ShaydDeGrai

I used to work as a professor at an engineering school that was also affiliated with a child study/teacher development program and we both maintained a LEGO lab and developed K-12 curricula based around LEGO. For us, LEGO Education site was useful for getting bulk technic parts, "retired" pieces (original (pre-NXT) mindstorms bricks, old style wire connectors, etc.) and parts you just don't find in retail sets (e.g. working solar panels, weighted bricks, etc.) You can occasionally get a good deal on a clearance lot here or there, but as a general source for parts you're usually better off buying a couple creator buckets at TRU than a "classroom" pack because the bricks sold through the Education/Dacta lines are amortizing the cost of developing classroom and teaching guides whether you plan on using them or not. Years ago, LEGO Dacta was teamed with various US distributors (like Kelvin Educational and Pitsco Education) but for the past decade or so LEGO seems to have been doing a lot more direct marketing (at least the LEGO section in the educational supply catalogs has been getting smaller while the LEGO Education website has been getting bigger. I'm not up on the latest policies with their website (it's been a while) but I've had students that bought things and had them delivered to off campus addresses so I _think_ they'll sell to anybody. If, however, you _ARE_ a teacher and buying for a school, you'll need to have paperwork on file with LEGO Education to exercise any applicable tax exemption. If you're doing a lot of work in technic stuff or have a strong interest in robotics, it can be a pretty good one-stop-shop for bulking up on parts that are hard to find in quantity from a single vender on Bricklink and rarely sold at all on Pick-A-Brick, but you can almost always find a better price elsewhere if you don't mind the hassle of shopping around.

If you go back to the source material, you'll realize that, even in the movies, the portrayal of the fell beasts was too small and the image from the video game ads is downright tiny. If you assume that a mini-figure is about 6ft (1.8M) tall. A Fell Beast _should_ be about 48 studs long with a 56 stud wingspan. The talons alone should be large enough to entirely wrap around a horse and rider. Granted, as portrayed in the movies, the fellbeast were very serpentine (the books suggest more of a featherless bird / pterodactyl-ish creature) rather than bulky and muscular, but the overall length would still dwarf a conga line of cave trolls. A molded fellbeast on this scale isn't LEGO anymore, it's an action figure crossed with a model airplane. Molding it on a smaller scale and you run the risk of the fell beasts looking cute or cartoonish rather than being one of the most terrifying creatures in Middle Earth. I can appreciate various arguments both for an against a brick-built model, but fell beast being "too small" isn't one of them. I think even my own brick-built take on the subject matter make the creature smaller than it should have been.

I accept the current mini-figure as more of an abstraction than as an "action figure" so, in general, I'm okay with the limited range of motion. Posable short legs, however, is something I support even though the height really wouldn't change in the seated v. standing position and a partially raised leg would hit a stud if the other foot is anchored on a plate. It's not a practical modification, it adds a lot of expense and complexity for very little range of motion, but I think the little guys are getting short-changed (no pun intended) with the current slab-legs.

Hey at least your cat was playing nicely. One of my cats did a full body, running pounce on my Emerald Night, decoupling the passenger cars and not just derailing the engine, but knocking it nearly half a meter from the tracks whilst continuing to bite and claw at it like it were full of catnip. I was just glad the whole set-up was on the floor to begin with because if it had started from a table top I don't think the locomotive would have survived.

I think this really depends on what you consider a "Minas Tirith Set" If you're thinking mini-figure scale, I entirely agree with you. You could certainly do a "Grond at the Gates" play set or a Trebuchet and section of wall as an army builder pack (like the Helm's Deep compatible battle pack") but it's not _really_ Minas Tirith, it's just a gatehouse and some wall sections. If on the other hand you want a _real_ model of Minas Tirith as either an Architecture Style micro-build or an UCS kit (think Middle Earth meets the Taj Mahal) then I think you certainly could capture the feel for the city as a whole, but you'd be nowhere near mini-figure scale. For example, I think my microbuild of The White City does a reasonable job of capturing the shape of the one in the movie: As it is the model fits on a 32x32 stud base, but trying to scale this up to fit mini-figures would cost a fortune (as least as far as a viable, off the shelf product is concerned). And the more detail and scale you throw away to keep the cost down, the less it resembles Minas Tirith.

It was probably just MOCPages down for maintenance (again ), everything loaded fine for me just now. As a back-up, in addition to the MOCPages link found in the initial post there are also shots on Flickr

The compressed air, in general, should be fine. The one gotcha to watch out for is combining it with certain 'types' of dust, particularly those containing silica. The time when you DON'T want to blast the dust off with compressed air is when the dust is harder than the ABS of the part itself. For most dust (pet dander, fur, pollen, shed skin cells, etc.) this isn't a problem, but using high pressure air to remove things like fine sand and plaster dust could abrade the surface of the bricks. For those cases, you're better off vacuuming and washing the brick (or just learning to live with the fact your bricks won't stay mint forever).

I don't have any kids of my own but I do have a niece and nephew. Most of my collection (particularly the MOCs) are in the "look but don't touch category". I'm more permissive with smaller kits and minifigures as well as the technic models because the former are easily repaired and the latter tend to be harder for them to break. I'm not an entire stick in the mud though, I keep a couple tubs of unsorted bricks and a few small creator kits handy should they want to build something of their own. If they behave and my brother-in-law doesn't object, I just let them take whatever build with them when they go. They don't visit very often but it's a treat for them when they do.

The last time I actively sorted parts before building for my own benefit was the UCS Millenium Falcon. If my wife is around though, I'll often empty all the bags at once into vaguely segregated piles just because she finds the noise of rummaging through the bags a bit annoying (she likening it to fingernails on a chalkboard). She doesn't mind the sound of me rummaging through piles of bricks, but the crinkly sound of the bags really bugs her. While I often dump out all the bags (or all the bags for a given number in a big build) at the outset, I don't go overboard on presorting things. I like rummaging around for parts. I'm trying to maximize enjoyment, not efficiency and, for me, most of the fun is in the build. Presorting makes the build go by too quickly, I prefer to savor it and tooling around looking for the right piece is part of the fun for me; it make building someone else's design less of an exercise and more of a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

Welcome, Sarah! So where are you from and what aspects/themes/memories of LEGO do you especially favor? (It's not a quiz, there's no wrong answer (unless you don't know where you live ))

This could just be an honest mistake, but I'll take Bricklink over eBay any day. Sure you can often get great prices on eBay because many sellers don't know what they've got or what it's worth, but you also run into situations like this where a part is misidentified or, more generally, Megablocks are lumped in with LEGO and sold by the pound, random stuff thrown into a re-sealed box is advertised as mint in box, etc. Of course there are many levels of recourse to straighten things out after the fact, but who needs the hassle. I've found that when dealing directly with Bricklink vendors, I can do business with, review and converse with people who know LEGO and share my hobby and are less likely to screw up my order or misrepresent their inventory. Sure, mistakes happen, but Bricklink has more of an educated community feel to it as opposed to the purely transactional eBay model and I think that makes mistakes less likely and motivates vendors to correct issues when they occur. [in the interests of full disclosure, I freely admit that I was a classmate of Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay) at Tufts and that we haven't spoken in years.]

From what I've been able to glean about the 10237 Orthanc, if it comes with minifigures at all, they'll be entirely out of scale with the model itself (as they did on the UCS Super Star Destroyer). The tower is supposedly 72 cm tall, which I think would be great, but I did the math when I was building my own Orthanc a couple years ago and, to match the tower in the movie, at minifigure scale the tower should come in at well over two meters (or nearly three times the size the rumored size of this one). I'll welcome any figure(s) they choose to bundle with it, but I think this one's going to be more of a collector's display piece than a play set (and I'm fine with that).

Welcome, from the other side of the planet. It's amazing how little plastic bricks can build a bridge all the way around the world.

If you're going to that level of effort, you should MOD the sign to be something like "Lucky Dragon" such that, if some of the neon lights were to go out on some of the letters, it would reduce to " ucky rag " after dark. It's a shame we don't have more glow in the dark pieces available, you could do the L,D,o an n in white and the other letters in glow in the dark. By day it would seem innocent enough, but turn off the lights and the Ucky Rag would be open for business.

I admit I don't dust very often but... A cheaper alternative to this, if you don't actually need an airbrush that could potentially be used _as_ an airbrush to deliver paint, is just to get a can of compressed air at a photographic supply store (or probably Amazon these days) Same basic principle, blast off the dust without building up (as much of) a static charge that will just draw the dust back (like a hair dryer would) using air under pressure going through a tiny nozzle. A camera store near my house sells it for about 4USD a can (about the same size and packaging as WD40, a push top aerosol can with a long straw nozzle for getting into tight spots) your milage my vary.

I'm glad to see that they've finally added a cinema to the modular line up, and I can understand why they drew inspiration from Graumans Chinese Theatre in LA, but I think I would have preferred something in the Art Deco style. All the (surviving) old movie houses near me are Art Deco with that certain angular, geometric, tacky charm inside and out. Don't get me wrong; I'll pick up this set, block up the windows, redo the auditorium and happily add it to my modular block, but as a model of Grauman's it's a little low-end and as a generic old movie house it's a bit of an odd duck.

If I had to guess, I'd say probably not. I think the problem is that CuuSoo sets are marketed as their own theme and TLG/Disney wouldn't want one theme cannibalizing the market for another (especially one where they had to pay extra for the license). If CuuSoo worked differently (no such thing as a separate CuuSoo kit or recurring residuals for "winning" CuuSoo designs) I could see an already successful Lone Ranger line being expanded to adopt many of the attributes that made MWT popular, but I don't think CuuSoo (as it stands today) is really about selling a winning design so much as it is about designers volunteering web content and users generating web traffic to bring Facebook and Twitter users to LEGO. Whether they produce BTTF or MWT (or Perdue Pete for that matter) is secondary to the fact that there are now blogs and websites all over the web dedicated to promoting and reviewing CuuSoo ideas. TLG doesn't spend a penny on any of that. We've volunteered our models, our time, our server space, our bandwidth, etc. to (however indirectly) promote LEGO to AFOLs and Non-AFOLS alike. Passing the review is less an exercise in marketing a new product than it is of keeping CuuSoo fans interested and hopeful that "the next big idea" with be one of theirs. Even by rejecting MWT, CuuSoo is creating buzz that kicks the term "LEGO" higher in the search engine queues. Yes, many AFOLs are annoyed by the action, but let's face it, we're going to to continue to buy their products anyway. Reconsidering MWT in the future buys them little compared with just waiting for the next buzz-worthy item to put LEGO back on the RSS feeds as a hot topic. The strategy could certainly blow up on them. If we stop posting and stop voting, CuuSoo is as good as dead. Maybe it's just the revised activity feed, but it certainly seems like there are a lot fewer new projects being posted these days (I know I don't spend as much time there as I used to and haven't proposed or updated anything in months). If they keep giving the appearance of rejecting good ideas, it becomes like slot machine with a reputation for never paying out - every now and then, somebody has to been seen as winning to encourage others to play. That's one of the reasons why I think, politically, it was a bad move for them to approve BTTF (and idea proposed by someone who worked for CuuSoo) in the same press release were they kill MWT for no fault of its own. It doesn't add credibility to the notion that "anyone can design a winning set" when you approve an idea from an insider and kill a outside idea because you perceive it might conflict with internally developed offerings.

I have some older bricks (1960's and '70's Samsonite) that I've pretty much retired because of clouding of clear pieces and yellowing of white, but overall I don't worry too much about fading and such, at the end of the day LEGO is somewhere between a toy and an art medium, not the original copy of the Magna Carta or anything so if it fades a bit I don't worry too much about it. I've never really gone out of my way to keep things out of direct sunlight and don't dust nearly as often as I should (I figured the dust would help block the UV ). That said, about 8 years ago I replaced the old wooden windows in my house with modern (high-tech, thin film, low-e, argon filled, double glazed, fill-in marketing buzz word of your choice here) replacement windows and I really haven't noticed any fading issues since (in my LEGO or my drapes). I won't say it's eliminated the issue, but it's certainly slowed down the process while maintaining access to cat-approved sunbeams in the room.

I can see the Imperial Hotel taking a chunk out of my Lego budget this year. Sure it's only a fraction of the original structure, but it looks like it will be an interesting build and a nice display model. I have to admit I wasn't too enthusiastic about the rumored Eames House offering or scuttlebutt about Habitat 67 (I'm not too keen on the existing Farnsworth House and the Villa Savoy was okay, but nothing to write home about, just to let you know where I'm coming from) I was afraid the next offering was going to be an other glorified modernist box (or stack of boxes in the case of Habitat 67). I think this offering has a lot more character and sits in good company with the White House, The Robie House and other standouts in the line.

The economics of it are a bit more complex than this, popular demand is certainly a major part of it, but the studios can also be very heavy handed in trying to force popular "demand" one way or another by limiting options, marketing propaganda as news, and just plain ad saturation. For example, I was reading one report a month or so ago that claimed 70% of movie goers over the age of 20 preferred 2D films to 3D but despite that, a major studio had imposed a standing policy not to approve any budget over $100M unless it was going to be in 3D - not because 3D was popular, but because 3D films are harder to pirate and they give the studio an excuse to charge more for them. The studio had also employed a marketing firm to troll websites and blogs to make postings about how great 3D is and to flame people who complain about 3D. The studios play with the media and talk about how this 3D film was the biggest blockbuster of the year and neglect to mention that 2D ticket sales (by attendance) for the same title exceeded 3D sales by 3 to 1, etc. They show charts about how many 3D films are being released compared to 2D in previous years (neglecting to mention that most of them were 3D conversions after the fact and only counting 2D films that were _only_ available in 2D or only counting the 2D films that played in IMAX theaters, etc.) and people are left with the (false) impression that 3D is the big thing and if they don't embrace it, pop culture will leave them in its dust. I use 3D films as an example just because it's the current wave of Hollywood dictating pop culture over the preferences of the majority of movie going public (and I mean no slight to those who like 3D, but independent surveys and actual count of tickets sold strongly suggest they are a minority audience, at least in the US), but this same sort of thing has been going on for years with genre films. Right now, it all about super hero films, a few years ago it was spy films, before that sports films, before that ... (you get the idea) While, to my knowledge, the studios don't collude with one another to force us into only having war films to pick from or some such, the cost of making pictures these days usually means no one wants to take a big risk. If Paramount's next big ten pole is going to be Sci-Fi, you can bet Sony and Fox are going to be releasing Sci-Fi films of their own at around the same time. It's one thing to take a chance on a 20M romantic comedy, but these days when many films can be shot on a back lot in Vancouver with cheap digital effects or a little village in Ireland where you can rent an entire hotel for less than one day's catering budget in L.A., a western shot on location with real horses and real cattle , practical sets, etc. can be a prohibitively pricey gamble for a studio that tries to break with the declared trend. The data isn't just anecdotal, it's out there if you know where to look and it supports your supposition rather well. While the Sergio Leoni/Clint Eastward westerns of the 60's and 70's have never been kids fare, the real economic turning point came around the time of the introduction of the PG-13 rating and "blockbuster" economics. The most profitable westerns in recent years have all been R-rated and while some have been highly praised (such as "Unforgiven") none of them have been blockbusters. In fact, R-rated blockbusters are rare (outside of the occasional comedy). Films don't become block busters because people see them, they become blockbusters because people see them over and over again. Most adults, if they go to the movies at all, don't tend to go to the same film twice. Tweens and teenagers, however, will. So Hollywood likes to push the PG-13 theatrical release and the "unrated" DVD (as minors can usually buy disks or stream videos without getting carded the way they would trying to sneak into "Henry and June" or "Showgirls") and certain genres that don't fit well in this distribution model (like westerns) get left by the wayside. I don't know if today's culture has room for a Gene Autry or a Crash Corrigan. I remember thinking of "The Rifleman" as a sort of western take on "Father Knows Best," but who can sit through either of those shows these days? I think a lot of kids have become too cynical at too young an age to accept that sort of "innocent" idealized world no matter where it's set. I think as a people, we've come to realize that the old west was not really a kid friendly time. Romantic notions of singing cowboys in white hats who shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand before giving him a stern talking to where he learns the error of his ways and goes on to become a pillar of society just doesn't fly anymore. Even slightly more mature fare (in its day) like "Raw Hide" and "Bonanza" comes across as naive and dated today. Lord knows I could never figure out what my mother found so great about "Dr.Quinn Medicine Woman" (whoever wrote that show really needed to go back to high school history class, they made the writers of "F-Troop" seems like scholars). The profitable reception of "adult" westerns from time to time suggests that people ARE still willing to watch an r-rated Drama set in the Old West, but I think the things a studio would have to do to turn such a film into a kids friendly film would make it unpalatable to adults. I don't know about The Lone Ranger, is it really a western, or will it be an action/adventure/comedy with western elements? I certainly don't consider the PotC films to be "Pirate" films in the same genre as "Captain Blood" or "The Sea Hawk," but who knows. Regardless of the past or future of the film genre, based on preliminary photos, I think I would have been more likely to buy the Modular Western Town over the Lone Ranger kits (though I am eyeing the train set). It's a shame we can't have both.

This is a very valid observation, but I think there is room to follow the same basic "age branding" that a lot of jigsaw manufactures use: an age cap on kits that really _are_ targeted at pre-teens (i.e. too simple to hold an older audiences interest) but declare some arbitrary age (usually much lower than the legal driving age) as "adult" or "+" to suggest that this is a hobby all ages can enjoy. For TLG this would mean that a kit branded as, say, 7-12 would stay the same but one currently marked "12-16" would get rebranded as "12 to Adult" or "12+". A "cap" age in the mid teens and above contributes little information for the gift buyer but does needlessly promote the "kid's toy" image. Seriously, what is less likely to offend a 17-year-old, giving him/her a kit openly branded as a toy for a 15 year old, or having her/him easily master a kit branded as suitable for "adults" ? This is another very valid point, TLG shouldn't compete with AFOL based events, but I do think they could do more to encourage high visibility AFOL activity, particularly in regions that DON'T have long standing LEGO Convention traditions like Chicago or Seattle. Take Boston for example, there are four Lego Stores in Massachusetts, so clearly there must be enough of an audience demand to sustain them. I'm told Maine has a LUG (though it only has a Facebook presence and, not being a Facebookie, I have no idea where they are or what they do) and the biggest city in Maine is only two hours from Boston so I'll declare them 'local' (at least compared to, say Baltimore or Seattle). A general New England LUG has been around for years and has a display at a local toy train show twice a year; but when it comes to big, dedicated LEGO conventions, New Englanders have to schlep over a mountain range and into the next time zone to get to one. It would be nice if TLG had some sort of scholarship/grant program in its advertising budget that local LUGs could apply to in order to get start-up funds and professional advice about how to go about holding a LEGO convention, incorporating an LLC or 501c3 for the purposes of managing funds and liability associated with the convention, etc.. TLG wouldn't be _running_ the convention, but they could provide needed advice, assign a liaison officer to act as consultant, book an expert builder to hold a kids-build event at the convention, arrange for an official LEGO vendor offering all the current kits, provide a company insider to give a talk where s/he says "no" to all our prospective product requests/suggestions and refuses to divulge information on upcoming sets , arrange for publicity at LEGO stores near the event, advertise the event via email to VIP members living within a certain radius of the venue, etc.. I think there are a fair number of Lego User's Groups out there that would love to host a (relatively local) convention but don't have a clue as to how to go about doing it. If the sponsoring LUGs and target venues were chosen wisely, it could translate into a lot of cheap advertising for TLG and a potential boon for the AFOL community.

I'm not usually that into the mini-figure scene but I _did_ pick up a spare copy of MMV mostly for the cows. The medieval market village is a great set in general, but the cows were really the tipping point (no cow tipping puns intended) for me.

As a business model, it probably makes more sense to let the colleges assume the risk. Rather than license the mascots from the schools, invest time, materials and energy into making the kits and trying to match the right mascot to the right alumni, it would be better to offer a "mascot service" where TLG makes a one-time production run and bulk sale directly to the university to do with as they please. Alumni relations and Development offices could then resell the kits at some outrageous "charitable fund raising" price point at sporting events or give them away at reunions or other events where they want to endear themselves to alumni just before passing the proverbial hat, or even just sell them at the campus bookstore. Unlike a regular LEGO kit where TLG has to worry about shelf space and when to retire a kit. Universities could sit on unclaimed kits for decades with little ill effect (the school I used to work at had an entire warehouse full of "branded" merchandise that the school used to dust off twice a year, Homecoming and Alumni Weekend, in an effort to separate alumni from their money wherever they could. While I think putting something like Purdue Pete on the shelves at Toys R Us next to The Hobbit is just plain silly, I could certainly see Purdue University buying 10,000 kits and selling them at campus events, or MIT offering the official Mans et Manus edition LEGO Beaver at the bookstore and in the gift shop of the MIT Museum, etc. For TLG, the sale is guaranteed by the terms of the contract, they don't need to market, returns aren't their problem, and if the kits sit around gathering dust for a decade, they're not out anything. For the universities, it's a one time expense and if they don't sell, they can always give them away as promotions to big donors, gag gifts, and parts of honorariums. They write the cost off as a development expense (10,000 Lego kits wholesale is probably less than what many of these places are already spending on Wine, Cheese and Party Rentals for alumni functions anyway).

Cool, I'd never seen the smokey transparent 2x4 before, I've got a bunch of the later/modern stud and tube clear (well, kinda foggy now actually) 2x4s, but I'd never seen the slotted brick in the clear. What material were they using for that one back then? 1952 sounds a bit too early for mass produced polycarb (at least for toys); cellulose nitrate is a little volatile to produce and store; the material looks like an acrylic resin but the casting would seem like to slow a process and the edges seem too crisp for thermo-pressing; cellulose acetate maybe? As for anniversaries, I've given up trying to figure out how TLG decides when time began. As far as I'm concerned, MY Lego world began on Dec. 24th, 1969 when I got my first Lego set as a Christmas Eve gift (a fire truck - though my second kit the following year, the 603 vintage car, was more memorable because of the yellow macaroni pieces and the smaller wheels).

From a user interface/ease of use standpoint, I'm rather fond of MOCPages. It really feels like it was designed from the ground up to make it easy to share and describe LEGO projects as projects, not just a collection of photos with captions. I get the feeling from the forum discussions that there is a fair number of TFOLs there, but most conduct themselves in a civil and mature manner (better than many places on the web). It's up to the individual poster to flag certain photos or discussions as "mature content" (not being a teenage boy I don't know if such a flag actually prevents anyone from viewing the page if they follow the link, but it does block out titles and photos in response to searches and newsfeeds (you get a generic link instead)). The UI is far from perfect (my biggest pet peeve is that if you take too long editing a page, the connection times out and you lose your changes) but then again no UI is, and for me it's the best of several less-than-ideal alternatives. MOCPages' availability could be a lot better (then again a lot of the software _I_ write is used in hospitals and other mission critical operations so maybe my expectations are unrealistic) and (compared to Brickshelf and Flickr) it _feels_ like very few people use it. As an experiment once, I posted the same photo set on Flickr and MOC pages and the Flickr set got more hits in a day than MOC pages did in a month. I also find that the MOCPages' ad server needs to be smarter about mobile devices. Most of the time the ads are sufficiently innocuous that I don't even notice they're there, but every now and then you get some stupid full screen, Flash based ad that can't play under iOS and won't let you access the page until it plays, so if you're on an iPad you just have to keep reloading the page until you randomly get an ad that doesn't block the site. I realize the ads are what's paying for this "free service" but with the tremendous rise of mobile computing in the past three years and the iPad controlling 85% of the tablet market, you'd think they'd realize they need to be more iOS friendly (especially when the Flash content could easily be replaced with HTML5/CSS3 and avoid the problem entirely). As for the major players, I've never tried posting to Brickshelf. I don't really know why, it's just one of those bookmarks I rarely click on and I already have so many accounts I need a database just to keep track of them. Still, maybe I'll give it a shot one of these days. I know I've found great stuff on there from time to time. I really don't know why I've never posted there - probably just a case of staying inside one's comfort zone. As for Flickr, I have posted stuff there from time to time, but I use it really more as a sort of advertising, splash screens and money shots that point people to my MOCPages account. My answer to the 200 photo stream limit is to delete stuff after a while (I make it a point not to link to my Flickr account as I know I might toast photos there and I don't want to leave broken links lying about the web). The two things I like best about Flickr are the traffic and the ability to comment on a particular area within a photo. I think the latter is a really cool feature that I wish MOCPages supported. The audience isn't limited to just LEGO fans (which is both good and bad depending on what sort of feedback you're hoping for) but it does seem that stand-out projects get noticed faster over there (and everything else gets lost in the shuffle of baby pictures, wedding photos, cute cats, fast cars, etc., etc. Anyway, that my two cents (which actually cost the US Mint about a nickel to produce - and we wonder why we have a debt problem when it costs us twice the face value of a coin to actually strike it and put it into circulation).