strip.

Family Circus, Beetle Bailey, Kathy.... they all get their share of derision even though they were immensely popular at some point. So I put it down to the difficulty of maintaining quality over an extreme length of time. TV shows are like that too. When your hospital drama has its second helicopter crash into the building, you know it is time to hang it up. There's probably a similar shark-jump meme for comic strips.

[Radioactive]

usually happens after the second day...

[Pompey]

Prince Valiant was terrible and never funny.

[Mindyourbusiness]

Cyto, Bloom County is still around and Berke Breathed still puts out good stuff. Wander on over to gocomics.com and have a look.

[Seamus]

Peanuts was pretty good in the 1960s, and even into the 1970s. By the time it was in its last decade, though, it was truly awful, to the point that the Washington Post's Style Invitational once asked readers to come up with new colorful expressions, such as "sleeping with the fishes" for "murdered", that could be use by mafiosi, and one of the winners was "still pushing out 'Peanuts'" to mean "on life support."

[Rufus The Monocled Derp Slayer]

I'm getting the distinct feeling it might be better to arm teachers than have dumbass cops roaming the school. The article says this is a good kid but now may face up to five years in jail. The irony is the cops are the biggest most dangerous bullies. Clearly, they don't generally give a shit about the well-being of kids or else they wouldn't exhibit such poor judgment that could potentially ruin a person's life.

It's retarded (and immoral I may add) beyond belief.

But if I've learned anything from David French and 'tough on crime' buffoons...Don't be acting like a thug by trying to be cool flashing a $2 bill as if glorifying violence.

So lesson learned kid.

[Gindjurra]

The fact that a counterfeit pen didn't color it would prove that it was authentic. Those things react to starch, which is something real money doesn't have in it.

It's also worth noting that the US Treasury Department has been trying to get people to stop using those pens for decades now, because they're not a reliable way to test for counterfeit bills and never have been. But people keep using them anyway.

[Rich]

I've noticed the "I don't know, I'll have to talk to my manager" effect both with $2 bills and when "new" money is introduced.

OTOH, I predict lots of counterfeit Tubbies (or whatever they'll be known as) will make it into circulation because people won't want to be perceived as racist by questioning them.

[Tom Bombadil]

Also, to a white business owner, all black people look the same. Irish, can I get a witness?

[Tom Bombadil]

I would imagine a 1953 $2 bill would have some value as a collectible.
The only thing the kid and grandma did wrong was use it to buy greasy fax-chicken.

[Tom Bombadil]

sorry, "faux" chicken.

[sarcasmic]

Finally, a cop headed to the bank where someone confirmed that the bill was real.

I'm honestly surprised the cop didn't assault the bank employee for daring to contradict him.

[Tom Bombadil]

I'm very surprised he went to the bank to check.
It was a no-win for him.
The best that could happen was they confirm he was right, and a cop don't need no confirmation.
The worst was that he's wrong which could cause PTSD.

Besides, the facts of the case become irrelevant as soon as any person disagrees with an LEO. That is resistance and non-compliance.

[Drave Robber]

If you disagree with a low earth orbit, you always have a choice of going down in flames.

[BYODB]

Yeah, cash is legal tender up until you try to pay your rent with it apparently. Oh well.

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