lordmarcovan

So… here I come, a month later, browsing the back pages, and reading old threads.  What did the winners spend their prize loot on, I wonder?

And then here I come, reading the back pages more than a month later…

On 4/15/2024 at 6:03 PM, JAZ Numismatics said:

So the real question is: how much time is enough to erase the distaste of owning objects associated with evil men? Because if you collect Roman, you've got a cabinet full of coins issued by murderous, torturing, genocidal, megalomaniacal, perverse, misogynistic pedophiles. 

Fair question.  I for one find some of history’s rogues interesting.

I guess it’s up to the individual about where they feel queasy and where to draw the line.

Perhaps a dark period that is still within living memory (e.g., the Holocaust) can be viewed a little differently than an era from which there are no living survivors.  Time may not heal all wounds, but it does bring a modicum of emotional detachment when enough of it has elapsed, I suppose.

(Of course I say this as an American.  I know folks in places like Europe and the Middle East have much longer cultural memories.)

I have nothing intelligent to add vis-a-vis die characteristics, but I really like that anepigraphic reverse!  I was previously unfamiliar with the type.  (Apparently I don’t crawl out of my burrow often enough.)

The bullion value of my gold “guitar pick” (Bermuda Triangle) has now caught up to what I paid for it (including the slab).

It is .999 fine,  with 1.0114 oz. of bullion.  

Reckon I’ll hang onto it a little longer and then flip it and convert it to some more historical gold or electrum later, maybe.

Sure, it’s modern.  But it’s fun.

Yes, occasionally.  
 

I've done repeat business with both Incitatus and David Connors.  Both good.  Dunno if I ever thanked ‘em, but they did get my repeat business.

Wow, an impressive array!  I love those hippos!

Here is my heffalump, which has been posted before in other threads.

53 minutes ago, akeady said:

I was in an anechoic chamber a while back, testing our MEMS microphone ADC.

Fun day 😄

ATB,
Aidan.

Are those pointy bits like foam rubber?  I’d be powerless to prevent myself from playing with them and squooshing them every which way and bouncing myself off the walls, and other kidlike behavior they would likely frown upon.  (I never fully grew up in some ways.)

Just now: high tide in the Marshes of Glynn, shot from a moving car window at 55 MPH.

(*Ladymarcovan is driving.  I’m the passenger.)

Just now: Grace the Dachshund tried to escape having her ears cleaned, but Bean held her down.

Wild roses on the back fence.
 

7 hours ago, Finn235 said:

I have a couple unusual trinkets

First was given to me by my (very devoutly Catholic) grandmother - I was told it contains a small sliver of bone taken from the skeleton of Saint Francis of Assisi, but the Italian translation is "Dust from the tomb of Saint Francis" so I have honestly no clue what is in the tiny reliquary. The note along with it says that it was personally blessed by Pope Pius XII in the early 50s.

 

Another, a not four- but seven-leaf clover that I found when I was in elementary school. Couldn't tell you why but I was obsessed with 4 leaf clovers at the time, and I found a little cluster of patches on the outskirts of the playground that was a hotbed for them. I eventually tossed most of the 4 leaf clovers but kept this one.

SEVEN leaves!  Wow.

2 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

I'm not sure if it's the original source but it may have come from the r/AncientCoins subreddit as it was the monthly "meme posting day" (last day of the month).

 

Seems likely.  I don’t do Reddit much, but I figured it came from somewhere like that.

Aha.  I’m not surprised to find it’s already made the rounds.

11 hours ago, Qcumbor said:

The item I'll write about is both not coin related AND coin related.

During the first half of the 40's in then occupied Corsica, while there was a shortage of about everything, my grandad built a kind of weird tool to cut out stripes of pasta in order to get tagliatelle in the end. Nowadays you would use something like that for your DIY tagliatelle :

 

Back then he had the brilliant idea to save 20 holed 25 cts coin that were in use at the moment, like the one below

 

Then he had to wash them (hopefully), file them to have them sharp enough to cut pasta and arrange them as follows

 

I still have it with me, together with the sestertius he found at Verdun battle (pretty sure he wasn't the one who shot @DonnaML's grandad 🙂 , and he got shot himself during that battle). I swear I never use that "thing" to cook !

 

... and I made sure there's no key date in it (they would be ruined anyway 😄 )

 

Bon appétit !

Q

 

 

Brilliant!  What a wonderful, one-of-a-kind artifact!  (And I love pasta.)

His Verdun battlefield sestertius was already amazing enough!

(Sorry, don’t know the source)

9 minutes ago, kirispupis said:

I would have to say the only known firecracker pack and label from the Goldstein's Company in Rochester, NY.

I used to collect antique firecracker packs and still have both of these. When I first started collecting these this was my "dream pack" because I grew up near Rochester. When they came up for auction, I sprung for them both.

Despite my fondness for them, I'd consider donating them to a museum in Rochester, but I'm too worried they would be ignored and destroyed.

Must be rare indeed- I can’t imagine very many of those survived their own time!  
 

(Edit- yeah, I guess “unique” is something more than just “rare indeed”.)

What is the craziest item you’ve ever owned that other people rarely have?

I was asked to answer this on Quora.

Here’s my answer. (Not coin-related.)

What’s yours? What’s the most interesting, unusual, weird, wacky, or rare object you’ve ever owned, which few other people ever have?

Considering our demographic here, I would imagine that for many of you it might be some kind of ancient artifact.  If so, great, let’s hear about that!  But what else have you had that might fit the bill?

The ideal theme song for that alligator:

https://youtu.be/dBN86y30Ufc?si=ZvuFzIy8OJu_fHpi

On 4/21/2024 at 8:17 PM, lordmarcovan said:

This guy was seen near our local Waffle House today.  Big ‘un!

(Not my photo- wife saw it on Facebook.  I don’t get the juicy neighborhood news like she does, since I closed my FB account.)

 

Heee’s baaack!

I don’t pay enough attention to shipping details, but my feeling is that as long as all the terms and costs are clearly described up front for me to base my decisions on (i.e., factor into the cost of the coin), then it’s up to the seller what they want to charge.  I can either accept that, or walk away and shop somewhere else.  

(I do agree, however, that it is shady for a seller to charge a high price for a basic, slow service and not be transparent about it.)

Here is my most recent purchase, from Ritter via MA-Shops.

Shipped from Germany to USA for $21.40 USD.  As I recall, it was shipped via UPS.  It arrived quickly, within 2 or 3 days.  Regular post for $20+ would seem a bit high to me, but for 2-3 day transatlantic shipping it seems pretty reasonable.  (Whether the price I paid for the coin itself seems reasonable to you is an entirely different question.)

Note to self: when browsing, always look for the same coin on other platforms or on the dealer’s own site for comparison-shopping.

(I instinctively already knew this, and have done it a few times, but I don’t always do it.  I need to make that a matter of routine.)

Well, since we started with a Tribute penny, I’ll share two sets of comparisons between my the Tiberius and Claudius coins of my first Twelve Caesars set (completed in 2013 on a modest budget), and my present, slightly more ambitious set (which is now 75% complete):

Tiberius Tribute pennies:

Then

Now

Claudius Æs:

Then

 Now

(I know, this second pair was kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison.)

Say what you will about the relative merits of each coin, but I think it’s safe to say (at least from a technical standpoint) that both scenarios show an upgrade.

I would imagine the convex scyphate shape of the coin in the OP also likely caused some challenges with lighting?

Then again, the second one looked OK.

I’m a pretty lousy photographer (mediocre to adequate on my best days), so I usually repurpose the seller photos or have PCGS or NGC image my coins for me.

So the photographs in my collection come from a variety of sources, but I edit them all into a standard template for a matching format.

Sourced from CNG images:

Sourced from PCGS TrueView images (I was a big fan of Trueviews during the tenure of Phil Arnold at PCGS.  Nowadays, less so.  I don’t think Phil did this one.):

Sourced from my own wretched cellphone shots through the slab plastic (lighting is the bugaboo that bedevils me the most):

Sourced from NGC Photovision images (NGC’s Doug Plascencia does great work, and I’m sold on their Photovision service.  I have them/him shoot all my ancients now):

So, my unhelpful tip for good gold coin photography?  Let the pros do it for you, unless you just enjoy the process and experimentation of coin photography for its own sake, as I suspect most of you here do.

For me, good photography is vital, as my coins are shared mostly online and spend all their time locked in a safe deposit box.  But the process of photographing them is more like a chore and less like fun for me, so I take the lazy man’s way out and pay the pros 90% of the time.

12 hours ago, Phil Anthos said:

 

Excellent.  Added to my Spotify playlist.  Thanks.