Snake America Eighty Eight
Snake is a weekly email covering the good stuff on eBay. Leg Day Observer is your home for Leg Sports (weightlifting, powerlifting, yoga, etc.). This week: ended items, bulking. Subscribe.
Vintage Casio transmitter watch, sold, $900: The vintage digital watch market is rudderless and badly oriented. There are a few different kinds. There is the old trash that will fall apart when you go swimming or walking. There are old Timex Ironmans -- black and orange -- which are fine, but are like 1950s baseball cards in that few reach the current age unused. And there are most old digital watches, which are Casio G-Shocks. G-Shocks are good watches, from a lapidary standpoint: they run OK, can withstand falling off dressers, etc. Because they're so good they have been eternally re-issued by Casio, sometimes with other companies, as collectable releases. This is unfortunate. When companies move from throwing stuff at the wall to playing catch with idiots they decline. Lots of G-Shocks are good-looking watches, but they aren't the happy accidents like the abovementioned. This is really a happy accident of randomness. The suits at Casio came up with 500 bad ideas between 1980 and 1984, and this. You can transmit here. To who? I think this is for when you go to the opera and it's really boring, so you transmit a distress signal to your HAM radio friends to put some pants on and get you out of there. "Breaker breaker this is boring as hell, over." "We got you Rawhide, come on." Then at the opera will call ... "It's the fire brigade," they say. "We have to shut your boring ass down." Did Bruce Willis win this? Did John Cena? Who else could it be? Recommended.
Champion Beams hooded sweat, sold,$190: I said above that when companies make things for fans, and when they collaborate with other companies, things fall off. I'm not sure that applies here. This thing is awesome. It's a decent-quality Champion sweat produced in the past five years. The Japanese stuff is better than the new stuff but not as good as the old stuff. Champions and Beams made a dozen things together and this is the only one that lives distinctly apart from Champion's bread and butter line. There are zippers on the sides as well. It's sold out. The idea of spending $200 for a K-Mart-quality Champion with zippers ... is cool. Look, I don't wear black and I want this. I read somewhere something by maybe Bill Cunningham or maybe Walter van Beirendonck Yohji Yamamoto that said if you wear all black you have no style because you took the easy, quitter way out. (He said it was lazy ... ) This applies to everything that isn't Champion clothing. Anyways, this thing is great and I wish I bought it when it came out instead of hedging against the erotic side zippers.
New York Athletic Club Champion football jersey, sold, $200: This is an all-time masterpiece of design. NY Athletic Club is a gym right by the park ... if you were in the Olympics and weren't an sponsored athlete you could wear their athletic wear at the Games. The brand was so well-considered that athletes would threaten Nike or whoever with wearing NYAC gear. (It was also racist.) The NYAC dropped off in the 1990s, as reported by Robert Lipsyte for The Times. NYAC puts a lot of resources into running, which is unfortunate, but also into water polo, which is not. There is a lot of NYAC Champion stuff -- they grey T-shirts, button-up crewneck sweatshirts, hooded sweatshirts (with one-color tags, so from the 1970s), shorts, etc. The abovementioned is a satiny, rubbery jersey Champion made in the 1970s and '80s. Some of these jerseys had puffy shoulders, to fit on top of shoulder-pads. I got one with the big shoulders and I can't wear it anywhere. I bet this jersey is why women's clothing went shoulder pad. Like how all those stolen turntables from the New York blackout were responsible for rap music. Van Bierendonck, wearing a Champion football jersey, was on deadline for pantsuits with Fiorucci and made the thing. Not sure the timeline is right ... but NYAC gear is much more New York than any item of black clothing. Not that that's a good thing. Recommended.
BBC Technics double record player, sold, $7000: This thing is cool since it looks like the Braun Atelier stuff from the 1980s but the important item for turntables is the cartridge. Just like how you can swap out any part of a bicycle(1), you can do that on a turntable. Except one piece matters way more than the others. You can put a great cartridge on a whatever turntable and it'll be much better. But a great turntable with a whatever needle is whatever.
It'd be funny if the guy (it's a guy..) who won it replaced the probably-decent needles on this turntable to crappy ones and just played shit-fi and grindcore records on it. The listing says the abovementioned has an Ortofon OM Moving Magnet cartridge ... a new, equivalent version sells for $70. You can buy a clearaudio needle for like $15,000. Is that the best the BBC could do? A working class needle. What if the needles on this were worth more than the turntable? One of the greatest moments of my life was when this guy who I bought a George Nelson dresser from was moving it into my apartment, and he handed me a plastic bag with the drawer pulls in it, and told me to be careful, since "these pulls are worth more than the dresser." I try and relay that message to anyone who looks at the dresser. The bag with the pulls weighed like 10 pounds. What if someone bought this monstrosity for the needles? I'm sure this turntable is going to Dubai, so we may never know.
Weird ass Patagonia skirt-jacket, ended, $325: You read stuff in Vogue Magazine or whatever about Vetements and their non-New York Athletic Club-affiliated Champion sweatshirt and ... I have to admit the Vetements jacket (the red one) doesn't look bad, since it's pretty big. But this thing above is wild, man. You could saw the sleeves off. You could make it into a dress. You could wear it with sweatshorts and you'd be arrested for being a prevert. I have a rubber pullover raincoat from Nepenthes that is some New Zealand fishing company, and it traps the heat. I'm not sure what you wear this with but it looks pretty close to the jacket Hillary wore on Everest ... eBay is really something else. I don't know how no one bought this.
Worthless Nike golf ball, sold $25: Golf is boring and I think these are bootleg but I have to pass it along since this is mainly a Nike newsletter and I'm not about to steer away from my bread and butter.
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Leg Day Observer Issue 5:
GQ piece here about whether Bane workout masks really work. I see these guys at my gym wearing them when running cones. They are pretty big but they're also in high school and on the football team. I'm not sure how much the Bane masks have to do with that. What these masks do is simulate the effects of training at high altitude -- say, Denver -- without having to make the athlete suffer the unfortunate side effects of such training, e.g., living in Denver. These masks, which Under Armour makes, as does this company called Training Mask, reportedly restrict blood flow, etc. Victor Conte, the Tower of Power bassist who later became responsible for 250 of Barry Bonds' home runs, was one of the first guys to use them.
The GQ piece breaks down a couple of studies which had the participants wear the mask during a few hours of exercise a week, and they saw some results ... one test showed no real improvement between the before and after, though the science-tists claimed that maybe if they do it more, something happens. Another test showed that the difference was not statistically significant. The GQ author says that even if they do help you, you shouldn't wear them because they don't look cool. I have to say I disagree. On the subject of performance ... the masks are an incredible scam. They don't do anything....
But what about singlet gains? Lore and reporting has it that when you train for powerlifting or weightlifting in your competition singlet (like a wrestler's uniform) you will set personal records -- PRs. This has no scientific basis. Most people -- athletes, citizens, etc. -- train in workout clothes and not a federation-approved 88% poly 12% spandex singlet. Most people work out seven times a week, maybe just six. Maybe 11. And most of the time it's in compression tights or spandex shorts and a T-shirt, not a one-piece singlet. My friend Joe, who competes at powerlifting, tells me that when he wears his singlet he can hit about a 20 to 30-lb. PR. My weightlifting coach Mike, who competes and is good, says he feels "sharper" when wearing the singlet, and that "the better you look, the better you perform," adding that "it's science." (I call it the Klokov theorem?) Searching the "singletgains" hashtag on Instagram doesn't offer any additional proof but the folks there look like they're enjoying themselves.
Looking good is one thing, but lifters train in singlets to simulate a meet. In a powerlifting meet you attempt nine lifts over at least 16 hours. In a weightlifting meet, you have six lifts (maybe less) over a couple hours. Says my friend Joe, "there is no real physiological gain from the singlet, but there is a kind of like hype-up feeling from wearing it, from simulating a meet environment and being hyper-focused." Joe is five weeks out of competition and wears his singlet twice a week(2). I'm not sure wearing your singlet for the first time at competition is a good look. Meets are unfamiliar environments (different barbell, different gym, having to diet) and throwing another variable in there seems difficult.
Of course, you can't wear those Bane things during games. If you have better workouts because you think you're upping your VO2 max by wearing that mask, cool. I'm not really into doing cone work. But singlet gains are real. When you wear a singlet, you don't want to let it down. I can think of no higher purpose for an item of clothing to serve. It's why we spend money. It's why we still live in America when we don't have to.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1) I think for the bike, it's the chain.
(2) to the gym