Hello, my name is Maureen, and it’s been three minutes since my last nitpick.

I couldn’t leave this beautiful pamphlet from 1651 alone, and just read the nice martyrdom speech by Blessed Terence Albert O’Brien, my kinsman from afar. Nope, I had to search for the beautiful Irish spirituality of the prayer, and find out it was Archbishop Laud’s beautiful Anglican prayer. And that EVEN HIS FELLOW DOMINICANS didn’t pick that up, either, and thus quoted it on their webpage about him!

Gahhhhh… I’m sure the blessed O.P. bishop appreciates it, but it’s annoying to be me!

Well, it’s less annoying than to have somebody else point it out instead! Heh!

I think all Canadian currency should be embossed with a picture of two drunk guys in stocking caps clinking beer glasse with “Eh!” printed over the top of the pic.

For coins? As a “shout out” to multiculturalism – an engraved beaver with “Le merde c’est moi” engraved above it.

What aboot that, eh?

Friggin’ Norwegians ruining everything. Sons of bitches.

Bill2 – I’ll take it as a compliment. Skål!!

I Blame Canada. On principle.

I couldn’t care less what sort of leaf they put on the bill. The maple leaf on our flag was so “streamlined” and modernized it practically looks like a pot leaf. What I don’t like about the new bills is their tactile quality. Somehow, I can’t seem to “feel” them with the skin of my fingertips. I can’t tell if I’m holding one or two. Even when I look at them and shuffle them between my fingers, I can’t seem to feel them. It’s the weirdest thing, and once they introduce $10 and $5 bills like this, I’ll have to be studying my money all the time to see how much I’m handing over.

This is so wrong – how much effort does it take to copy the maple leaf on the flag and put it on an engraving plate? Somehow I get the feeling that someone simply used Google Image Search to find some clip art, and took the first result that was “free”.

It also speaks very ill of the kind of checking going on. Surely, there must have been many people who reviewed the design before it got to this stage – wasn’t even one of them able to catch this?

(And no, I wasn’t calling you Shirley.)

What I really hate is the infiltration of Canadian coins into the US. It seems like they’re a silent plague, creeping down from the border and making for the sunnier climes of Mexico. I’ev actually gotten more Canadian coins in change while living in Texas than I did in New York State. And it seems that once you get Canadian coins, you can’t get rid of them – you’re handed a fistful of change at a Wendy’s drive through at night that’s loaded with “Loonies” you can’t see, but if you try to give one to the a kid running the fish pond at a charity event, your innocent oversight indiscretion is spotted immediately.

Yes, that George V dollar is very nice indeed.

Bill Go figure, our penny stash up here is full of that Lincoln fellow. They are discontinuing minting the penny here. We should have chosen something different.

Don the cap is a Toque, darned Colonials!

And if you think our money stinks, scratch the maple leaf on the $50 & $100 and you can smell maple sugar. Really! Counterfeit that folks!

Chris the First Nations and Metis are arguing who is in the canoe and which way its going.

Doesn’t much matter who the sovereign is, Mike. Artistically, that’s still better than anything we’ve ever minted.

Okay, I hit Wikipedia for a comparison between the sugar maple (Acer saccharum) and the Norway maple (Acer platanoides) and the people complaining are right; that “stylised leaf” is Norwegian, not Canadian.

I can sympathise: it’s as if someone tried to pass off a four-leaf clover as shamrock and then explained that it was a “stylised” image.

Though regarding the new currency, I thought the designs for the euro were okayish if not that great, but the new Canadian design is pretty bad too. Sorry, but that’s how it looks to these eyes.

IMHBNIO, the most beautiful coins ever minted were from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Check this out:
http://www.greek-coins.net/images/zeus-coin.jpg

And that’s just one of many.

I agree with Michael D on the coin. A plain yet stylish picture of their English Heritage and native ethos.

Link? Phooey, it was supposed to be!

Well, after they dumped the prettiest flag in NATO (at least) there’s no limit to the possible bad taste of HM Canadian Government. Or le Gouvernement Canadien de SM.

I went to the Newser link above and then to the CBC link for the comparison between the two maple leaves. My favorite comment was this:

“This is outrageous…I will soon be putting up a post office box address where you can send me all of these insulting $20 bills that you might have in your possession so that I can perhaps take a truckload of them to Ottawa to represent our collective anger to Parliament.
I may even demand to speak to the Prime Minister or the Governor General about this.

Heheh – non-Canadians may not get the reference to meeting with the Prime Minister or the Governor General. I think it’s an allusion to the publicity stunt of one of our native Indian chiefs, who’s engaged in a month-long Weight Watchers marathon liquid diet (even the press has stopped calling it a hunger strike) until the PM and the G-G will meet with her.

Our current dollar coin was supposed to have the voyageur design on it, but the Royal Canadian Mint went above and beyond the call of duty — and lost the dies. So they commissioned the loonie design instead. Hey, it only cost a few million bucks and a classic coin design to fix the error, so who’s complaining? And a few million more to fix the Norwegian maple leaf. . . .

Government at its finest. At least we’re not minting trillion-dollar nickels.

And we have the toonie ($2) that looks like a huge quarter with a penny stick in the middle.

in 1967 the dollars had no serial numbers just 1867-1967.

We have a second form of currency, Canadian Tire Money. printed on proper bank note paper, but too small to use for counterfeiting.

One interesting thing about all this new money in Canada: as soon as a new bill or coin is released, people set about trying to destroy it. Physically. I remember when the toonie came out: immediately the news filled with stories about people trying to pop the gold-coloured center out of the coin. Now, I suppose $2 isn’t that much money to waste just to have a bit of fun. But the first polymer dollar bill was a $100, and people couldn’t wait to set fire to them, melt them in the microwave or run them through a blender, just to see if they could wreck them. A hundred dollars is a lot of money to me. I was just astounded that people could be so determined to be the first to find the weakness that they’d just throw it away.