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Tag Archives: #whereswilly


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One-Liner Wednesday – Just Call Him Willy

willyHe’s up in a tree!

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UPDATED March 4th/15

Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.

As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.

Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”

The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:

1. Make it one sentence.

2. Make it either funny or inspirational.

Have fun!


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I Found My Willy! (and other randomness)

If you’ve been following me for a while you might remember this post: https://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/whereswilly-com-the-20-blog-post/ It’s about a $20 bill I received and signed up online, before I spent him, to see where he goes. Yesterday he resurfaced!

I got an email last night to let me know my Willy is still in good condition and is about 7-8 hours away, north of Sudbury, Ontario. He came out of an ATM! I was afraid that since he was old (2004) he might have been taken out of circulation by the bank, especially since we now have plastic money here in Canada. But it turns out my Willy is still making his rounds.

Also, this morning, I was greeted with an email to say that a user of Goodreads with the handle “Coffee Talk” wanted to be added as my friend.

coffee

I accepted, of course. Although I’m surprised – coffee has been my friend for years already.

What’s your randomness for today?


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whereswilly.com – The $20 Blog Post

“Do you have change for a twenty?”

That’s how it started – with those words.

“I think so,” I replied, juggling gloves and newspapers to dig into my pocket. I pulled out a couple of receipts and a five dollar bill and then went into the other pocket. Just as I was about to give up, I found a ten.

“Yes!” I exclaimed.

All right, maybe I wasn’t quite that excited. I was just collecting for my paper route after all.

It was while I was walking back down my customer’s driveway, my gloves still tucked under my arm, that I saw the writing on the $20 bill.

“Yes!” I exclaimed, for real this time. “It’s a blog post!”

This is what I saw.

whereswilly

I couldn’t wait to get home to check it out.

When I googled whereswilly, I saw a Wikipedia entry for it, so I decided to go there first — in case it was some kind of hacking thing. It turns out it wasn’t.

According to Wiki, the “Willy” refers to Sir Wilfred Laurier, past Prime Minister of Canada. There are apparently close to 4,000,000 bills in circulation with this message, and you can, in fact, register on the website to see where the bill has been AND be emailed to find out where it goes. It’s based on a “Where’s George” site in the U.S., to track currency there, and has been used by researchers to track the movement of pandemics, such as SARS.

Isn’t that interesting?

I’m only the second person who has tracked this particular $20, but I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. According to the website, I can do this with any bill, any time.

You can check out the Wiki page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Willy%3F

Have you heard of this before? Have you ever come across a bill with a website written on it? Do you want to start one? It’s so cool!