November 17, 2008: "Another Man’s Pants"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
I must admit, we bought this token because we liked the design and knew it would make a neat and eye-catching ad.

The obverse motif was intended to represent the personification of England and America communicating by telegraph (i.e. electronically, hence the lightning), but the engraver inexplicably directed the lightning bolts down toward the trouser region, all but demanding that we make this the focus of our caption.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
The person who sold us this token did so with the following caption included: "Celebrating advancements in cable technology – in 1858." Which we thought was pretty good, but given the goofy lightning imagery, we figured we’d go all out and create something extremely silly and, we hope, extremely memorable.

So we did.