Where's Willy on CFNY this past Monday

[Rob (Retired)]

I'm not too up to date on the forums, so I hope this isn't old news...

The afternoon DJ (don't know her name) mentioned that she received a bill marked up to follow the link to see where this bill has been.

The bill she found had been through a bunch of provinces, and it sounded like it was on hit number 5!

She was quite taken with the concept, and mentioned the web site a number of times.

Of course she did casually comment that marking up bills was illegal. Hopefully she'll check out some of the info on the site, and realize that there is nothing wrong with adding some basic WW markings.

Watch for the CFNY $5 bill floating around!

[JonnyBob]

It was Josie Dye, and shes the reason I'm on here right now. Now you all have me obsessed. I have been here once before many years ago but didn't grasp the fun involved but I have now. Hope to see you all around.

Jonny B

[Seth]

Welcome JonnyBob, keep on EMSing* your bills, soon enough the hits will roll in and you'll be hooked.

*EMS stands for enter, mark, and spend; in that order. Now that you're here you gotta talk like the locals. :)

[JonnyBob]

I read the whole Willypedia, just so I could understand what you were talking about. One thing I do wonder though and I know this question doesn't belong here but what does the [Ø] after peoples names mean?

[DougyB]

what does the [Ø] after peoples names mean?

That's a great question JonnyBob. I've been around here a long time, and although I "lived through" the time where that symbol came to be used, I can only remember the generalities of what it means.

Perhaps one of the members that still uses it can explain.

Or perhaps its meaning has lost relevance, and the symbol should be relegated to the history pages.

[Rob (Retired)]

This actually started after I was in semi-retirement, but I believe it was a protest against certain members of the community who were generally jerks on the forum, and bragged about their Willying Prowess - including how they generated their own hits.

The protest lead to Hank removing the person from the rankings.

It may not be relevant any longer, but acts as a reminder that there are community standards to be upheld by the membership.

[JonnyBob]

Cool thanks.

[Lucifer666]

Here's a link (http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2436133) to a WG recent taping about marking your bills .. give it a chance to load and then it's right after the commercial..

I'm not too up to date on the forums, so I hope this isn't old news...

The afternoon DJ (don't know her name) mentioned that she received a bill marked up to follow the link to see where this bill has been.

The bill she found had been through a bunch of provinces, and it sounded like it was on hit number 5!

She was quite taken with the concept, and mentioned the web site a number of times.

Of course she did casually comment that marking up bills was illegal. Hopefully she'll check out some of the info on the site, and realize that there is nothing wrong with adding some basic WW markings.
!

[Samson Ø]

This actually started after I was in semi-retirement, but I believe it was a protest against certain members of the community who were generally jerks on the forum, and bragged about their Willying Prowess - including how they generated their own hits.

The protest lead to Hank removing the person from the rankings.

It may not be relevant any longer, but acts as a reminder that there are community standards to be upheld by the membership.

I do remember why and the above statement is accurate. It was a symbol of protest. I still have it only because I'm too lazy to remove it. I guess it still acts as a reminder of the "darker days" of how a certain person was a huge jerk and basically ruining the fun of this hobby. Thanks to Hank, that person has been banished to a dark corner of Saskatchewan, never to been heard from again. :) j/k

[Lucifer666]

This was just in the local news paper
Link (http://www.personal.psu.edu/klg197/f...g/wggoerie.jpg)

[Rob (Retired)]

Page not found - looks like the ... got pasted in - instead of the correct characters.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/klg197/f...g/wggoerie.jpg

[Lucifer666]

When I tried to use that link, I got the article and started reading it, but then it shrunk down to a tiny image so small the letters in the words were dots and I couldn't make it large again. Dunno what that was all about. I did find the article at
http://goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti...PAGE/610140354 (http://goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061014/FRONTPAGE/610140354)
and I could read it just fine. There is a bill in there with the serial # shown, but it is not a George, LOL. Don't hit the Gary! I don't know how long that link will last, so here it is:

http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/800/1129/1160081367/oascentral-s.realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/Creatives/GoErie/ERIERPM-HOUSE01/104rpmbanner.gif (http://oascentral.goerie.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/www.goerie.com/FRONTPAGE.html/929263413/Top/GoErie/ERIERPM-HOUSE01/104rpmbanner.gif/38613538666661373435333163313630?) The buck never stops
Where does all that money go? Online bill tracker knows
http://imgsrv.goerie.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=GE&Date=20061014&Category=FRONTPAGE&ArtNo=610140354&Ref=AR&MaxW=240
Gary Kanis stamps a stack of dollar bills to be entered in the Wheresgeorge.com database Friday afternoon at his home in Wattsburg. (Ben Hager / Erie Times-News)

Zoom (http://javascript<b></b>:NewWindow(600,400,'/apps/pbcs.dll/misc?url=/mal/zoom.pbs&Site=GE&Date=20061014&Category=FRONTPAGE&ArtNo=610140354&Ref=AR&NoCache=1');)
Buy this Photo (http://photos.goerie.com/)



By ROBB FREDERICK
robb.frederick@timesnews.com (robb.frederick@timesnews.com)

WATTSBURG -- Gas, milk, cable, stamps and two more bags of Halloween candy: Gary Kanis knows how fast the money goes.

What interests him is how far: How a single dollar from his wallet can go from Wattsburg on to Toronto, Chicago, Milwaukee and Salt Lake City, hopscotching the country as it passes through cash drawers, tip jars, birthday cards and stripper garters.

So he decided to track it. He bought a red stamp pad, and he started marking dollars, circling the seal of the Federal Reserve Bank with a Web address, www.wheresgeorge.com (http://www.wheresgeorge.com/).

"Track where I go next!" it says.

And it worked. In four years, Kanis stamped more than half a million notes. He marked every dollar he got, and then he set them loose, into Pepsi machines and onto coffee-shop counters.

He has found them online 102,000 times.

"It hooks you," he said. "When you spend a dollar in Erie or Cleveland and you see that some guy has it in Hawaii, that's kind of neat. It makes you wonder how it got there."

Kanis saw his first George dollar in 2002, when a stamped bill came with his change at a gas station in Niles, Ohio. (That note, a 1993 Alexander Hamilton, surfaced again in May, at a Missouri hobby shop.)

http://imgsrv.goerie.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=GE&Date=20061014&Category=FRONTPAGE&ArtNo=610140354&Ref=V3&MaxW=200
(Chris Sigmund / Erie Times-News)

Zoom (http://javascript<b></b>:NewWindow(600,600,'/apps/pbcs.dll/misc?url=/mal/zoom.pbs&Site=GE&Date=20061014&Category=FRONTPAGE&ArtNo=610140354&Ref=V3&NoCache=1');)
Buy this Photo (http://photos.goerie.com/)

He went to the Web site and typed the bill in. He saw that it had come from Indiana.

"My first reaction was, 'This is pretty neat,'" he said. "But I really didn't have the time to mess with it then."

He spent the $10. But then he wondered where it went.

"I always read the things people wrote on money," he said. "You know, 'Dan was here,' and things like that. And I always wondered who Dan was."

He's been stamping ever since.

"Gary's a good guy," said Hank Eskin, the Boston software designer who started the George site.

"I've met him a few times, and I like him. But he's gone a little crazy with this."

He has, in fact, scored more George hits than any of the game's 50,000 players. His notes have surfaced in all 50 states.

That's a bill-tracker's bingo. And Kanis, who retired from GE Transportation, has done it 42 times.

That's a little more than Eskin expected. He started the George site in 1998. At lunch, he pulled a dollar out of his pocket, and he saw a message in pen: "Write this on 10 dollar bills and good luck will come to you."

And the truth is, he didn't do it.

It did get him thinking, though. Every dollar is different. Every dollar moves. And the path of that travel is anonymous, more or less -- a good thing, since altering a note is technically a violation of federal law.

Eskin thought he'd test it on the Web.

"You know how it is," he said. "All the good ideas are taken. But no one had ever done this before."

His players have since floated more than 76 million notes.

Even the scientific community has noticed. Health experts in Germany and California have applied the George model to the study of global pandemics. If the flow of money reflects the way people travel, they argue, there's reason to believe a communicable disease would take the same path.

Gary Kanis could have guessed that. And his guess is the epidemic would be bad. His dollars have been found in Argentina, Belarus, China, Iceland, Morocco, Panama and South Africa. They are so common in Wattsburg that they sometimes come back in his change stack.

He once got a note he had stamped three years earlier. He smiled, and spent it again.


ROBB FREDERICK can be reached at 870-1733 or by e-mail.

Last changed: October 14. 2006 5:

[CapitolHill Jill]

Thank you for the link Lucifer!

Fantastic article.

It's probably better we have Wattsburg Gary as the "face of George" and not you eh!
;)

[Lucifer666]

UR very welcome CHJ.
As for my mug on the the bill it would look best on the $$100.00.

Thank you for the link Lucifer!

Fantastic article.

It's probably better we have Wattsburg Gary as the "face of George" and not you eh!
;)