High-tech times are good

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Nov 16, 1999

SAN FRANCISCO (NYT) -- The latest issue of MicroTimes includes a Holiday Gift Guide promoted on the magazine cover: "Looking for that perfect stocking stuffer but don't want to blow your budget? We have cool gifts for $1,000 or less."

Tackling an age-old question

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- If you find yourself wondering where the heck your money went, now there's a way to find out. An Internet site called "www.wheresgeorge.com" -- in honor of the president whose likeness graces the $1 bill -- tracks U.S. currency as it changes hands from city to city. Bills marked with "www.wheresgeorge.com" have been through Ryan's Produce in Albany, N.Y., and the tax collector's office in Coffey County, Kan. A marked $100 bill bought a nail gun in Lorton, Va., and at last report was 20 miles away in Sterling, Va.

"I didn't think it would be as addicting as some people are finding it," site creator Hank Eskin said. "It's something out there on the Internet that's not porn, and it's not selling anything. It's pure fun. I think people appreciate that."

The record starts when someone enters the serial number of a bill at www.wheresgeorge.com and marks the bill with the Web site address. About 3.5 percent of them will be logged again by someone else as they change hands, Eskin said. Someone with the nickname "Adam" claims to have entered 65,051 bills into the site and has heard about 4,955 of them -- a success rate of 7.6 percent. "The ones ($1 bills) seem to get most of the hits," said Colleen Marsala, who has marked and logged about 1,300 bills in her spare time. "I've seen mine spent in bars, fast-food places. I read where one was used to pay for a hooker."

Defacing U.S. currency is a crime, but federal law defines "defacing" as altering a bill so much that it cannot be used. Edward Sheehan, a spokesman for the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing, said that while it is legal to write on U.S. currency, "we discourage people from doing that. It is best to have the notes pristine."

Ready to roll $18,000 barrel

NEW YORK (NYT) -- How far can tequila, the rough-and-tumble party animal of distilled spirits, take its image upmarket for the millennium? One manufacturer is aiming pretty high. The drinking world is about to meet 1800 Millennium Single Barrel, a limited- edition version that the marketer, UDV North America, will sell only by the barrelful -- and you get the barrel, too.

UDV, the unit of Diageo that also markets regular 1800 tequila and Jose Cuervo Gold, the best-selling brand, wants consumers to think of tequila in general and 1800 in particular as a refined libation worthy of being swirled in a brandy snifter. "It is meant to be sipped and savored, not served in a margarita," said Steve Goldstein, a UDV spokesman, about the 1800 Millennium. "In fact, anyone who would mix it should face prison time."

The company hopes to tap into the lucrative growth of so-called superpremium drink brands at a time when most liquor categories are flat or declining in popularity. "People are feeling good, stocks are up, houses are appreciating, and people are spending," said Frank Walters, director of research at M. Shanken Communications in New York, which publishes trade journals for the liquor industry.

Each buyer gets a handmade barrel and all the 80-proof tequila that was aged in it, packaged in 288 personalized bottles. Cachet- seeking restaurants, hotels and liquor retailers are expected to buy most of the 200-barrel production run and resell the tequila to the public at about $60 a bottle, more than four times what Jose Cuervo Gold typically fetches. But the company says it is not too late for a tequila fancier to plunk down $18,000 or so and stock the cellar with a personal barrelful.

Collectors of the macabre

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Armed with cash and a taste for the macabre, Cathee Shultz and J.D. Healy hope to buy a relic from the worst mass suicide in American history. The couple, owners of a bizarre shrine known as the Museum of Death, say they will be among the expected hundreds at a Nov. 20 auction of property belonging to 39 Heaven's Gate cult members who committed suicide at a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe.

Anyone looking for arm patches embossed with the group's logo or artwork featuring space aliens, however, should stay home. Other than the famed bunk beds, few if any of the items -- televisions, VCRs, kitchen utensils, furniture, sleeping bags, a trampoline and a fax machine -- have much connection to what happened March 26, 1997, at the cult's rented home. That doesn't matter to Shultz and her husband. "Even if it's just a linen napkin, we hope to get something," said Shultz, 37, who plans to move their museum from San Diego to Hollywood in January.

The item the couple most wants is one of the 20 bunk-bed frames. The cultists were found in the beds poisoned to death from a mixture of applesauce, vodka and barbiturates. They were dressed in black outfits with "Away Team" patches, Nike tennis shoes, purple shrouds and a plastic bag over their heads. The cultists left a video message saying they were shedding their "earthly containers" to join a spaceship trailing the tail of the Hale Bopp comet. Shultz and her husband have already acquired from an anonymous donor one of the outfits, she said. A bunk bed would allow them to create an exhibit duplicating one of the rooms in the house.