I currently watch four TV shows semi-regularly… Scrubs, My Name is Earl, 30 Rock, and 24.  I try really hard not to get sucked in to watching other shows, because for the most part TV is a waste of time.  I do occasionally also watch CNBC and random news.  But last Monday I caught the premier of The Black Donnellys.  And last night I watched episode 2.  And tonight, episode 3 (online)… I’m hooked.

If you like The Sopranos, you’ve gotta check out The Black Donnellys… episode 1, episode 2, episode 3 (NBC puts each week’s show online a week early).

It is about four Irish brothers, probably in their 20s, who live in a rough New York neighborhood.  The storyline so far appears to be about how they will eventually become mobsters, starting in episode 1 with a chain of events that ended with them killing all of their neighborhood’s Italian mobsters.  Kind of similar to the storyline in Godfather 2, but set in present day and with an Irish twist.  You can tell NBC is setting this show up to fill the mobster-show void that The Sopranos will leave behind when the last episode airs on HBO this summer.

This show really feels like another great HBO drama, but it’s not.  It is an NBC network show.  It is already very dramatic and it gives us the violence that was desperately lacking from most Sopranos episodes.  But it took me until the end of the second episode to realize that there wasn’t any cursing in The Black Donnellys.  The story is just that good and doesn’t need it.

It airs Mondays on NBC from 10pm to 11pm Eastern.

Month 2 is over, and this morning I had to do 60 push-ups and 60 sit-ups.  I can’t do the push-ups in one set anymore.  That stopped shortly after my month 1 post.  But I still do the sit-ups in one set, and that will probably continue until I start having to break the push-ups into three and four sets.

Anyway, I’m still at it.  Who else is still with me?

Today while I was eating lunch, I caught a segment on CNBC about the government trying for a third time to popularize the dollar coin.  The dollar coin has failed twice in the past and they are now trying it for a third time in hopes that this time it will finally catch on.  They have changed the design of the coin again, but other than that they are doing nothing new.  Because of this, the dollar coin will fail for a third time.  Collectors will scoop these coins up, but you won’t see people carrying them around and actually spending them.  Dollar bills work perfectly fine.  I don’t need dollar coins and neither do you.

Putting a new user-interface on a bad product isn’t enough to make it succeed.  People who have a perfectly functional product (dollar bills) aren’t going to change their habits and adopt a new product (dollar coins) unless there is a damned good reason to do so.  Sure it will save the government millions of dollars since coined money lasts longer than paper money.  But we Americans don’t care about that.

The government is only thinking about what this product will do for them.  They are not thinking about their customer.  What will this coin do for me??!!

The government needs to create a need for the dollar coin.  A fellow on the CNBC report today suggested that they eliminate the dollar bill, so that there becomes a need for the dollar coin.  That would be a good start, but I already have a ton of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.  I don’t want to further clutter my truck’s center console with a fifth type of coin.

After this coin fails again, and several years pass, and millions of tax dollars are wasted on trying to figure out what happened, I hope somebody in Washington starts thinking like a business and takes a look at what their customers want.  If they do this, they will discover… we hate pennies.

So how about when attempt number four comes around, they shift coins up in value, rather than just adding a new type of coin?

– Reduce the production of penny coins
– Encouraging industry to adopt 5-cent rounding in payment processing systems
– Encourage states to use 5-cent rounding for sales tax

Now I have room in my pocket for a new type of coin, so they can replace dollar bills with dollar coins.  And eventually discontinue all production of pennies and dollar bills.

But since it is the government we’re talking about here, and this won’t actually happen for many years… how about saving us all some trouble and skip 5-cent rounding and go straight to 10-cent rounding?  I don’t think I’d miss nickels all that much either.