news at eleven...

okay. so, if you look at the top of this penny from colorado, you'll see a pretty good example of what's referred to as the 'catch notch' of an elongated coin. basically, the way it works (in my understanding) is that each machine is equipped with two sets of opposing steel rollers called a mill. basically, imagine a train wheel on a track. anyhow, one of these mill rollers (or both on machines what print both sides) is called a 'die' and it's on this die that your final design is etched. each die typically features four different designs to give customers a choice in what their product will look like, though i have heard unconfirmed reports that smaller die rollers have been made that only have one or two designs on them. that catch notch, though is usually a universally exaggerated feature on all mills that ensures the die will have a firm 'bite' on the coin to avoid any slippage which would cause a misprint. it's not too uncommon to get a crappy, off kilter coin from a lot of machines, but in theory, this shouldn't be the case. so, through a process called plastic deformation, the coin is put under sufficient pressure to render it flatter, elongated, and with the embossed pattern stamped into it in the areas where the die was etched away. you can actually tell this is going on during the pressing process at a machine, since you'll feel a bit of resistance when you're cranking it through.
something else to note are the silver colored 'smudges' that you can see poking out through the copper on this penny. sometime after 1984, the mints started putting a higher percentage of zinc in our pennies to make them cheaper to produce, a fact that i don't suppose bummed anybody out at all unless they got a kick out of mashing pennies. as a matter of fact, the guy who was in charge of this machine was giving out pennies for the public use and acted more confused than he probably should have when i asked to use my own.
"i want to use this penny, if you don't mind, sir. it's a 1978," i said.
"but i have these right here. for you. i have a bowl of them"
"yes, but those are new pennies, and are full of zinc, and so i'd rather use my own," i said.
"oh, i don't know," he said. "i have this whole bowl i am supposed to give away".
win some lose some.....
anyhow, i don't care much for this guy. i got it at the national western stock show in denver, colorado, which was a badass way to spend the day wandering around looking at giant horses and sheepdogs tearing ass around barking at lambs. essentially, the coin itself is just an advertisement for some local news station and is devoid of any real personality. it seemed like a pretty expensive thing to do, to have a custom die made for some trinket that most nobody would ever give a rat's ass about. but, go ahead. ask anybody who went there if they still have their 'souvenir, channel 9 penny' and the only person who'll say 'yes' is going to be me.
i really do hate this penny, the soulless, smudgy turd, and am happy that i never have to 'blog' about it again.

Adventures in travel. A train blog...

the following is a dialogue that i had with my notebook whilst on a fernet fueled amtrak train trip from los feliz, ca. to raton, nm. my instincts tell me i had fun... unfortunately, the amazing degradation of my handwriting skills will be lost to translation into text, but use your imagination, please.

4:25 P.M.: fucking train. some old guy with a walker just queered my shot of fernet in the men's room. well.. he was unable to prevent it, but he made it pretty hasty.

4:37 los feliz to union station: not as secluded or romantic as i has (sic) hoped. what is? this seems like marta but way more solid. p.s. no one has asked me for any money yet.

5:56: union station looks like a crazy, goddamned gothic cathedral: beautiful and old. i met two guys traveling back from santa barbara to albuquerque. the lucky fuckers are done with their trip at 11 am tomorrow, which is 10 hours earlier than i'll be. still. the accomodations on this train are nice. i think i smell worse than anyone on this thing since i have been wearing a parka in los angeles all day. amtrak is pretty stringent about how much shit you can carry on, so i wore my bulkiest item of clothing. it's dark and i am underground, yearning for those mountains.

7:30 p.m.: more drunk than not. train travel seems to rule irrevocably. something about it is laid back and (illegible). some amazing, alcoholic airplane motel. not far out, but some shit has disappeared. i will be in new mexico and they say that the altitudes will kill me. it's higher there, i am told than denver, by about a thousand feet. i am not too terribly concerned with altitue (sic) as i am by coyotes, however. a good friend predicted that i will be gang raped by the fucker coyotes until i starve to death. raped by dogs until i starve.

10:41 lounge car: pulled through inky black, a sausage party blares through the desert night. HAHA! you are an alletevative (sic) faggot. honestly? i just want to end up drunk and asleep and in up in arizona. the good news? i will!!!

1:57: weird needles kid is gone. they won't ever, EVER let you smoke on this roving behemoth. goddamned ever. there is installment. vanessas opionion (sic) of me is ..."fucking brilliant, only he hides it under his foul mouthed, beer drinking manners". trains make people lie. "jason is clearly a crack baby :)" and so are other train passengers.

3:15 a.m: to much (rest of sentence is illegible. i believe it made reference to 'poison' and 'motherfuckers')

END OF SCENE

why i heart black metal

people often ask me what is is about black metal that draws me to it like a moth to an icy, windswept flame. i hear all kinds of objections to my predilection . "that shit is SO gay, dude. really?" they say. "it sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom by a retarded janitor" they say. "i can't stand 40 minutes of blastbeats" they say...
and, honestly, i don't have a really good answer to give anyone. taste is, obviously, a subjective matter: an opinion that is pretty hard to define and compartmentalize. it's like somebody asking why you prefer apple juice to orange juice, or beer to champagne. you can't really know why, you just do. truth be told, i thought BM was a pile of dumb horseshit when i first heard it myself. this was from me, who was heavily into 90's death metal and 20 minute long doom 'opuses' at the time. "black metal? why would anybody even bother to write a riff if you can hear the goddamned thing? plus they look like dead, gay clowns." ultimately, i'll thank mayhem and varg vikernes for turning the corner for me. what follows may seem like a non sequitir, but i promise to steer everything back on track in due time...
i will admit with conviction that i love manowar more than a lot of things. and while i can't remember the year, i remember very VERY clearly the first time i heard 'hail to england'. there was something about the over the toppedness, the macho bullshittery, the sheer 'kicking-ass-for-the-sake-of-kicking-assedness' that those guys exuded that made me buy into them immediately. they weren't on about chicks or partying at all back then. what you had instead was an entire album about valkyries and satan and gratuitous piccolo bass solos and goddamned cat-skin gloves and poisoned lips... on an album called 'hail to england'... and they were from goddamned auburn, new york. if you were to ever watch an inter view with manowar (most notably joey demiao, you would very quickly deduce that these guys are either totally, 100% behind every word they say pertaining to their love for metal as a whole, or that they are all fucking lunatics. personally, it is my opinion that joey demiao is 90% metall-er than shit and 10% loony. anyhow... it's this sort of conviction that leaves me believing eric adams when he talks kooky shit about 'dying for metal'.

that about sums it up. kinda makes me want to go to germany.

BM for me, at least in the beginning, kind of embodied that same "no, i'm not fucking kidding you" attitute. moreso than punk, which ultimately boiled down to a manufactured look, cultivated by petulant teens in the early 70s, those few early pioneers of the 2nd wave of BM took some questionable philosophical stands to an extreme end. norwegian kids obviously had an 'issue' with the spread of christianity in norway back in the early 90's, but what makes the whole phenomenon noteworthy is that there was a musical theme to their specific blend of activism: a specific soundtrack to the movement. it's comparable to PETA creating a genre of music to accompany them acting like stupid dicks outside of department stores. and pay attention here... they fact that they like to listen to fiona apple is not the same as starting a band. instead, all the rage (albiet baseless in reality) and feelings of isolation (again) were channeled into a distinct movement, the likes of which had never been fully explored. these were pissed off, middle class children railing furiously against intangible things that really didn't have much impact on their day-to-days. i think, ultimately, they were pissed because they had no genuine grief. comfortable and happy, they decided to hate jesus... and the gap... and people who weren't quite as angry as they were. but goddamnit, they did it with enthusiasm. and made some damn fine records along the way.
see... i admire conviction, i really do. and a lot of times, i wish i wasn't so apathetic about most things. i wish i had the balls to lay down and die for something that i believed in, but i don't. after all, even a questionable cause is still a cause which merits the tiniest modicum of respect in standing for. you hear these tales of church burnings and suicides over the depressive nature of life that these wacky kids had and you've gotta kind of admire (is that the right word here?) their willingness to subject themselves to prison and death to carry out their intent, no matter how screwy. it's something i'd never have the gumption to fuck with. hell, i bet even old joe demaio would wash his hands of the whole mess.

the battle above the clouds

this one? i like that one a lot. it's kind of hard to catch any details in the photo i took, but that's because it's pretty hard to make out any details on the original itself. despite having been well traveled and worn , it's a well pressed penny with damn near perfect registration. if you look at the bottom, you can notice what is known as the 'tail' of the flattened penny. it's a naturally occurring byproduct of the last bit of copper rolling through the presses. the tops of a lot of EPs (elongated pennies) will often sport what is know as a 'catch notch', which is a small tab that the presses make to hold firm the penny and start the whole process. if i can remember, i'll show a good detail of a catch notch on another penny sometime.
anyhow, this guy came to me from rock city, chattanooga, tennessee. if you have ever been in the south you should at least recognise the name, since the highways are filthy for hundreds of miles with billboards that encourage you to 'see rock city!' they even sell what would appear to be immensely popular red birdhouses with the slogan painted on the roof.
chattanooga tn is a weird, little town, and i am not really sure how i feel about it. downtown, along the tennessee river is a pretty and bustling scene with plenty of touristy stuff to get into, including a pretty decent aquarium. if you decide to cross the bridge and go north of the city, you'll find what i guess would be the arts district. it has a lot of cool and quirky neighborhoods with nice feeling 'neighborhood' type bars. the bars up there have always been my draw to the area and one of the most contented moments of my life was spent with a girl of whom i was fond at a breakfast themed bar called 'aretha frankenstein's'.
that being said, it appears (as of my last visit at least) that the rest of chattanooga is dying a slow and ugly death. i've never bothered to try and find out what may be the cause for this, but i'd guess it's the same diagnosis for any number of small towns that are collapsing nowadays. anyhow, everything there that i saw outside of downtown was concrete and ugly and boarded up. it gave me a weird and sad feeling to see it, probably because very one of those ugly, little boarded up buildings was, at some point, somebody's dream. at night time, those broken dreams got pretty damned scary. and fast.
the next day, we headed up lookout mountain, which is the only reason i really ever considered visiting chattanooga a second time. according to wikipedia, it is 2,392 feet high, and sits on the collective borders of georgia, alabama, and tennessee. it's also a tourist trap, but that's okay by me. there's a cool civil war battle field up there where we tried to fight off the inevitable destruction of atlanta, a terrifying cave (if you're into that kind of stuff), and the aforementioned rock city.
ah, rock city. for 14 bucks, you get to dick around on some boulders and look at neat stuff. a sign informed me that i could 'see seven states' from up there. i had to take it's word. it offers up a fantasic view of the tennessee valley, which is probably the best reason i can think of to visit, and features a 'lover's leap', where bummed out indians could fling themselves to their deaths. also, there's a rope bridge that's pretty fun to hop around on and that my girl was too terrified to transverse. anyhow, the penny came from a concessions stand at the top of the place where you could also buy three dollar sodas. at the end of the day, we both concluded that we 'saw rock city... and it sucked', but i think time's ability to erase bad memories and keep the good ones has left me with kind of a soft spot for the place.

gathering sums of a larger part...

okay, so chances are you're going to have to take my word that this one is from san francisco since my hands are shaky and i use a telephone for a camera. this penny is the one that officially started my 'collection', since it's the second one i got a hold of. 'what brought me to san francisco in late 2009?' nobody asks. well, i'll tell you. work. and a pretty sweet gig to boot. a carpenter getting paid SF union wages with no obligation to rent can certainly have a pretty badass time here. i was trying desperately to spend all my money and failing at it! anyhow, this began my love affair with californians, the golden gate bridge and fernet branca, the filthy, black poison that puts electricity in your finger tips and poetry in your soul. that is, until you black the fuck out and wake up on a bathroom floor.
anyhow, my buddy ollie and i were asked to work on a courtyard marriott hotel and i struck at the upportunity, since i have never really been anywhere outside of the south, save a trip to gettysburg when i was a little kid. i won't bore you with those details because they are, well, boring. though i did get into it with the site foreman for asking 'what the fuck were YOU guys doing during the civil war?'. 'being cowboys', he said. brilliant.
the aforementioned love of my life and i had been in the sadistic 'on again, off again' cycle for a little while since visiting north carolina, but this time around, 2500 miles away from home, i received a not so pleasant phone call that basically informed me that she was boinking another guy and that i was to butt out forever, please. dirt. however, this left me in an interesting position; single, mildly heartbroken, rich and in a town with more bars than people. it made the situation easier to cope with than you could ever imagine. and i like to think that i coped in grand fashion. we cut a fiery swath through this place, leaving nothing but huge tabs, intimidated san franciscans (fran franshitheads, we were fond of calling them) and angry bartenders in our wake. somewhere in there, ollie invented a nifty little concoction called the 'random act of violence' that consisted of fernet branca, vodka, diet coke and grenadine. now, i have told bartenders about this one and every one of them, to a man, has said that the random act sounded like the awfullest drink ever conceived. ever. but i am here to tell you that like fernet itself, once you had the first one, the second one goes down with a lot less clamor, and the third walks itself right into your liver uninvited. ollie even managed to get 86'ed from a place called 'dirty thieves', which, i have been told is nearly impossible to accomplish unless you are naked and fighting women. he left and i did not, though he exacted his vengeance on me for leaving him locked out of the house by attacking me from behind a bush: a random act of violence of his own which ended up with two bottles of my 'souvenir' fernet being smashed to hell and bleeding into the bay.

bonjour!

so this one is the inaugural post. i'll take a quick second to introduce myself to the nobody who will be reading this blog. my name is jason, and i live in san francisco, california, not too far from the san andres fault that i hear will inevitably send this whole city sliding into the pacific ocean. good times! anyhow, i don't really have a clear direction that i want to take this thing yet, but i know that it'll somehow involve telling tales of the road and elongated pennies. apparently 'elongated' is the preferred nomenclature for the pennies that are dispensed from machines in tourist areas after they have been cranked through two opposing wheels which have been engraved with one of four designs of your choosing. saying smashed, smooshed or flattened will earn you healthy dose of ridicule from the elongated penny collecting community. why you should care if you're looked down upon by a guy who scours ebay for 1987 world series pennies that have been mashed to hell is up to you, but i'd say punch 'em in the nose and carry on: a penny off of ebay is an impure acquisition anyhow.
i guess we'll start with the first penny i own that got me into thinking about all this nonsense and work our way forward to now.

i got this little guy in chimney rock, north carolina 3 or 4 years ago. my best friend, john and i had decided to 'fuck it' and take a trip up to asheville to wander around and drink beer while he took photos of things. we did just that, and it was a good time for both of us all in all. in downtown asheville, there is an old man who owns a belt buckle store with what i'd consider to be a pretty awesome selection of badass, albeit expensive buckles. i'd recommend that you check it out if you're ever there, but temper my suggestion with the fact that the guy is also a dick. he actually yelled at us for having too much fun in his store. 'there's nothing in here that's so funny that you boys need to be laughing', were his exact damned words. i'd also tell you to visit the admiral in west asheville. it's a nifty, little place with wood paneling and a fantastic food menu. on weekends, after 8 o'clock (i think) they clear out most of the tables and spin really good garage and soul music. the best part is that the people there will actually start to dance and have fun once this happens instead of scowling at each other with crossed arms. man! nothing beats pretty girls dancing on a cool springtime evening.
anyhow, the next day took us to chimney rock, which, if you've not been, is one of my favorite places on earth. i hear they filmed scenes from 'the last of the mohicans' there. i heard that because every single damned person in the little town down in the valley will tell you that. the town (village?) of chimney rock is a neat, but sorta useless place since there is nothing, NOTHING there except for about a quarter mile of identical souvenir shops and mediocre restaurants. but it's really quite beautiful with a little stream that runs between it and the mountain. i also managed to score a legit, fur 'coon skin cap for fifteen bucks as i remember. anyhow, as a recently transplanted westerner, every time i think of the 'south', i don't think of much else besides porch beers, cicadas, beat up acoustic guitars, and the view of lake lure and the appalacians from chimney rock. i recently met a girl in denver who told me that she liked the appalacians more than the rockies because they were older and 'had wiser energy'. i'm still not sure exactly what the hell that meant, but something inside of me was forced to agree with her.
anyhow, this penny is sad juju for me. at the time, i had lost the love of my life to my own doing. so it goes. dirt. but man, i remember the way my heart felt back in those days, smashed all to hell and gone like that little 'lucky NC penny'. like isaac brock said, 'i didn't wanna go to bed and i didn't wanna stay up late'. it came out of the machine, still kinda warm and it immediately kind of saddened me a little. 'this is what this little guy will remind me of forever', i said to myself, and i was right. i think that was also kind of what drew me to the idea of starting to collect smashed flat abrahams; their value as emotional and historical bookmarks. ask anyone with tattoos and they'll be able to tell you exactly what they were doing with themselves and where they were when they got each one of them. i know that holds true for me. but in this case, an elongated penny is a more pragmatic method of committing a specific time in a person's life to memory; they cost 51 cents to make, are super portable (my whole collection to date is still in my wallet) and they don't get scabby and gross and punched by your friends. and, as far as the love of my life goes, i am fortunate to have remained mindful of the 'healing' process if you can honestly call it that. i am happy to report that once you realize that you'll survive that kind of crazy, painful mess it makes subsequent heartache a bit easier to fool around with. i have also tested this theory.