Here’s an honest-to-goodness money-maker.

It wouldn’t occur to me to pay for something that cost, say, $2.39, with anything other than cash (or a Dunkin’ Donuts cash card). But I see “young folks” whipping out there debit cards to buy candy bars and lattes all the time. So I keep thinking that cold, hard cash is going to be yet another thing that goes buggy-whip in my lifetime. (Will panhandlers have to get themselves set up with some sort of card swipe machine in order to stem?)

On the one hand, it’s probably more convenient not to have to worry about having cash on hand. Take it from someone who remembers the pre-ATM era, there were times on weekends when you’d worry about running out. So you’d make a trip to the grocery store – whether you needed to or not – and use your check-cashing privileges to get $50 over the grocery tab. This was, of course, at a time when $50 could actually tide you over for while. (These days, I don’t even bother with $100 transactions at the ATM.)

On the other hand, if you’re spending cash that’s actually in and on hand, you do have a pretty good idea of how your supply is dwindling. Sure, you can always summons up your balance, but I’m thinking that it’s easier to lose track if you’re swiping your debit (or, heaven forbid, credit) card for every little transaction.

Yet there is, blessedly, still a demand for cash, so that us old fogeys can still keep some in our wallets and under our mattresses, even if there are no newspapers, and few books, to spend it on anymore.

A British outfit called De La Rue, “the world’s largest commercial banknote printer”, “involved in the production of one in five of the world’s banknotes“ benefits nicely from this demand.

It was De La Rue that got the new currency contract for Iraq in 2003, when legal tender no longer bore the mustachioed likeness of Saddam Hussein. This was no trivial matter. Iraq needed 1.75 billion new bills, and they needed them within two months. So De La Rue went into overdrive to make the deadline, and

…chartered 27 Boeing 747s to deliver the freshly printed banknotes. (Source: The Economist.)

De La Rue also produced the currency for South Sudan, when it gained its independence last year. (Now that’s probably a country that doesn’t have a lot of debit cards in it.)

And while I may think that demand for cash is down,

Low interest rates have cut the opportunity cost of holding cash. With banks looking wobbly, many prefer to keep their money stuffed in the mattress, creating extra demand for banknotes.

So bad is good for De La Rue.

What would really be good for their business, of course, is the dissolution of the Euro.

However lousy that would be for the rest of the world, all those countries scurrying around to regenerate a national currency.

Wheeeee…….

Greece may need drachma – probably by the boatful if they end up with hyperinflation.

Once Greece is gone, baby, gone from the Euro zone, the Cypriots may need to get their pound back. The Portuguese their escudo. The Spanish their peseta. The Irish their punt.

While the Euro is vastly more convenient, currency was more interesting when each country had their own.

It was always entertaining to see whose mug made it on to the banknotes – and to see whether you’d even heard of them. (Most Europeans probably haven’t heard of Andrew Jackson or Alexander Hamilton, either.)

In truth, I can’t remember anyone depicted on any country’s currency, other than our own. And, of course, The Queen on British currency. (Still there: they never went on the Euro.)

I think that Irish punt may have had W.B. Yeats and/or G.B. Shaw, but I’m not entirely sure. Grace O’Malley? Queen Medb? Maybe. I remember the coins, however: lovely deer, salmon, harps.

While multi-Euro currencies were interesting, it was also a drag to have to convert and reconvert when you moved across borders. We probably average one European trip a year, mostly hitting one country, but sometimes more per trip. Euros are mighty useful for these treks. And, since we’re always planning another overseas trip, we just hang on to Euros from one trip to the next. No need to ask whether we’ll ever get back to Italy again in our lives.

Anyway, although they’re protected by being diversified – they also print passports and create holograms for credit cards - I’m sure that De La Rue is kinda-sorta hoping that the Euro goes down. Bet they’re watching every move Angela Merkel makes, dreaming about cranking out all that new folding green (or red or blue), figuring out how many planes they’ll need to charter to deliver the not so goods to Athens.

Until we go entirely cashless, it must be fun to be an honest to goodness money maker.

O, obit. (They ain’t kidding about the high cost of dying.)

There was an article on boston.com the other day on folks who are taking part in the “latest trend in dying: the self-written obituary.”

Having done all they can to dictate exactly how their funerals will go — down to playlists, menus, and off-beat hearses — baby boomers, and some members of the Silent Generation, are now taking control over the story of their lives.

O, obit. Why not?

Who wants a boring old obituary with “just the facts”? And, let’s face it, most of us aren’t born great, haven’t achieved greatness, and will die waiting for greatness to be thrust upon us. Which means that there’s no behind the scenes NY Times obituary writer with a file chock-a-block full of bits about our lives, just waiting for the word so he can truck it out to commemorate us.

But I must say that, while I won’t be granted a free, this is news, death notice, I also don’t want anyone paying to publish my obituary, either. (Talk about the ultimate in vanity press.)

Which is not to say that I don’t want to have a final word or two.

So maybe one of these days I’ll get around to pulling together something or other for someone or other to read at my funeral, errrrr, the celebration of my life. (I believe I’ve already made it clear that a smidge of my ashes should be strewn in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Leicester, Massachusetts, where I’ll be with four generations of Rogers-Trainors; another smidge tossed in Galway Bay; and a final soupçon left in Fenway Park. (On this final destination for my final destination: if the Red Sox continue their pathetic ways, please spit in the ashes, muddy up a baseball, and hurl it at someone. But please don’t let my brother Rick be the one to do the hurling, as he’s likely to actually hit a player.)

And if I’m still blogging -  if blogging, indeed, still exists – I should leave a final entry, a ghost-post as it were, with instructions on how to publish it. (Hey, it’s free!)

As a writer of sorts, I won’t have any problem pulling together my swan song, but for those looking for a place to start, there’s Susan Soper’s ObitKit, who’s dying to help folks “put the fun in funeral.”

Actually, no one of Irish descent, who grew up poring over the Irish Sports Pages (i.e., the obituaries), needs to be told how to put the fun in funeral. Why, even at the funeral of my well-beloved Aunt Margaret, whose sudden death (okay, she was 85) devastated those of us who loved her, a number of us blew whistles as we got in our cars for the procession from her church in West Newton to her burial in Leicester. (To anyone curious about funeral processions that process for 50 miles, the cars do stay together on the Mass Pike, but they go the speed limit, resuming funeral pace when off the Pike.) You may ask what we were doing with whistles at a funeral. Well, we didn’t ask the funeral parlor where Margaret was waked to have baskets full of glow-in-the-dark whistles (with the funeral parlor’s name and address embossed on them) in the ladies room, did we? I mean, if they didn’t want us to take them, they wouldn’t have been there. And what good’s a whistle if you don’t go and blow on it?

As for owning your own obit:

Statistics on the number of seniors working to meet the ultimate deadline are hard to come by, but obituary-writing courses are being offered on-line and in workshops, and informal obit-writing sessions are popping up at book club meetings and girlfriend reunions.

Why discuss Hillary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies, when it’s so much more enjoyable to work with that most scintillating and engrossing of topics: me, myself, and, of course, I.

Auto-obituary writers should not let themselves get too carried away.

The [Boston] Globe charges $10 a line for a death notice, which is about 35-40 characters, plus an $18.50 fee to put the notice on Legacy.com for one year. At the New York Times, a death notice costs $55 per line, which runs about 28 characters, and the paper’s Legacy.com fee is $55.

The Globe is a regular bargain, but when you do the math, even things there can get pretty pricey. A 500 word story-de-moi would translate into 2,000 – 2,500 characters. Let’s go with the lower end of the range here. At 40 characters per line, that’s 50 lines. So your death notice would cost you, well, not you-you, but someone who knew you-you well enough to get your obituary into the paper, would have to fork over $500 – plus extra for that year on Legacy.com. So obituary writers had best make sure that they put aside a few bucks if they want to make sure that they get published. (As opposed to having your grieving relict say, “$500 bucks to get this load of crap in the obituary section? No way. I’ll just mimeo copies and hand them out at the funeral.”)

The Times, as befits the country’s Paper of Record, is far costlier: 5.5 times per line – and that’s for a shorter line.

Even if you got your story down to a tweet, for five 28 character lines (hitting the tweet 140 max), you’d (again, not you-you) would be set back $275. And that’s for a tweet.

With this self-obituary-ing craze, the high cost of dying  seems to have gotten a bit higher.

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My sister Trish sent the link to this article to me, so a doff of the shroud to her.

And just to see what you could pack into 140 characters (this is 135),  here’s my death tweet:

Daughter, sister, wife, aunt, cousin, friend, colleague. Worcester girl. Red Sox fan. Loved Ireland. Pretty darned funny. A reader. Should have been a writer.

This is subject to change, of course. If the Red Sox keep going the way they’re going…