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the annual quarterly report
Feb. 20th, 2007 09:47 amAt a roadside chicken stand somewhere in what used to be Tom DeLay's congressional district in suburban Houston, I received in my change the South Dakota state quarter. This completes for me the five state quarters of 2006 and means it's time for ... the annual quarterly report.
Nevada - Wild horses couldn't drag me to Nevada in the summertime, and here are the wild horses to prove it. An otherwise nice design too cluttered with tiny horses. (Remember that the image is much smaller than the reproduction at the Mint website: apparently a lot of the designers forget this crucial fact.) Rating: 2nd of 5 for the year.
Nebraska - A sweeping broad but uncluttered panorama, in the spirit of Maine's quarter though with very different scenery, this fine design depicts a Conestoga-style wagon rumbling past Chimney Rock. Situated at the very far west end of the state, Chimney Rock is I guess the only natural feature in Nebraska worth engraving, but if you've got it, flaunt it. It could have been worse: see the Dakotas below. Rating: 1st of 5.
Colorado - Oh dear, this is a quarter to prove that panoramas aren't always the best design. The Rockies are magnificent mountains, but engraved in undifferented color in tiny size on the back of a quarter they look like a fungus. Rating: 4th of 5.
North Dakota - Didn't anyone tell them that Kansas had already put a buffalo on their quarter? North Dakota goes them one better with two buffalo. This is what happens when you're a Great Plains state with no natural features worth engraving on your quarter. What's Oklahoma going to use, three buffalo? Rating: 3rd of 5.
South Dakota - What's wrong with this quarter? Let us count the ways. First you have another one of those Giant Birds familiar from the California and Minnesota quarters, a result of bas relief not being very good at depicting perspective. Then you have what on close inspection turns out to be a remarkably incompetent rendering of Mount Rushmore than makes all four Presidents look as if they have mustaches. But it's too small to get close inspection very easily; at an ordinary distance it looks like ... another fungus. Rating: 5th of 5.
This is the first year in the history of the state quarters in which not a single state presented a map of itself; but considering the remarkably uninteresting shapes of all these states, perhaps it's no surprise.
In this antepenultimate [I love that word] set of states we finally get past the slavery issue which had been dictating the state admission order for the previous four years' worth of quarters. Nevada was an underpopulated territory that became a state because Lincoln was looking for any likely territory liable to cast 3 Republican electoral votes in 1864. It did, but it turned out he didn't need them. Nebraska and Colorado were admitted after farming and mining booms in the postwar period, the former the direct result of the Homestead Act of 1862. Then there was a gap. Several territories reached state size in the mid-1880s, but they leaned Republican and the Democrats then in power were disinclined to do anything about it. When the Republicans took over again in 1889 they admitted a bunch of them in a rush, beginning with the Dakota Territory, which to get more Senate seats out of it they split into two. Legend has it that President Harrison covered the texts of the two bills on his desk before signing at the ends, so that nobody would know which state was admitted first.
In 2007 the states we get are the other four beneficiaries of Harrison's and the Republicans' largesse, two or three of which are still useful for the Republicans today, plus the hesitant tag end of the batch, Utah.
Nevada - Wild horses couldn't drag me to Nevada in the summertime, and here are the wild horses to prove it. An otherwise nice design too cluttered with tiny horses. (Remember that the image is much smaller than the reproduction at the Mint website: apparently a lot of the designers forget this crucial fact.) Rating: 2nd of 5 for the year.
Nebraska - A sweeping broad but uncluttered panorama, in the spirit of Maine's quarter though with very different scenery, this fine design depicts a Conestoga-style wagon rumbling past Chimney Rock. Situated at the very far west end of the state, Chimney Rock is I guess the only natural feature in Nebraska worth engraving, but if you've got it, flaunt it. It could have been worse: see the Dakotas below. Rating: 1st of 5.
Colorado - Oh dear, this is a quarter to prove that panoramas aren't always the best design. The Rockies are magnificent mountains, but engraved in undifferented color in tiny size on the back of a quarter they look like a fungus. Rating: 4th of 5.
North Dakota - Didn't anyone tell them that Kansas had already put a buffalo on their quarter? North Dakota goes them one better with two buffalo. This is what happens when you're a Great Plains state with no natural features worth engraving on your quarter. What's Oklahoma going to use, three buffalo? Rating: 3rd of 5.
South Dakota - What's wrong with this quarter? Let us count the ways. First you have another one of those Giant Birds familiar from the California and Minnesota quarters, a result of bas relief not being very good at depicting perspective. Then you have what on close inspection turns out to be a remarkably incompetent rendering of Mount Rushmore than makes all four Presidents look as if they have mustaches. But it's too small to get close inspection very easily; at an ordinary distance it looks like ... another fungus. Rating: 5th of 5.
This is the first year in the history of the state quarters in which not a single state presented a map of itself; but considering the remarkably uninteresting shapes of all these states, perhaps it's no surprise.
In this antepenultimate [I love that word] set of states we finally get past the slavery issue which had been dictating the state admission order for the previous four years' worth of quarters. Nevada was an underpopulated territory that became a state because Lincoln was looking for any likely territory liable to cast 3 Republican electoral votes in 1864. It did, but it turned out he didn't need them. Nebraska and Colorado were admitted after farming and mining booms in the postwar period, the former the direct result of the Homestead Act of 1862. Then there was a gap. Several territories reached state size in the mid-1880s, but they leaned Republican and the Democrats then in power were disinclined to do anything about it. When the Republicans took over again in 1889 they admitted a bunch of them in a rush, beginning with the Dakota Territory, which to get more Senate seats out of it they split into two. Legend has it that President Harrison covered the texts of the two bills on his desk before signing at the ends, so that nobody would know which state was admitted first.
In 2007 the states we get are the other four beneficiaries of Harrison's and the Republicans' largesse, two or three of which are still useful for the Republicans today, plus the hesitant tag end of the batch, Utah.
