Benjamin Franklin gets a makeover


Are you tired of the old $100 bill? I know I am! As a highly-paid industry expert and jewel thief, I sleep in a nest of them. So boring! So easy to fake! But now Benjy’s got his groove back with this new hundy. I can’t wait to light one of my solid gold cigars with one of these… although I think the new microlens array might be toxic when burned.

Okay, who am I kidding. It’s a rare day indeed when I even get to see a hundred at a distance, much less in my hand. But I know what one looks like at least, although soon even that knowledge will be outdated. Seeing as it’s a popular target for counterfeiting (how surprising!), the $100 bill has been outfitted with a number of high-tech security measures. Holographic liberty bells, a strip of microlenses that creates the illusion of movement in different directions… or something like that. The announcement was just made yesterday and I haven’t had a chance to stop by the Treasury, so I’m going to have to take MSN at its word.

I’ve rather liked the redos for the other bills, personally, and I’m always impressed by how crazy foreign currency is when I go abroad. Bills different lengths so blind people can tell them apart? Hmm, what a good idea that was like fifty years ago. Yet every day in America, an average of 7000 blind persons are scammed by unscrupulous cashiers because all our bills have the same dimensions.

This information brought to you by the letter $.

[image: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images]