Some unfinished business regarding the "Villain" medals withdrawn from my November 2017 giveaway

There. Adolf and Uncle Joe learn synchronized swimming, and join Luca Brasi in Davy Jones' locker.

And good riddance to them.

Adolf and Joe "sleep with the fishes" now.

 

Oh- if someone would please be so kind as to ask @Paddy54 to take me off his Ignore list long enough to see this, he is welcome to then re-ignore me afterwards.

But the promise has been kept, albeit belatedly and after a rather bad misunderstanding for which I accept the blame.

Hopefully that will put this whole sordid business to rest.

It does as far as I am concerned.

 

They might've been silver, or merely silver plated. I have seen them described both ways online.

In case anyone else is curious, I suppose some explanation is in order.

Without going back over the whole November giveaway thread (which I edited after removing the medals anyway) and basing these bullet points solely upon my own recollections of the matter, here's a summary:

• I didn't feel totally comfortable selling these, because of the potentially controversial subject matter. These are not historical period pieces. They were made in the late 20th century. I think they might have even been made in America, though different sources I read also say Italy or even Germany (but I strongly doubt that last.)
• So I decided to give them away instead. Which in retrospect was not a terribly great idea, either.
• @Paddy54 found them distasteful and objectionable, for personal and family reasons he explained to me in a PM and on the giveaway thread. He said if I needed stuff for a giveaway, he'd be happy to contribute something. He made the point that these were manufactured for crass commercial purposes, and in an indirect way they actually glorify these two historical evildoers. I didn't disagree with that, though my distaste for them was not as visceral as his.
• I told @Paddy54 that if he would put up a giveaway prize of equal value, I would withdraw the "Villain" medals from the giveaway and also put up an alternate prize myself, in addition to the prizes donated by him and @coin_nut.
• He put up a very nice prize of much greater value than the medals, more than fulfilling his obligation. I also put up an alternate coin prize worth 3-4 times what the pair of medals had been. (@coin_nut had also put up a prize.)
• I offered to throw the medals off the Gascoigne Bluff Pier here, to effectively destroy them and remove them from the market. They thus became @Paddy54's property once he put up a replacement prize in the giveaway.
• However, it was my understanding that he did not want actual physical possession of them- merely their removal from society.
• Somewhere in here I got the idea that he didn't want me to make a spectacle of destroying them, either, so (as I recall- perhaps erroneously) this took my offer to toss the medals into the Frederica River off the table as well.
• It is here that I fumbled and obviously misunderstood the importance of this detail, since the destruction of the medals had apparently also been a condition of @Paddy54's donation to the giveaway. (Though I had already volunteered to throw them into the river on my own initiative.)
• This left the medals semi-forgotten, as all mention of them was removed from the giveaway, which proceeded with the other prizes put up by me, @coin_nut, and @Paddy54. It left the medals in limbo. (Or so I thought, when I thought about them at all, which wasn't much.)
• When I came up to North Carolina to visit Michael (@Aethelred) and you, @asheland, I brought the medals with me and put them in with a batch of coins I was bringing into Michael's shop. (I had originally received them from him in a bulk lot under similar circumstances.) I told Michael they had been nothing but trouble and I wanted to be rid of them, so I returned them to him. This put me in violation of the earlier "destruction" promise I'd made to @Paddy54, though with the other distractions of the trip and visit, that wasn't on my mind at the time. I thought I had done my part by taking them out of the giveaway, and that @Paddy54 didn't care one way or another what happened to them after that as long as I didn't sell them or give them away (obviously now I realize this was where I screwed up).
• After returning from the NC trip, I offhandedly mentioned what I had done with the medals to @Paddy54 in an unrelated PM, completely oblivious to the fact that I was angering him considerably by so doing, and how from his viewpoint I had violated my part of the agreement. (Which I had, but merely by error and not out of any idea of profiting from the damn things. If I was selling them on the sly, I certainly wouldn't have said anything to him about it, now, would I? Nor would I have replaced them in the giveaway with a much more valuable prize of my own. Maybe @Paddy54 thought I was taunting him by bringing them up again. I don't know, because communication broke down after that.)
• The first hint of major trouble came when I sent out a group PM to all the donors and winners of the giveaway, to coordinate the shipping and so on. But the system would not let me include @Paddy54 on this message.
• It took me a moment to realize that he had blocked me.

• So I tried to have @Aethelred contact him and get his address, so we could ship the stupid medals to him and close the book on the whole sorry mess. By now I was getting rather annoyed myself.
• But he had blocked Aethelred, too. So after a few more attempts to reestablish communication and to apologize (admittedly not very well, since I too was getting increasingly angry over the whole debacle by this point), I finally asked @Aethelred to just ship the medals to me and I would take care of the matter by doing what I should have done in the first place.
• So Michael shipped the medals back here to me (again), and the rest of the story can be seen in the photos above. By the time Adolf and Joe hit the drink this morning, I was no longer doing it for @Paddy54, who may never speak to me again. I was doing it for ME. Those things were cursed. And they are where they belong now, in the mud at the bottom of the murky Frederica River. Good riddance to them, I say, and to the memory of the evil men they portrayed.

Sometimes it's true what they say about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions, but in this case, there was also a healthy dose of human error and stupidly clumsy mishandling by me, as well. (And that's not the only screwup I made with the November giveaway, either- I've made another embarrassing blunder- but the other one has nothing to do with the medals or @Paddy54 and I'm working privately behind the scenes to fix that one now. Happily, the other two parties there have been understanding, and are still talking to me.)

*whew*

So that's my side of the whole soap opera. Needless to say, I am sorry for my mishandling of the affair and accept full responsibility. Whether @Paddy54 ever forgives or not is entirely up to him. I wash my hands of the matter (or will, once I fix my other unrelated screwup which I won't go into at this time- y'all have probably heard enough.)

 

True, but I don't own a gun, and maybe it's a good thing I don't, because of my semi-scary encounter with an aggressive and dangerous road-rager on my way home.

I did think about giving 'em a good bash with a hammer before dropping 'em in the drink, but in the frigid wind on the river this morning, I was busy enough trying not to deposit my cellphone or myself in the water!

 

"Overly dramatic?" You bet. It would have been far better to dispose of the things quietly, before it all went bad.

But by the time it had gone bad, and dragged on (entirely due to my own incompetence), a little ritual seemed necessary appropriate.

It was cathartic for me, anyway.

 

Ah, excellent. I am very happy to hear this. Thank you.

This matter is now concluded, I'm happy to say.

Umm... well...

... except, that is, for the extremely embarrassing fact that I've also misplaced the coin which @coin_nut donated in the same giveaway, which was won by @Alok Verma. As if I hadn't already screwed the November giveaway up enough already! Wow. But both of them have been made aware of the issue and have been very understanding, and I'm working on finding that coin and getting it shipped to where it needs to go ... or I'll make it good- with interest.

Note to self: put everything for the December giveaway in its proper place, and leave it there until the end of the month! Sheesh!

 

Side note: those first three moving images in the OP were the very first animated GIFs I've ever made! It's true that the first GIF/fourth picture (my POV of walking down the pier) is rather wobbly and seasick-inducing (but at least with the GIF you didn't have to listen to my fat-person mouthbreathing and wheezing from the original source video).

I was tickled to find an app on my phone for making animated GIFs. I've never done it before, and it was easy with that app. (The last GIF in the OP sequence is someone else's, with a clip from The Godfather movie, as some of you movie trivia buffs might've recognized from the "Luca Brasi" reference.)