Illegal quarters

Just when you thought it was safe to find a quarter in your pocket, like I did in a previous post, you may stumble onto a 'fantastic' illegal coin!

The movie 'Fantastic Four' (based on the comic) has a promotion out. 40 000 quarters were printed with some of the characters in the movie on them. Pretty cool promotion, until you find out that the US Mint actually said that the printing was illegal. All of the quarters used were state quarters for California, and about 800 of the promotional coins have been released in every state.

(And if you're a keen collector, you can submit your find of the Fantastic Four coin to win a private screening of the film!)

Read more about it here.

And while we're on the topic of coin collectors, I stumbled onto Coin Collector, which has lots of useful information for the numismatist (new word for the day! I promised Taki I'd stop using it; she thinks it's a naughty word :P ). Plus there's a coin trivia day each week, where you have to really know your coin stuff to get the answers right!

State of the coin

Today I was standing in Central Park, waiting for Taki. I had my hand in my pocket, and I discovered a coin - ok, not that exciting. But I looked at the coin, and realized how different it was. Did you know that the US Mint has made special quarters, one for each state?

The NY quarter, which was produced in 2001, has the Statue of Liberty on it. I didn't even know they made these types of coins, I just figured one coin was the same everywhere. But apparently, they've been producing state quarters since 1999, and are going to finish making them next year. This year, the mint is releasing coins for: Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah.

So really, discovering a coin in your pocket can be really interesting. I'm going to keep my NY state quarter, maybe make a nice little origami frame for it. Maybe one day it'll be worth something. (You can find out more about the state coins here.)