Snake America: Issue 17
ERRATA: Crying Of Lot 49 (USA, 1966) was published in 1966, not 1996 as stated in the last letter. Snake regrets the error, and offers this link in which the joints* on Pico in LA are addressed in the same manner by the author's Inherent Vice (USA, 1996 2009) narrator and Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer-winning food critic who is the subject of a New Yorker profile and who reviewed "The Spaghetti Incident" (USA, 1993) aptly for Rolling Stone.
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Military Mess Kit Cutlery: Gold -- There's no consensus silverware. The above isn't silverware but what's the other option? The 501, the Shaggy Dog sweater, the Rietveld toilet ... what's the set-it-and-forget-it complement of forks and knives? I don't know. No one does. I thought these would be a funny idea for my kitchen but they're too small to be useful. You can hang them from an on-the-wall corkboards or use them for eating beef stew, but that's it. I do like the idea of gold silverware, though. They remind me of the copper Air Max 97s, only seen on PickYourShoes.com for a week: broken times two. Stay away from buying in bulk (many spoons, $100) ... While I'm no closer to what I'm looking for, it's worth noting the most expensive similar cutlery on The Machine is a German food storage locker for $300. He has three. The paper on the bundles forks and spoons is still white, so this probably wasn't Nazi cutlery. You can find the above-mentioned on a google search. No further discussion shall be tendered here.
Tamiya Toyota Celica Model Kit: Some things will always be undervalued. Rare, rare slot cars are among these things. Tamiya is maybe the Herman Miller of in-box model car kits from the 1970s ... they did everything. This is an invisible see-through Celica car from that era, which was used for rallies in real life. Toyota Celicas are kind of hurtbag now ... I was thinking that their glory position during the Jimmy Carter era and subsequent fall from grace and into profit is akin to ... People Magazine being lame now but a destination for big-ticket writers back then, and who would be able to tell today? But I looked at the auction again, and it's a 1987 and the Celica has always been a decent sports car. Still, take a look at the 1985:
The French call it jolie laide ... but it's a beautiful machine. According to blackholesun.fr, le box art from the auction above matches up with the 1987 model. (The auction's wording is unclear: is the model car toy or the car model 1987? I don't know Tamiya's production techniques and whether they work a year in advance, like the Madden video games, or whether Toyota gave them the design specs ahead of time.)
And yet ... it's hard to find a real Toyota Celica rally car from 1987 for sale. RallyCarsForSale.net's search function is, in a word ... insufficient. They should do better. A 1994 Celica is on British eBay for 4,000 British pounds -- or about 909 Pounds and 35 Shilling more than the seller's Dutch Auction price for the toy model***. Which is the better deal? The real-car's seller's name includes 1987 and is listing their auction privately. Do they know something we don't? Or is it the other way around?
Thanks for reading. Questions and errors can be replied to me. Tell your friends to sign up to this newsletter--it's better on email.
Snake
* Food joints, BKA restaurants, poi huts, burger shacks, noodle drops, etc.
** Also this is pretty good.
* SOURCE = xe.com