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Last-Minute Olympic Tickets? Yeah, There's a Place For That

For the first time in Olympic history, the Olympic organizing committee has posted a web site that allows folks to buy and sell tickets to events at the Winter Games.  At a profit, if desired.  There are other sites offering Olympic tickets, including StubHub and eBay.  But keep in mind that in past years, ticket prices have plummeted just before the start of the games as supply outstripped demand, so time your purchase (or your sale) wisely.

US Mint Limits $1 Coin Orders To $5,000 In Wake of Frequent Flyer Frenzy To Accumulate Miles

It started out innocently enough: The US Mint wanted to get more $1 coins in circulation.  Americans have been slow to give up their dollar bills in favor of dollar coins, and it's in the US Treasury's interest to promote coins over dollars because they don't deteriorate and require replacement as often as paper money does.  (A coin can last 30 years while a bill may be unusable in less than two years.)

So the US Mint launched a program to sell $1 coins commemorating Native Americans in bulk to the public, offering them in quantities of $250 that can be sent directly to your doorstep with no shipping or handling charge.  And you can use your credit card to purchase them.

And that's where frequent flyers, always in search of more miles for less cost, saw an opportunity: Purchase thousands of dollars worth of the coins using a credit card that gives you loyalty points or frequent flyer miles for buying stuff.  So an individual with a credit card linked to, say, Delta Air Lines, could charge $10,000 worth of coins and collect 10,000 frequent flyer miles on Delta (presuming the buyer is receiving one mile for every one dollar spent).  Upon receiving the coins, they could be deposited in a bank account in order to pay that credit card bill.

On-line bulletin boards devoted to the accumulation of frequent flyer miles first disseminated the news--one individual writing on FlyerTalk.com said he'd purchased $800,000 worth of the coins, earning enough miles to circle the globe a couple of times in first class.  (The US Mint said it had no record of such a large order, but pointed out the buyer could have made a number of purchases using different credit cards and different addresses.)

But it was a Wall Street Journal article by Scott McCartney earlier this month really brought the general public's attention to the scheme.  And now the US Mint is limiting sales to 5,000 coins at a time unless you write the US Mint and explain why you need a larger shipment.

And while it isn't illegal to order thousands of dollars worth of $1 coins and them simply take them to the bank, the US Mint's ordering page now says, "The immediate bank deposit of $1 coins ordered through this program does not result in their introduction into circulation, and, therefore, does not comply with the intended purpose of the program." 

So the Mint has inaugurated a 20-box limit on each individual order.  Since each box contains 250, $1 coins, that means the maximum order as of this writing is $5,000.  The Mint also says some credit cad companies may consider the purchases as "cash-equivalent transactions" not eligible for the accumulation of frequent-flyer miles, so proceed under those cautions.

Sunsets After the Tsunami . . . Dateline, Thailand

Early last year I posted a blog item about the coastal village of Bann Talae Nok in southern Thailand. This was the place that lost nearly 200 residents, including 16 schoolchildren playing on the beach, when the 2004 tsunami devastated that part of the world.

(You can read that post if you click on "Breaking News" at the bottom of this page and scroll down to Feb. 10, 2008.)

The blog Global Citizens recently asked me to pick one of the most memorable sunsets I've seen in my travels, and I chose the sunset I saw (and photographed) on the beach at Baan Talae Nok when my television crew and I were there shooting part of an episode on southern Thailand for the most recent season of "Rudy Maxa's World."

Not only was the deep, orange sky noteworthy, but every night, as the sun sets, a herd of wild buffaloes comes down to the water's edge and seems to debate for awhile whether to wade into the Andaman Sea.  The decision is always, eventually, "Yes," and you can see them in the photo I loaned to the Global Citizens blog.