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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lordmarcovan, post: 2934005, member: 10461&quot;]They might&#039;ve been silver, or merely silver plated.&nbsp; I have seen them described both ways online.</p><p><br /></p><p>In case anyone else is curious, I suppose some explanation is in order.</p><p><br /></p><p>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 <i>own</i> recollections of the matter, here&#039;s a summary:</p><p><br /></p><ul> <li>I didn&#039;t feel totally comfortable <i>selling</i> these, because of the potentially controversial subject matter.&nbsp; These are not historical period pieces.&nbsp; They were made in the late 20th century.&nbsp; 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.)</li> <li>So I decided to <i>give</i> them away instead.&nbsp; Which in retrospect was not a terribly great idea, either.</li> <li>[USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER] found them distasteful and objectionable, for personal and family reasons he explained to me in a PM and on the giveaway thread.&nbsp; He said if I needed stuff for a giveaway, he&#039;d be happy to contribute something.&nbsp; He made the point that these were manufactured for crass commercial purposes, and in an indirect way they actually <i>glorify</i> these two historical evildoers.&nbsp; I didn&#039;t disagree with that, though my distaste for them was not as visceral as his.</li> <li>I told [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER] that if he would put up a giveaway prize of equal value, I would withdraw the &quot;Villain&quot; medals from the giveaway and also put up an alternate prize myself, in addition to the prizes donated by him and [USER=80148]@coin_nut[/USER].</li> <li>He put up a very nice prize of much <i>greater</i> value than the medals, more than fulfilling his obligation.&nbsp; I also put up an alternate coin prize worth 3-4 times what the pair of medals had been.&nbsp; ([USER=80148]@coin_nut[/USER] had also put up a prize.)</li> <li>I offered to throw the medals off the Gascoigne Bluff Pier here, to effectively destroy them and remove them from the market.&nbsp; They thus became [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER]&#039;s property once he put up a replacement prize in the giveaway.</li> <li>However, it was my understanding that he did not want actual physical possession of them- merely their removal from society.</li> <li>Somewhere in here I got the idea that he didn&#039;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.</li> <li>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 [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER]&#039;s donation to the giveaway.&nbsp; (Though I had already volunteered to throw them into the river on my own initiative.)</li> <li>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, [USER=80148]@coin_nut[/USER], and [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER].&nbsp; It left the medals in limbo. (Or so I <i>thought</i>, when I thought about them at all, which wasn&#039;t much.)</li> <li>When I came up to North Carolina to visit Michael ([USER=81808]@Aethelred[/USER]) and you, [USER=91033]@asheland[/USER], I brought the medals with me and put them in with a batch of coins I was bringing into Michael&#039;s shop.&nbsp; (I had originally received them from him in a bulk lot under similar circumstances.)&nbsp; I told Michael they had been nothing but trouble and I wanted to be rid of them, so I returned them to him.&nbsp; This put me in violation of the earlier &quot;destruction&quot; promise I&#039;d made to [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER], though with the other distractions of the trip and visit, that wasn&#039;t on my mind at the time.&nbsp; I thought I had done my part by taking them out of the giveaway, and that [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER] didn&#039;t care one way or another what happened to them after that as long as I didn&#039;t sell them or give them away (obviously now I realize this was where I screwed up).</li> <li>After returning from the NC trip, I offhandedly mentioned what I had done with the medals to [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER] 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.&nbsp; (Which I had, but merely by error and not out of any idea of profiting from the damn things.&nbsp; If I was selling them on the sly, I certainly wouldn&#039;t have said anything to him about it, now, would I?&nbsp; Nor would I have replaced them in the giveaway with a much more valuable prize of my own.&nbsp; Maybe [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER] thought I was taunting him by bringing them up again.&nbsp; I don&#039;t know, because communication broke down after that.)</li> <li>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.&nbsp; But the system would not let me include [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER] on this message.</li> <li>It took me a moment to realize that he had <i>blocked me</i>.</li> </ul><p>[ATTACH=full]713029[/ATTACH]</p><ul> <li>So I tried to have [USER=81808]@Aethelred[/USER] contact him and get his address, so we could ship the stupid medals to him and close the book on the whole sorry mess.&nbsp; By now I was getting rather annoyed myself.</li> <li>But he had blocked <i>Aethelred</i>, too.&nbsp; 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 [USER=81808]@Aethelred[/USER] 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.</li> <li>So Michael shipped the medals back here to me (<i>again</i>), and the rest of the story can be seen in the photos above.&nbsp; By the time Adolf and Joe hit the drink this morning, I was no longer doing it for [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER], who may never speak to me again.&nbsp; I was doing it for <i>ME</i>.&nbsp; Those things were cursed.&nbsp; And they are where they belong now, in the mud at the bottom of the murky Frederica River.&nbsp; Good riddance to them, I say, and to the memory of the evil men they portrayed.</li> </ul><p>Sometimes it&#039;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.&nbsp; (And that&#039;s not the <i>only</i> screwup I made with the November giveaway, either- I&#039;ve made <i>another</i> embarrassing blunder- but the other one has nothing to do with the medals or [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER] and I&#039;m working privately behind the scenes to fix <i>that</i> one now.&nbsp; Happily, the other two parties there have been understanding, and are still talking to me.)</p><p><br /></p><p>*whew*</p><p><br /></p><p>So that&#039;s my side of the whole soap opera.&nbsp; Needless to say, I am sorry for my mishandling of the affair and accept full responsibility.&nbsp; Whether [USER=19250]@Paddy54[/USER] ever forgives or not is entirely up to him.&nbsp; I wash my hands of the matter (or will, once I fix my <i>other</i> unrelated screwup which I won&#039;t go into at this time- y&#039;all have probably heard enough.)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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