I hate it when stores won't accept large bills. I currently have two $50 bills in my wallet. They were spit out at me by a bank machine, which at the time I thought was mighty fortunate. Due in part to my hesitation to part with the largest bills I've ever handled, I haven't yet broken them. When I try to, it might prove difficult, due to the signs I've seen at the cash registers in many stores of all sizes, reading:

DUE TO RECENT COUNTERFEIT, WE CAN NO LONGER ACCEPT $50 AND $100 BILLS

Counterfeit sucks like that kid in shop class who stuck things in the power sander and shot people with hot glue and ruined it for the rest of us. Stores have got to come up with a better way of keeping counterfeit notes out of their registers than "discriminating" against the larger bills. Refusing to accept $50 notes because some rotten ones have turned up is like keeping "terrorists" out of the United States by humiliating every poor Arab at the border with an anal-cavity search. (Speaking of which, Lynnsie England, the former employee of the U.S. Armed Forces famous for flashing a smile and a thumbs-up while posing for a photograph with a pile of naked, sexually-abused Iraqi prisoners of war, recently gave birth to a son. I would totally be proud of my mother if I discovered such photos of her. I feel worse for that child than I do for Madonna's brood, when they're finally allowed to watch TV and catch clips of her humping mechanical bulls in cone-shaped bras.)

Or like slaughtering or burying alive a hundred million birds to avenge the lives of twenty-odd humans (source). Quoth the BBC: "Millions of birds have been culled in an attempt to stop the spread of [avian flu]." Culled . . . what a cute way of spelling "killed." I wonder why humans with contagious diseases aren't buried alive, specifically HIV-positive scum bag rapists.

To get back on topic, big bills are nice. They make you feel rich and important, and keep you from having to carry around a roll of twenties that makes your wallet fat and your back pocket scream, "MUG ME!" I can certainly understand refusing to accept a fifty dug from the bottom of a bag full of thousands, but to refuse them all is insane. I wonder if mints could encode every bill they print with a unique identification number, hidden in a watermark on the bill so that would have to be scanned at a register and matched to a global database. This would work much the way a credit card works.

This will never happen, of course, because it would require the government to implement a change to a current system. Though, every few years, on the money, they take some hair from the Queen's head and add some girth to her nose, and sprinkle on some shiny gold stickers and ugly little kids playing pond hockey.

Oh, well . . . there are worse things the government could be funding.