Saturday, September 30, 2006

Where's George? At the Dollar Tree!

I took Max to the Dollar store ("Dad, the real name is "the Dollar TREE.") to get some goodies for a sleepover. He'd gotten a zip-style motorcycle which instantly broke but was still fun, and we figured we'd get some more of those. The rider's legs had broken horribly, but not in a crash, they just broke, and the seat came right off but you could still run the plastic zip strip through the wheel and make it go. The zipper degraded visibly right before your eyes; I figure it's got about a hundred runs in it.
Anyway, caveat crap, and I have a hate/hate relationship with cheap-ass Chinese crap, but I is unteachable, and we went anyway.

We got some really cool flip-over cars in similar packaging to Evel Parapelegic, and some glow bracelets for everyone to have fun with after dark. So, six bucks. Everything's a dollar at the dollar store.
When I went to put back the "Two Three-Color Glow Necklaces!" in favor of the pick-up-sticks-sized-tube of 15 various glow things, there were three hispanic kids playing in the aisle, and a dollar bill lying on top of the toys in a bin.
It brought me up short. "Is that yours?" The kids were running around, paying no attention to me or the dollar. Weird. The back of the dollar was up, and in the middle I recognized the "where's George" stamp.
One aisle over, there was a loitering teen with pinkish hair and a trenchcoat. I think he had a friend wandering around, as well.

That was cool. What wasn't cool was just now finding out how lame the Where's George site is. I expected I'd be able to search for McMinnville, or 97128 and try to figure out which bill I'd seen. Nope. Nada.

Plus, I know I entered a bill once, but they had no record of my email address. Any of them.
Sucky. Plus there are idiotic banners for things much less cool than I'd expect from such a conceptually cool concept like tracking currency collaboratively with rubber stamps and internet connections.

BUT! By using Google to search ONLY wheresgeorge.com (Advanced Search), I found several McMinnville dollars, the most recent of which was found on July 2nd. I wonder if the pinkish-haired kid was the one who made the note about the small tier (sic) in the bill.
Note, though, the idiotic map showing Alaska in Baja, with a red-rocket-line of the bill shooting up to Washington from the south. Edward Tufte would not approve.

The one that had two entries two years apart in McMinnville made me wonder, too. Did it just knock around here for a couple years, was it in someone's piggy bank the whole time? Did the same person enter it both times?
I wonder.

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