King Neptune

I actually met King Neptune back in 1984. I was in the US Navy, and when we crossed the equator he came on board and demanded all the pollywogs who hadn't been accross the equator to suck a marchino cherry out of his naval after he had smeared it over with bearing grease. Such is the life of a sailor at sea. Being a certified shellback now, I will never have to undergo that initiation again. I'm not quite sure if the US Navy even allows such practices anymore, it is considered hazing and they have women aboard most of the ships. We had to crawl on our hands and knees for a couple hours and were beaten and made to do humiliating things. We had a beauty contest the night before, where sailors dressed as women, hoping to win the beauty contest and become Neptunes prize. That lucky guy didn't have to get hazed and just sat beside Neptune during the ceremony.

What does this have to do with stamps???? Oh yes, King Neptune is pictured on this stamp from Barbados.

Laos and Unesco

These Laotian stamps are spectacular when you have them in your hands, the scanned images do not do them justice.
If you notice, the second stamp from the top has Unesco printed on it. Check out this site and learn more about Unesco. http://whc.unesco.org/en/about/ Unesco has a large following of collectors who try to get postcards from all of the Unesco sites.
If you think you may be interested in collecting these, check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/topicalstampsandpostcards . There, you can find many of the people interested in trading Unesco postcards.

Politics

Ahmad Shah, pictured here, of Iran(Persia), took rule in 1909 at the age of 11. He replaced his father, who was probably not a happy man over the ordeal. Ahmad Shah stayed in until 1925 when he was replaced. I believe Russia and England pretty much had Iran under control albeit divided between the two countries. This certainly begs the question, what was going on over there? These stamps were overprinted in several formats and forgeries abound. While forgeries can still garner a decent price. Authentic ones can be easy to difficult to identify. I've joined the IPSC trying to gain insight into distinguishing authentic stamps of Iran. This is a good group to join if you are interested in these. They have a group on yahoo with a wealth of information.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iranphilatelic

Year of the Rooster

This being the year of the dog, lets look back at a set from last years year of the Rooster. This is a colorful set from Hong Kong, China. 4 subspecies on the same number of denominations.

Notice the larger indents in the center of each side along the stamp perforations. This type of perforation has a special name which is eluding me. If you know what this name is please comment and let us know what that name is. Inquiring minds want to know.

These stamps lead me to mention Cees, who specializes in chicken stamps, I've placed a link to his new blog on my blogsite. He has several links on his blog that are also of interest.

The US is releasing a sheet of stamps this year containing a stamp from each year of the Chinese zodiak, having issued over the last 12 years every zodiac sign individually. All US collectors are sure to want to get this sheet, as I am sure many haven't gotten all the years for one reason or another.

JimmyB

Maps on stamps

Topicals are the most popular means of collecting stamps, at least here in the USA. I've got googles of maps on stamps, here are just a few. My problem with topicals is that I collect countries AND topicals. Not a bad thing unless I'm missing a stamp that falls into both catagories, in which case what do you do? How about the high end stamps? The common stamps you may soon get a duplicate and fill both albums, but who wants to pay a high price for the same stamp twice?

"Holy Roman Empire" you say?

These stamps are of the Austria design, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbia also carried Austrian designed stamps. For enthusiasts of history and WWI these are exciting stamps.

The spark that ignited the First WW is closely tied to these stamps. Kaizer Franz Joseph(The Old Gentleman) was ruler of the Austrian Empire. His grand nephew Karl succeeded him as Kaiser (Emperor of the old Roman Empire) upon Franz's death as Karl's father had been assasinated(Archduke Ferdinand) which had set the wheels in motion for the war.

It's amazing to me that the Roman Empires lineage of Emperors had continued on as far as the early 20th century.

There is a set of Bosnian stamps from this era that depict scenic views of the countryside.

All these stamps are sure to get collectors fumbling for information as to the what, where and when of this time in European history.

Palestinian Authority

It's a small world with the internet.
In one of the several groups I've joined in the online community, I was easily able to contact someone from Palestine. We exchanged a couple mint sheets of stamps easily available to ourselves, but difficult to get apart from each other.
I had simply wanted used stamps from Palestine in exchange for mint US.
My friend informed me that it was difficult for him to obtain used stamps and that it was easier for him to get mint.
That kind of surprised me. When I went to my Scott catalogue, I found that the values for used were the same as the values for mint. I wonder if the used values were underpriced then in the catalogue? After all, aren't the values based on availability? Perhaps the demand for Palestinian stamps isn't great enough at the moment to justify a higher value. I would suggest to anyone recieving mail from Palestine to hold onto those covers, or at least soak off those stamps and put them away for safe keeping. We may know something those catalogue editors don't. If Scott's people aren't trying to get there hands on Palestinian Authority stamps, they may not be seeing how difficult it is to get them.

I'm not referring to the older Palestine stamps but rather the latest ones issued by the new Palestinian authority.

I'd like to add, that it took a good month and a half to recieve this letter. Closer to 2 months. Perhaps it was carried on camelback across the Sahara, and placed on a raft that needed to drift by ocean currents all the way to the US. I'm sure all of us that have corresponded internationally have wondered what was taking so long for a reply. Another guess of mine, is that big brother is going thru and reading all the mail for security purposes. No doubt our correspondance is so innocent, that they have cryptographers working overtime to try to find the hidden message buried within our communication.