Because Gandalf has spent the last 30 years wandering Middle Earth stoned out of his gourd

Wherein let me check the Silmarillion for the appropriate synonym for bogart

No yen or Kongbucks!

Wherein a few examples of the new economy from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

Hyperinflation

Y.T. bargaining with the metacops

"Tell you what," the second one says. "You pay us a trillion bucks and
we'll take you to a Hoosegow. Then you can bargain with them."

"Half a trillion," Y.T. says.

"Seven hundred and fifty billion," the MetaCop says. "Final. Shit, you're wearing cuffs, you can't be bargaining with us."

Y.T. unzips a pocket on the thigh of her coverall, pulls out the card with her clean hand, runs it through a slot on the back of the front seat, puts it back in her pocket.

U.S. government office regulations

5) Cash pool donations, as with all monetary transactions within the
U.S. Government, must use official U.S. currency - no yen or Kongbucks!

Naturally, this will lead to a bulk problem if people try to use the donation bucket as a dumping ground for bundles of old billion- and trillion-dollar bills. The Buildings and Grounds people are worried about waste-disposal problems and the potential fire hazard that may ensue iflarge piles of billions and trillions begin to mount up. Therefore, a key feature of the new regulation is that the donation bucket must be emptied every day - more often if an excessive build-up situation is seen to develop.

In this vein, the B & G people would also like me to point out that many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue.

While creative, this approach has two drawbacks:
1) It clogs the plumbing, and
2) It constitutes defacement of U.S. currency, which is a federal crime.

DON'T DO IT.

That's a lot of Meeses

"There's money in the storage compartment in front of you," Ng says.
Y.T. opens the glove compartment, as anyone else would call it, and finds a thick bundle of worn-out, dirty, trillion-dollar bills. Ed Meeses.

"Jeez, couldn't you get any Gippers? This is kind of bulky."

"This is more the kind of thing that a Kourier would pay with."

"Because we're all pond scum, right?"

"No comment."

"What is this, a quadrillion dollars?"

"One-and-a-half quadrillion. Inflation, you know."

Solyndra Green is Obama

Wherein literally minutes were spent on this flexing all my mad grafx skilz

First sentences by Neal Stephenson

Wherein it is acknowledged that ranking and or judging books by a single sentence is a wholly stupid enterprise and thus these are arranged chronologically

But the Cobweb sentence would be my favorite.

The Big U, 1984

The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk.

Zodiac, 1988

Roscommon came and laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway.

Snow Crash, 1992

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.

Interface, 1994

William Anthony Cozzano's office was a scandal.

The Diamond Age, 1995

The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.

Cobweb, 1996

Clyde Banks was standing in line, in the early stages of hypothermia, when he first saw his future wife, Desiree Dhont, wrestle.

Prologue from Cryptonomicon, 1999

Two tires fly. Two wail.

A bamboo grove, all chopped down

From it, warring songs.

...is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice--he's standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers is out of the question.

1st chapter from Cryptonomicon, 1999

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored.

In the beginning...was the command line, 1999

About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information-processing machines for use in the home.

Quicksilver, 2003

Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head.

The Confusion, 2004

He was not merely awakened, but detonated out of an uncommonly long and repetitive dream.

The System of the World, 2004

"Men half your age and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold," said the Earl of LostWithiel, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Rider of the Forest and Chase of Dartmoor, to one of his two fellow-travelers.

Anathem, 2008

Do your neighbors burn one another alive?

Reamde, 2011

...to be added September 20, when Amazon delivers it. I read that if you do THE FACEBOOK, excerpts from the first chapter are available at The Neal Stephenson's THE FACEBOOK page. But by not doing THE FACEBOOK this isn't available to me. On THE TWITTER I requested help in accessing the first sentence and received no help. Based on this small, but completely accurate, sample size, I conclude that participating in social media is both annoying and pointless.