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Whenever I empty my pockets of change, I always try to remember to put a couple of extra Sacajawea dollar coins back in my pocket.

I think they're cool. Gold-colored money! A woman on a coin! A dollar coin!

But nobody seems to use 'em. I never get change using them from business establishments. In fact, I only see them in three places:

• In change from stamp machines at the Post Office.
• In change from ticket machines for CalTrain.
• In rolls from my credit union, when I purchase them.

So I've taken to carrying them around. I leave them in tip jars. I give them to homeless people. (One of whom once yelled after me, "Hey, what the hell is this?") I sometimes even make purchases with them, though not often.

I think part of the problem is that they don't have a good shorthand name. They're not big or heavy enough to be called cartwheels, for example.

A friend calls them "Libbies," because the coin says "Liberty" across the top, and my friend thought that was the woman's name. (Having missed the hoopla about Sacajawea.) Not bad, but it does ignore the fact that it's supposed to be Sacajawea on the coin.

Some years back (long before the coins came out), I was in a radio-drama writing workshop. I spent a while under the mistaken impression that the best kind of dramatic presentation for radio was a portrayal of a real-life situation in which hearing is the only relevant sense. Hence the science fiction story in which characters talk to each other by radio, and the talking-heads-on-the-train story. You'd think I would have known better, having spent a couple of years writing radio comedy at Swarthmore, where I never tried to do anything like that. But somehow it never quite occurred to me that on radio, it's even more important than in visual media to give the audience visual images; it's just that you produce those images using sound.

So one of my bright aural ideas was a science fiction story about a future approach to browsing the Net: in my story, a brilliant young programmer creates, for her final project in an A.I. class, a semi-intelligent program that acts as a filter and reader of the Internet for a blind person. The idea was that the software would translate the flow of words on the Net (I'm thinking future-of-Usenet here) into audio data streams; the blind person could specify parameters that would cause one or more streams to slow from high-speed garble into recognizable speech.

The A.I. would be some kind of intelligent agent, dealing with the data and performing various tasks. (You can probably tell that I didn't think through the technical details very well; the high-speed-audio-streams thing in particular doesn't hold up too well to close scrutiny.) And the programmer wanted her creation to have a personality, so she named the program Sacajawea; the program was supposed to be the blind character's guide through the online world. In fact, the title of the story was "Spirit Guide."

I still think there are some cool ideas mixed in with the chaff there, but it's unlikely I'll ever come back to that piece; like I said, the underlying assumptions were flawed for radio, and I've got too many other writing projects that I'm more interested in at this ponit (and I'm not writing those, either).

But the real point of all this was that I knew "Sacajawea" was too awkward a name to use repeatedly in a half-hour radio show, so I picked a nickname for her.

Back in the '80s or so, there was an editor at Marvel Comics named Louise Simonson. (For all I know, she's still there.) And she was almost universally referred to in their lettercols and such as "Weezie." So I figured that was a standard nickname for Louise, and that it would make a perfectly good nickname for Sacajawea.

Unfortunately, it turns out not to be a nickname most people are familiar with for Louise, and it doesn't sound so good as a name when spoken aloud. Too much like "Wheezy," who should presumably be another of my Seven Dissolute Dwarfs.

So the upshot of all of this is that I still don't know what to call the dollar coins, but every once in a while I look at one and I think, Hi, Weezie.