Hi All,  Just need to check my glasses here.

So a new Boesendorfer Model 290 is $119,000.00?  Heck, order me two...
(Just kidding!)

John Tuttle

 [ Editor's rambling:
 [
 [ Gee, John, you could get the Boesendorfer 290SE model, equipped
 [ with the SE ("Stahnke Electronic") solenoid player.  In the fine
 [ tradition of selling player pianos, it will only cost twice the
 [ price of the ordinary 97-key 290-centimeter 9-1/2-foot-long Imperial
 [ Concert Grand !
 [
 [ But it might be cheaper than we thought.  At the end of the article
 [ was exchange rate information -- "1 DM is circa 0,67 US$ or 0,51 GBP,
 [ etc." -- which I edited in error.  I thought that the unknown
 [ character on my display (the little empty box) was the pound sign
 [ (=L=) for GBP.
 [
 [ Not so, said author Gerhard Dangel-Reese.  He advised me, "Aha, the
 [ new symbol *.  This is not the GBP, it is the new euro.  We all have
 [ to get used to it."  (Like "dollar", the word "euro" is not capital-
 [ ized.  The asterisk * is my substitution for the little empty
 [ square.)
 [
 [ Well, I was annoyed and embarrassed, and I blamed my old Macintosh
 [ for the error ("kick the computer").  When I carefully displayed the
 [ same data on the PC/Win95, the screen also showed the empty square.
 [ But amazingly, the same text pasted into the Netscape HTML editor
 [ yielded the glyph € !!   What's gives?
 [
 [ Gerhard explained that new fonts with the euro character are now
 [ available from Microsoft via download sites, and even old Windows 3.0
 [ is supportable if the operating system is patched.  Bob Fitterman
 [ noted that in lieu of the Macintosh I could use a typewriter(!):
 [ make the euro symbol with a capital 'C' and then over-strike with
 [ the equals sign (=).  The euro symbol is derived from the Greek
 [ letter epsilon, says the official site at http://europa.eu.int/euro/ 
 [
 [ The German mark is fixed at 1 DEM (Deutschmark) = 0.5113 EUR (euro),
 [ and today the euro exchanged at 1.1243 USD (US$).  Therefore 1 DEM
 [ is 0.5748 USD, and the price of the Boesendorfer 290 today is only
 [ 88,060 USD before tax is added.  So why not buy three !!
 [
 [-- Robbie