They're Round, So Can't Be Boxes, Apparently

Interestingly enough, tins are made of plastic now  

I don't even know when tins stopped being made out of tin.  Is there a history lesson somewhere?

Locating the full manufacturing history of containers dubbed to be "tins" is left as an exercise for the reader.  

Cheap cop out, Jeremy.  I like it!  

Not long ago, I realized that I was running low on mints at work.  I keep them in my desk drawer for after lunch and times that my breath just generally needs to be mintier.  In fact, in the middle of typing that last sentence, I decided to be mintier, so I grabbed a mint.  I go through them fairly quickly, but I'm okay with that.  It makes me more pleasant to have a conversation with.  

At least physically.  Mentally, having a conversation with you is just as mind-numbing.  

Most normal people would go to a grocery store or to a large chain box store where they have large displays of candy and mints right next to the cash registers in order to buy mints.  They also tend to have a larger candy-themed aisle dedicated to this sort of thing.  I am not most people.  I buy my mints online from a large retailer which, for strictly Blag purposes, we'll call Nile.com.  

I do this for several reasons.  

Liar. 

I do this for one reason.  It's ludicrously cheaper.  The exact same container of mints that I can buy at the grocery store for around $2.75, I can buy a case of on Nile.com fora shade under $2 each.  Of course, they come in a box of 8 containers, so I'm buying in bulk for the savings, but I'm okay with that.  Want to know why?  Because they're mints!  They won't go bad.  They'll just sit in a box in my office desk until I need them, at which time, I pull out a new container, open it up, and I'm good to be minty fresh.  I can do this 8 times before I need to think about it again...and I've saved six bucks.  Twelve if you count the fact that I bought two of them, but that's not important right now.  

Regardless of all of this, I noticed that the box my new mints came in specifically says that it contains eight "1.5oz (42 g) TINS."  They actually call the containers of mints "Tins."  One would think that the tins are made of...you know...tin, or at the very least some form of metal.  I mean, people still use the name "tin foil" to describe aluminum foil (or Aluminium, for our European readers), and that's generally considered acceptable.  But in this case, my mints are housed in containers entirely made up of plastic.  There is no metal, tin or otherwise, involved in my mint containers.  I feel I've been lied to. 

Bonus! Collectible Quarters Now Even More Valuable!

Why do cents come in groups of 25, and dollars come in groups of 20?  

Please tell me this isn't one of those rhetorical questions like why we drive on parkways and park on driveways.  

Everybody loves amusing rhetorical questions!  But no...this isn't one of those.  It is rhetorical, I guess, since I'm not really expecting an explanation, but it really is a genuine question that has been plaguing me for a long long time.

Since about 7:30 this morning.  

That's a long time!  

So anyway, money is weird and confusing.  I remember back in grade school, when math class (or "maths," for our British readers) included many a lesson on currency.  They had to explain what coins were available and how to properly count out a certain number of cents using the fewest possible coins.  I never had a problem with it, since I'm a genius, but I would often have problems with self-righteous teachers telling me I got an answer wrong because I didn't put the cent sign after the correct number.  That sort of thing happens a lot when you're a genius.  It's the price we pay.  

Anyway, if you think about it, 25 is a weird number to use when dividing up a dollar.  Sure, it makes 50 really easy to come by, but is it honestly that much of a sacrifice for the sake of easy math?  If we were like the rest of the world (And by "rest of the world" I mean any country that uses Euros and the Bosnian Convertible Mark, since that's the amount of research I put into this...asking a Bosnian what money they used), dollar would be broken up into 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cent increments.  Dollars already come in 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 denominations for those of you who, unlike me, don't roll exclusively with hundreds.  

The only difference in American coins is the 25 cent coin, which isn't even twenty five cents!  Look at one...nowhere on there does it say it's worth 25 cents.  It says it's a Quarter Dollar.  So now, you not only have to understand currency and values, but you have to know fractions in order to figure out 25 cents.  Granted, it's not something that most of us think about, but that's exactly the sort of thing that pops into my head and builds a nest and stays for weeks.  In fact, almost none of our coins tell you how much they're worth.  Penny is one cent, Nickel is five cents, Dime is ten cents, Quarter is 25 cents, and Fifty-Cent Piece is not surprisingly Fifty Cents.  At least only the names of the Penny, Nickel, and Dime are missing from the coin itself...they actually tell you how much they're worth.  But tell somebody not from America to give you a Dime, and they won't know which coin to hand over, since none of them have the word "Dime" on them.  This is unnecessarily confusing.

So, while there is a genuine (and entirely reasonable) push to eliminate the penny from American currency, I think those efforts are a little off the mark.  We should be replacing the quarter with a 20-cent piece.  That way, at least the denominations on either side of the decimal point will match up and you only have to learn one set of math equations to deal with money.  You'll have 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50.  Then, regardless of if you have to come up with 83 cents or 83 dollars, you can do it the same way...a 50, a 20, a 10, and three 1s.  Boom, done.  

Genius. 

What's The Deal With The Red Stick On The Box Again?

The problem with never using stamps is that you lose your stamps  

Fortunately, Jeremy has a connection where he buys stamps...the post office.  And all was well in the world...

So not the point.  

The point, I guess, is that mail isn't what it used to be.  It's an issue that's been addressed across multiple media outlets, social and otherwise, about how people don't pay all that much attention to the mail anymore.  I sure don't.  Quite seriously, I go out to my mailbox and empty its contents roughly once per week or so, mostly because there's never anything worthwhile in it.  There's the standard town "newspaper" and advertising circulars, solicitations from various cell phone/cable TV/sattelite radio/insurance providers which go straight into the rubbish, the occasional political mailing, a year's subscription to Sports Illustrated that I'm still not 100% sure how I ended up with, and every once in a great while...bills. 

It's a sign of the times that there are precisely two bills that I get in paper form, and of those, only one that I pay in paper form.  One doesn't have electronic billing, but I can pay directly from my bank's website, and the other charges a $3 "convenience fee" for electronic payment, so they get a check mailed to them.  That second bill is my water bill, which arrives like clockwork every 90 days and gets paid a little less like clockwork when I darn well choose because even if I forget about it, they'll just tack an additional 60 cents on to my next bill for a late payment and I care less than 60 cents worth about the whole thing.  Also, it's the only time ever that I have to drag out my check book and envelopes and stamps.  It's a hassle.

It's less of a hassle than it could be because I keep all of these gubbins in one place.  I reach into a single shelf on my desk and pull out my check book, an attached pen, and stamps squeezed in between.  Directly above that is a box of envelopes which I had to buy not long ago for the first time in 8 1/2 years.  I checked the box.  

Not long ago, I embarked on this process because the friggin water people wanted to get paid again, and they still haven't accepted the inevitability of free online bill payment (Thanks, Town Water Department).  I grabbed all of my stuff, and to my dismay, the stamps were not attached to the check book (which incidentally also hasn't seen an update in at least 8 1/2 years, since the checks still don't have my current address on them).  I had no idea where else they could have been since the only time I ever use them is every three months when using the same three items to pay the same one stupid bill.  I looked all over the desk for the stamps of which I'm almost entirely certain I still had several left.  No avail.  To this day, I have no idea where those stamps are.

My water bill got sent out two days later when I finally went to the post office to buy new stamps.  The rest of them went right to the shelf on top of my check book.  See you in 90 days!