h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

*Goes digging on Google*

The Latvian Lat is worth more than one Pound Sterling.

http://www.x-rates.com/d/GBP/table.html

The Christmas Island Head?

They are worth an arm and a leg.

PP

At the moment a GBP is only worth two thirds of a Cypriot pound.

In British slang a dollar used to be 5/- (five shillings, five bob or a crown) and a half-crown 2/6 (two and six, two shillings and sixpence, two and a tanner or two and a kick) was half a dollar in slang terms (not currency conversion terms, though it would have once been true). As a child getting a half-crown coin was much better than getting a florin (2/-, two bob or two shillings)

At the fish shop 'One of each' was one penny worth of chips and one penny worth of fish. Cost two pence (the old penny 12 to a bob) with 20 bob to a quid (one pound). Today you wouldn't get any change out of a fiver for 'one of each'. In the old days fish were a foot long and the chips were a quarter of an inch thick.

You're living up to your name.

>Today you wouldn't get any change out of a fiver for 'one of each'

Yeah you would. Here anyway - the chippy over the road is £1.10 for chips and £2.90 for fish.

The fish and the chips in our locak are pretty darn big. So much so that I usually have to get a small portion of chips otherwise I can't finish it.

Just before the switch to decimal you could get a pint, with a florin (2 bob) and get tuppence change.
A four pint round with a bag of nuts for ten bob.

The fifth domestic appliance to be to be electrified, after the sewing machine, the fan, the toaster, and the teakettle, was the vibrator.

could you cite your sources

My Nan!


or..

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/09/19/110919crbo_books_levy?currentPage=all

Are you sure it wasn't the chair? We are talking US aren't we?
Les Dawson joked in the 1970s, "I bought my mother in law a chair for her birthday but she wouldn't let me plug it in." Boom, boom.

The new shilling is bigger than the old tanner.

6d is called "a tanner" because of the exchange rate for soldiers in india was

6d = 8 anna

and 6d was a days wages

Actually, Taff, the origin of 'tanner' as slang for sixpence is of unknown origin.

(Mr. D - always compelled to double check any etymological facts he is presented with)

In today's Metro I read that there are more obese people than starving people in the world.

More people are at risk of dying because they eat too much (1,5000,000,000) than because they don't have enough to eat (900,000,000).

*1,500,000,000

The word "suns" reads the same upside down. (Invertadrome?)