Money For Nothing
And Your Chicks For Free...
Daniel at Lobowalk has a book recommendation that I think I'll take him up on. I'm not a huge Cormac McCarthy fan, but I did like 'Blood Meridian' and 'All The Pretty Horses' was OK, so this one should be a good read.
The one he's recommending is called 'No Country For Old Men', and the plot is one that's near and dear to my heart: What happens when Joe Citizen stumbles upon a huge pile of cash?
The stock answer seems to be "Nothing good will come of this". Ill-gotten loot always has a collection of skeevy characters hanging about that will do just about anything to get their grubby paws on it.
Two of my favorite books use a similar plot, and coincidentally, both have been made into movies. I happen to think that the movie and books version are just about equal in quality in both cases.
The first is fairly recent, and is called 'A Simple Plan'. Based on a novel by Scott B. Smith, it features Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton in the lead roles of two brothers who stumble across $4 million in a downed aircraft. I read the novel about a year before the movie came out, and was pleasantly suprised by how well the movie followed the novel.
The second one dates back quite a ways. I can remember seeing the cover of the paperback version in the racks every time I wnt to the library when I was a kid. I was intrigued by the picture of a skeleton sitting in a jeep with a scoped rifle and a big wad of cash out in the desert. I never got it off the rack back then, but I should have.
Late one night back around 1990 or so, I was channel surfing and ran across a movie with a couple of Border Patrol agents whizzing around the desert in Jeeps. Looked OK, so I settled in to watch. It starred Kris Kristofferson and Treat Williams, and damned if they didn't find a jeep out in the desert country on the Texas/Mexico border with a skeleton, a scoped rifle and a toolbox full of cash, about $800,000 worth. I sat up straight, and went "Hey! I know where this story came from!" Turns out the money in the film dated from 1963, and the scoped rifle was a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano. You can probably guess some of the plot from those two tidbits.
I rounded up the book from a used book store, and it was better than the movie, mainly because of the lack of staring at Kristofferson's craggy face. OK, the man can act, but damn he's made outta rawhide...
Anyway, the book and the movie are called Flashpoint, and they're worth looking for.
So, three cautionary tales of money outta nowhere, and the troubles it can cause. Therefore, when you run across that gunnysack full of $100 bills, just call me, and I'l gladly weather the storm for you, and give you a 10% cut!
Incidentally, given individual $100 bill measurements of 6.125" long, 2.62" wide, and .11 mm thick and a weight of somewhat less than a gram, a stack of a hundred $100 bills ($10,000) will weigh nearly 100 grams. $100,000 dollars put you close to the kilogram range (2.2 pounds) and a full mill is gonna weigh a bit less than 10 kilograms, call it 20 lbs or so. It'll be close to the size of a box of copy paper in volume.
So, if you're penning your own tale of newfound loot, remember that the $5 million stash your protagonist finds is gonna weigh almost 100 lbs, and will fill up a car trunk pretty quick!
Daniel at Lobowalk has a book recommendation that I think I'll take him up on. I'm not a huge Cormac McCarthy fan, but I did like 'Blood Meridian' and 'All The Pretty Horses' was OK, so this one should be a good read.
The one he's recommending is called 'No Country For Old Men', and the plot is one that's near and dear to my heart: What happens when Joe Citizen stumbles upon a huge pile of cash?
The stock answer seems to be "Nothing good will come of this". Ill-gotten loot always has a collection of skeevy characters hanging about that will do just about anything to get their grubby paws on it.
Two of my favorite books use a similar plot, and coincidentally, both have been made into movies. I happen to think that the movie and books version are just about equal in quality in both cases.
The first is fairly recent, and is called 'A Simple Plan'. Based on a novel by Scott B. Smith, it features Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton in the lead roles of two brothers who stumble across $4 million in a downed aircraft. I read the novel about a year before the movie came out, and was pleasantly suprised by how well the movie followed the novel.
The second one dates back quite a ways. I can remember seeing the cover of the paperback version in the racks every time I wnt to the library when I was a kid. I was intrigued by the picture of a skeleton sitting in a jeep with a scoped rifle and a big wad of cash out in the desert. I never got it off the rack back then, but I should have.
Late one night back around 1990 or so, I was channel surfing and ran across a movie with a couple of Border Patrol agents whizzing around the desert in Jeeps. Looked OK, so I settled in to watch. It starred Kris Kristofferson and Treat Williams, and damned if they didn't find a jeep out in the desert country on the Texas/Mexico border with a skeleton, a scoped rifle and a toolbox full of cash, about $800,000 worth. I sat up straight, and went "Hey! I know where this story came from!" Turns out the money in the film dated from 1963, and the scoped rifle was a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano. You can probably guess some of the plot from those two tidbits.
I rounded up the book from a used book store, and it was better than the movie, mainly because of the lack of staring at Kristofferson's craggy face. OK, the man can act, but damn he's made outta rawhide...
Anyway, the book and the movie are called Flashpoint, and they're worth looking for.
So, three cautionary tales of money outta nowhere, and the troubles it can cause. Therefore, when you run across that gunnysack full of $100 bills, just call me, and I'l gladly weather the storm for you, and give you a 10% cut!
Incidentally, given individual $100 bill measurements of 6.125" long, 2.62" wide, and .11 mm thick and a weight of somewhat less than a gram, a stack of a hundred $100 bills ($10,000) will weigh nearly 100 grams. $100,000 dollars put you close to the kilogram range (2.2 pounds) and a full mill is gonna weigh a bit less than 10 kilograms, call it 20 lbs or so. It'll be close to the size of a box of copy paper in volume.
So, if you're penning your own tale of newfound loot, remember that the $5 million stash your protagonist finds is gonna weigh almost 100 lbs, and will fill up a car trunk pretty quick!
posted by El Capitan | 12:06 PM
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