.fr

it's maybe just the mildly autistic part of me talking now, but i'm surprised and excited to find that euro-coins have the two faces facing in the proper direction, relative to each other.

hold a US coin by the edges between two fingers so that you can spin it to compare the design on each side. most likely, you have your forefinger at the top and your thumb at the bottom, like the guy in the photo. notice that if one side is rotated correctly, when you spin it around the other side is upside-down. that always bothered me. long ago, someone had to make the decision of how the obverse (front) and reverse (back) would relate to each other. it was a tiny decision, almost without consequence, but they flubbed it and did it wrong. i only know the word obverse because this fact irritated me enough as a kid to investigate it. here in the enlightened european union, someone spent the extra time to question whether, of two seemingly equal choices, there wasn't some angle they could slice the question to come up with a deciding factor.

there are never equal choices. if it looks like it, you don't understand the situation well enough yet. for a long time, i've loved being presented with a coin-flip decision, so that i could at least come up with some arbitrary reason why one choice is the better. but hey, that's no better, really!

in writing this, for the first time in a long time, i questioned what the reasoning would be for having the reverse upside-down. well, the questioning happened as a by-product of coming up with reasons to do it like i like it. i came up with about an equal number of reasons for doing it either way. drat.

but this is good. this is one step past self-centered, past NIH. except it brings the decision nearly back to being a coin toss.

...

when i took my last big trip, i was writing about how iced coffee means something totally different in australia. an australian friend called me out for writing about nothing, of missing the entire point of travelling: getting deep into the culture talking to people. but claire was way more social than me. i hear her voice now in my mind, nagging, but i'm still excited by this kind of stuff. rain man still enjoyed his trip to vegas, after all.