Check out this reverence for the loller dollar – yep, there’s a country where American money is actually run through washing machines to keep it clean and smelling nice. (No Polish jokes, please.) That country is, not surprisingly, Zimbabwe, where the zimdollar became useless for anything other than kindling and was replaced as legal tender by the dollar, despite the fact that American bills can’t be printed as easily down there as they can on our turf:

The washing machine cycle takes about 45 minutes — and George Washington comes out much cleaner in the Zimbabwe-style laundering of dirty money. Low-denomination U.S bank notes change hands until they fall apart here in Africa, and the bills are routinely carried in underwear and shoes through crime-ridden slums. Some have become almost too smelly to handle, so Zimbabweans have taken to putting their $1 bills through the spin cycle and hanging them up to dry with clothes pins alongside their sheets and clothes.

I guess given the choice of carrying soiled foreign money in your shoes or your own currency in a wheelbarrow, I mean, it’s kind of like Scylla and Charybdis, but the former would have to win out. Of course, it begs the question that if rampant inflation hit the US, would we have to run around with our undies full of Canadian loonies that we occasionally took to the laundromat and washed on gentle cycle?

(h/t to LOLFed intrepid reporter J. Napsterista)