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.
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