Based on a few emails I received a few people did not pick up that my last post, Treasury Overhauls Circulating Coins, was an April Fool’s Joke!

I am happy it fooled a number of people since it takes a lot of work to come up with something that looks good and could be believable if it wasn’t posted on April 1.

Aside from the date, there are a few other subtleties I hid through the post for fun:

  1. Unless the world is falling apart, I cannot think of any reason why the Secretary of the Treasury would make this type of announcement on Sunday. Geithner may be a hard working person but unless the economy and markets are crashing, he was probably spending the weekend with his family.
  2. Although I found real numbers to calculate real weights, I just multiplied all of the Mint’s numbers by .75 and rounded up. I didn’t think there were many chemists or metallurgists who would try to validate my calculations.
  3. Notice that when I mentioned the discontinuation of the half-dollar, I did not mention who was on the obverse except to say, “the coin honoring the last assassinated president.” I know, it was an esoteric omission but it allowed me to do the next one—
  4. As far as I know, there is no such person named “Cathleen Towson” associated with the Kennedy family. It was a play on Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Townsend is the eldest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy and was once Maryland’s Lieutenant Governor. If you did not know, Towson is the name of a town northwest of Baltimore and the home of Towson University.
  5. Another subtle try to drop a hint was in the last paragraph where I wrote, “It may be foolish to think….”
  6. Finally, if you keep up with the tags at the end of the post, the tag was “Fun” and not something like “U.S. Mint” or anything more serious.

I had a lot of fun putting this together. I hope it brightened your April Fool’s Day!

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