Coins Used in Jewelry: Illegal to Deface?

I've seen some really beautiful jewelry made out of coins, such as rings made out of quarters, and coins which have been stamped with words like "lucky" on a penny, or otherwise drilled to wear as a pendant, etc.  And there always seem to be comments such as, "Isn't it illegal to deface currency?" and "It's not legal to sell or wear defaced coins!" and so forth.   So obviously there is a lot of confusion and misinformation about what you can legally do to currency.

So I checked with the  US Mint website, and this is what I found:

1. Is it illegal to damage or deface coins?

Section 331 of Title 18 of the United States code provides criminal penalties for anyone who fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the Mints of the United States. This statute means that you may be violating the law if you change the appearance of the coin and fraudulently represent it to be other than the altered coin that it is. As a matter of policy, the Mint does not promote coloring, plating or altering U.S. coinage: however, there are no sanctions against such activity absent fraudulent intent. 

This means that if you try to change, for example, a quarter so it looks like a dollar coin, that's fraud.  Or if you alter the date on a coin to a more rare (and valuable) date, that's also fraud. 

But smashing a penny in a penny rolling machine, like you can do at Disneyland, is not fraud and is perfectly legal.   Drilling a hole in an old buffalo nickel to wear as a pendant is legal.  Stamping "lucky" on a penny is perfectly legal.  Forming a quarter into a ring is also perfectly legal to sell, buy and wear.

Kintsugi

Per "Inside Smithsonian Research" Newsletter (Winter 2009):

Nothing could be further removed from America’s grab ’n go coffee clutter than the centuries-old ceramic tea bowls now on view in a quiet corner of the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art in the exhibit “Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics.” Dating back 300 years or more, these simple vessels have endured from a time when tea, not coffee, was king, and drinking it was regarded as a meditative and spiritual ritual.

Tea-ceremony aesthetics focused on the beauty in imperfection (wabi-sabi). “Even in tea bowls that were not repaired, people came to look for the slight idiosyncrasies, even flaws, in the glaze that made one bowl more interesting than another. The context of tea drinking created a moment of awareness of transiency, of the way in which all objects, like all human beings, exist in a fleeting way and are decaying.”

Exactly when golden kintsugi repairs began is unknown. An incident involving an heirloom owned by the shogun (commander) Ashikaga Yoshimasa(1434-1490), however, may have encouraged development of the technique.

Within a century, repairs using lacquer combined with powdered gold or silver became common in Japan. “Sometimes owners even commissioned lavish maki-e, or ‘sprinkled picture’ decoration to replace large fragments,” Cort says. In this practice, artisans replaced a missing fragment of a broken bowl by crafting a new piece with built-up layers of lacquer. Powdered silver and gold were then carefully sprinkled upon the sticky patch in a pictorial design, such as cherry blossoms.

By the 17th century, some tea-ceremony practitioners were even being accused of breaking their tea bowls on purpose, in the hope that kintsugi mends might increase their aesthetic and commercial value.

“Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics” is on view in the Freer Gallery of Art through May 10.

A Man of Style - Yves St. Laurent

Per JENNY BARCHFIELD, Associated Press Writer:
PARIS – From the Picassos that graced his walls to historic artifacts and hundreds of sculptures, the artwork that inspired late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent went on display Saturday (February 21, 2009), three days before it is auctioned.

The exhibition is free and open to the public through Monday afternoon — hours before the start of sale, which will be held in six sessions over three days because of the sheer size of the collection. Hundreds of private collectors and museums from around the world are expected to bid on the lots.

Billed as "the sale of the century," the auction of the 733-piece collection will disperse in three days a collection that took Saint Laurent and his lifelong partner Pierre Berge half a century to amass.

Highlights include Piet Mondrian's 1922 painting "Composition in Blue, Red, Yellow and Black," whose squares of saturated colors inspired Saint Laurent's legendary 1965 shift dress; a wooden sculpture by Romania's Constantin Brancusi that is expected to sell for euro15 million-euro30 million ($19 million-$37 million); and a pair of bronze animal heads that disappeared from a Beijing palace in 1860 and that China now wants removed from the auction and returned.

Other lots include sculptures from ancient Egypt and Rome and 17th century Italy, medieval ivory crucifixes and silver German beer steins that covered every available surface of Saint Laurent's homes, as well as his Art Deco furniture and even his bed.

The sale, organized by Christie's auction house, is expected to gross $250 million-$380 million. A large portion of the proceeds is to go to a foundation to support AIDS research.

More pictures here. You can view the Christie's catalog here.

"Green" Graffiti

This is amazing and beautiful!

Quartz - Beautiful Variety

I thought I'd write about different types of gemstones, since I've been seeing a LOT of misinformation out there. I'll start with Quartz, because it's common, pretty, popular and there are lots of different types of Quartz gemstones:

Amethyst - purple quartz

Aventurine - greenish translucent chalcedony

Carnelian - red chalcedony

Cat's Eye - chatoyant

Chalcedony - microcrystalline quartz

Chert - cryptocrystalline quartz

Chrysoprase - apple green chalcedony

Citrine - yellow quartz

Flint - microcrystalline quartz

Hornstone - flint

Jasper - red or brown chalcedony

Moss Agate - variety of chaledony with inclusions

Plasma - green chalcedony

Prase - leek green chalcedony

Rock Crystal - clear quartz

Rose Quartz - rose pink colored quartz

Sapphire Quartz - blue colored quartz

Smoky Quartz - brown to black quartz

Tiger Eye - pseudomorph of asbestos The worst thing I've been seeing lately are colored glass stones sold as quartz. These are generally given "fruity" names: strawberry, pineapple, cherry, blueberry quartz, etc., or sometimes just colors (aqua quartz, ruby quartz, pink quartz, etc.) But these are NOT "quartz" at all, but manufactured glass! There IS a genuine "lemon quartz" however, which is a sort of greenish golden color, different from citrine, shown here:

View of Home from Deep Space

What a beautiful sight! Earth and our moon, as seen from 31 million miles away...



NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has created a video of the moon transiting (passing in front of) Earth as seen from the spacecraft's point of view 50 million kilometers (31 million miles) away. Scientists are using the video to develop techniques to study alien worlds.

"Making a video of Earth from so far away helps the search for other life-bearing planets in the Universe by giving insights into how a distant, Earth-like alien world would appear to us," said University of Maryland astronomer Michael A'Hearn, principal investigator for the Deep Impact extended mission, called Epoxi.

During a full Earth rotation, images obtained by Deep Impact at a 15-minute cadence have been combined to make a color video. During the video, the moon enters the frame (because of its orbital motion) and transits Earth, then leaves the frame. Other spacecraft have imaged Earth and the moon from space, but Deep Impact is the first to show a transit of Earth with enough detail to see large craters on the moon and oceans and continents on Earth.

You can read the full release here.

Colonel Sanders via Satellite??!

I *love* Google Maps, especially the "street view" feature. I could spend hours just looking at places all over the world.

I was looking at Google Maps today to verify that there is absolutely NOTHING between my house in New Mexico and the Grand Canyon (well, no cities, no people--just lots of mountains, sand, desert, etc.). And there IS literally nothing in between!

Zooming past the Grand Canyon, I was looking at Las Vegas and then went north in search of Area 51. I was completely surprised when I zoomed in on what I thought was Area 51---and saw a huge KFC (Colonel Sanders) logo!!!

Do you see it yet?
Zooming in:

At first, I thought the government photoshopped that head to cover something in Area 51. However, apparently, KFC constructed a giant tile ad of their logo/mascot, Colonel Saunders, to “make it viewable from space”. The giant logo was intentionally constructed near Area 51 so that Google Maps visitors (and other satellite maps) would see the ad. They're calling this an "astrovertisement" and apparently "mapvertising" and "roofvertising" are trends for the future.

I wonder if there are other giant "astrovertisements"out there?