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"American money," in the words of Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, "is the ugliest money in the world." Every note is the same color and size, making for a particularly monotonous currency. Here are some more imaginative notes from around the world.

Australia was the first to make its legal tender out of plastic polymers, which last four times as long as conventional notes and provide much greater security against counterfeiting. Yet they are still recyclable when retired from circulation. A transparent window and a raised printing process called intaglio allow blind people to feel the difference among the denominations.

The U.S. dollar is widely accepted as Cambodia’s currency, but folks use riels for amounts smaller than $1. With its depiction of Angkor Wat on the front and the Kizuna Bridge over the Mekong (signifying friendship with Japan) on the back, the 500-riel note is practically a postcard. And since the exchange rate (5,000 riels to one U.S. dollar) makes this note worth about 10 cents, it’s cheaper than buying one.

Want to know which animals constitute The Big Five? Just check your South African currency, which has likenesses of the rhino, African elephant, lion, Cape buffalo and leopard. Some South Africans even refer to notes by the animal, so “a buffalo” means 100 rand. A rash of counterfeit 200-rand notes (aka leopards) before the World Cup in 2010 caused many merchants to stop accepting them.

Just one look at this bill from French Polynesia in the South Pacific and all your cares seem to melt away. No stuffy pictures of conquering war heroes here. These notes feature pretty women with flowers in their hair, traditional thatched-roof huts perfect for afternoon naps, unspoiled corals, tropical fish in a rainbow of colors and denominations, and palm trees swaying in the breeze.

Remember Disney Dollars, those commemorative bills you could purchase with real dollars but then never redeem after leaving the theme park? Salt Spring Island, part of the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, took the idea a step further in 2001, issuing these beautiful notes that celebrate the community. Many island merchants, including banks and the post office, offer a discount for using the local currency.

Encouraged by the success of Salt Spring dollars, the tiny Vancouver Island community of Chemainus (population 3,900) started issuing its own currency in 2010. It proved unimaginably popular: Collectors quickly snapped up all the $100 notes, and neighboring towns started accepting the bills. Emily Carr, whose paintings are synonymous with Chemainus’ First Nations communities and their respect for the natural surroundings, graces each bill.

A charity known as Fifth Pillar started printing these bills in 2010 to protest widespread corruption in India. Like all of the country’s legal tender, the zero-rupee bill features a likeness of Mahatma Gandhi. But it also declares “I promise to neither accept nor give bribe.” Be careful who you give these to; you might get a fat lip as your change.

Hyperinflation caused Zimbabwe to tack zeroes onto its notes repeatedly, and still people had to carry bushels of bills to complete simple purchases. Hard currencies like the South African rand and the U.S. dollar were legalized for use in Zimbabwe in 2009, rendering Zimbabwean dollars, even trillions of them, worthless. Except, that is, on eBay, where they’re a hot commodity among collectors.

Not only are Swiss francs one of the world’s most stable currencies, they’re also one of the few that are meant to be viewed vertically. And where most currencies would feature a dead president, Switzerland's franc instead celebrates cultural icons, all of whom made their marks in the 20th century, from the architect Le Corbusier to historian Jacob Burckhardt.

Eritrea has only been an independent African nation for two decades, so its currency eschews former heads of state in favor of typical Eritreans of today. And each note features not just one, but three figures from the current era, usually smiling young women festooned with jewels.

Most of Colombia’s currency is unremarkable, but this latest note, first issued in 2000, is an exception, even though it depicts a long-dead white man on its obverse. The likeness of author Jorge Isaacs is rakishly rotated vertically, and a paragraph of his 1867 novel, La Maria, overlays an image of El Paraiso, the hacienda where much of the book takes place.

Sir Edmund Hillary did something even more rare than conquer Mount Everest. In 1992, he became one of the few non-heads of state to appear on a nation’s currency while still alive. (The U.S. has a law forbidding living people from appearing on its bills.) Hillary, who died in 2008, agreed to be depicted only if New Zealand’s highest peak, Aoraki/Mount Cook, were the backdrop rather than Everest.

Antarctica isn’t a country, so these notes aren’t legal tender. But they’re accepted like cash at the few places on the continent where money is needed. The funds raised from selling these colorful notes as collectors' items goes to fund research projects like the one featured on the $100 bill: investigating the hole in the ozone layer.

Hebrews Against Catholics Chess Set - Amazing

In the far 1950s a 10-year-old boy Gianni, from a family of glass makers of a little city Murano near Venice, started to work as an assistant at blowing factories of Murano island where he studied for 7 years. When he was 24, having studied and worked at about 12 various factories for 14 years, he opened his own studio in Venice. The first works of Gianni began to be sold in souvenir shops in San Marko square.

Venice had a great impact on the art of Gianni and in 1969 he created his chess set "Hebrews against Catholics" and won his first prize of Murano Masters.
In some years he made a collection of flowers for Salvador Dali based on his artworks.

In 1981 the family of Gianni moved to America and he started to teach his art to American students in the USA universities.

The chess set is exhibited in the Museum of Corning we have already written about.

One can even buy the glass chess figurines in the shop of the museum.

If you have enough money, of course.

Amazing and Creative Paper Art

The Story of Strawberry Beer - Amazing Cinemagraph

“We hand-loaded over 150 pounds of local strawberries into this wood fruit press. This will produce five barrels, or 150 gallons, of finished beer — over a pound of fresh-squeezed fruit for every gallon of this beer.”
In this day and age, if you’re selling a product, it’s unbelievably difficult to stand out from the crowd. So what’s a company to do? You can spend a lot of money and see if something sticks or you can work with some highly creative people to see what they can do.

Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg, the duo behind those beautiful cinematic gifs, just sent word about their latest project. It’s the first journalistic cinemagraph story ever told and it’s about the process of hand making a strawberry beer with Dogfish owner and brewmaster Sam Calagione. Sure, at first glance it looks like a fancy advertisement but with those gorgeous gifs and thorough explanations, you can’t help but get pulled into the story.
“The step-by-step process is brought to life through our cinemagraph process and we hope it takes you there with us, witnessing each moment happening,” says Beck. “We are so proud of this story and hope to share it around the world, if not for the story and imagery than for the love of good BEER.”
First cinemagraph: “Fifer Orchards, a fifth-generation family farm in southern Delaware, provides a broad range of sustainable local fruits and vegetables that we use in our pub kitchen and brewery,” says Sam Calagione. “Bobby Fifer is pointing out just how ripe and sweet these strawberries are. They are the focal point of our newest beer, but getting them ready to brew with is not going to be easy.”

“The fruit press is hand-cranked in the parking lot outside the brewhouse in Rehoboth Beach, Del. This is definitely a two-man job. It’s amazing how little these fruit presses have changed since I first helped my uncles and father make wine with one about 30 years ago. We’ve brewed with blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, raisins, oranges and lemons, but I think this is the first strawberry beer we’ve ever done.”

“Extracting the juice was exhausting but cool. It took us a few hours to work through all of the fruit, and the juice was a vibrant blood red as it ran through the slats. Because the press worked in repetitive increments, the juice pulsed out in surges. Before we cleaned up, the area looked like an epic crime scene minus the chalked body outlines. “Are wild strawberries really wild? Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child?” — Shel Silverstein.”

“While strawberries are the focal point of this recipe, the catalyst for its creation is the sorghum. We love chatting with and listening to our Dogfish regulars, and a gluten-free beer is the No. 1 request by far. It seems as if lots of folks who have gluten-tolerance issues are pining for an interesting beer. Sorghum has been used to make beer in Africa for centuries, so we found a sorghum syrup that we really liked: dark, sweet, with notes of molasses and pit-fruit.”

“We mixed sorghum with our filtered water, then set the pump to re-circulate the liquid out of the bottom of our boil kettle and back in through an angled pipe on the tank. This pumping action creates a natural whirlpool effect, which helps to evenly mix the sorghum into the hot water. We then added buckets of fresh squeezed Fifer strawberry juice. The room smelled so good as the mixture came to a boil.”

“I thought a lot about which flavors would work well with the sorghum base. This led me first to the strawberries. They worked well together in tests, but as with other gluten-free beers I tried, the flavor was a little dislocated from the malty character of beer. These experiments led us to the final flavor component. We have played with lots of different types of honey at Dogfish, but dark buckwheat honey has a beautiful hay-like, earthy-malty thing that we felt added the final touch to this recipe. So in it goes.”

“We shut the lid on the boil kettle and let the concoction simmer a bit. The gas burner roared as the beer bubbled and the fragrant steam filled the air with notes of honey, berries and grain. By boiling the beer in an open-flame kettle, we pick up additional caramel notes from the scorching that occurs on the bottom of the kettle. It smelled like harvest time.”

“Like any new experiment at Dogfish, this beer will first be tapped and served in the building where it was made, our brewpub in Rehoboth Beach. But it is headed to our Milton production brewery for national distribution later this year. We decided to call it Tweason’ale because this initial batch was brewed and served during the transition between spring and summer; a beautiful time of year here.”
This story was first published at The New York Times on June 30th, 2011. If that’s not great publicity, I don’t know what is…