Snake America Ninety Four
Snake is a weekly email newsletter covering eBay collectibles. Leg Day Observer handles fitness. This week: bad bids. Subscribe
eBay: Jerry Only 4001 Rickenbacker Misfits bass, $1450: I don't write about the auctions I'm bidding on for a handful of reasons. Privacy is important and I don't want to affect prices. I like what I buy and I like being the only bidder. Does being the only bidder mean I'm getting ripped off? Possibly. But the $14 Gatorade High School Athlete hat, the $1 Mr. Peanut instructional video, the DJ Screw towel, the Japanese 'Thief' (music by Tangerine Dream) poster with the tiny tear in it that is otherwise fine, the explicit Toronto Raptors bumper stickers, etc. seem like deals. They wouldn't hold the same appeal as items of public record or with multiple bidders. Schrodinger's Law for eBay says you can only judge an auction if no one bids on it.
Getting good prices on garbage keeps me going, and if more than one person is interested I have to assume the cost of, say, motocross shirts from Iowa, or Adidas shorts with the Coca Cola logo on one thigh, or explicit Toronto Raptors lawn chairs, will rise and put the things in line with first-wave US hardcore records, original Bush administration Air Jordans, other Bush administration taxi medallions and Austin real estate.
I bid on this awful bass guitar that Jerry Only(1) used and at press time I'm still in the lead. Jerry used it in the Misfits, who had a really bad sound -- sonically. Their songs were pretty good. The bass itself is broken beyond repair and comes with a handful of loose hardware and custom skulls. It doesn't even look cool. I don't want any of those things, but I bid on it the second I got the link. If I win Jerry Only's bass guitar, I'm leaving town forever and changing my name. No way I am paying for this piece of garbage. Why did I bid?
When I look through my bid history it's like I'm using a pea shooter. My greatest fear is being on the hook for something expensive that's only pretty good, but I bid on everything that's important that comes my way. I have bought lots of cool stuff -- almost nearly too much -- but nothing bank-breaking or physically bigger than my pretty big coffee table. Most of my bids are for losses. But there's a reason why.
eBay, for a while, used to let you look up other users' bid histories. I would do it all the time and it was awesome. You could plug in any name to eBay's search and see what they were buying or trying to buy. Getting the name was some work ... but usually it wasn't. These were public sellers and buyers and if you bought and sold enough good shit you'd come across the heavyweights. The bids made by Larry McKaughan, the best vintage seller in America ... they should've been put in a museum. He was buying the coolest shit. I think he bought something off a friend of mine? I don't know. His history was like, deadstock 501s the second they were listed, crop-duster jackets, Barbour jackets from the 1700s that had no name or model numbers, wabash stuff disco underwear. Another guy from LA, Snappy Gabs, was running the same shit. You understood the difference between people who did this for a living and people with accounts.
For the first few years eBay was a Wild West of information. In addition to searching buyers, you could go into an auction and check out every bid. If someone beat you, you could see who did it and you could see what else they won. Or even if they didn't beat you. Information made it nice and lawless, a markerplace the opposite of sticking with a barber who gets sloppy after a couple haircuts. Why buy anything from the same place twice?
Some people really knew how to spend money. For a while this one Californian won almost every valuable US hardcore record. My friends looked to see who was beating them and it was often him. scott666. I've yet to run into someone who's met him in real life but the lore is he was an accountant in California. He "had a really good job," which by my young standards could have been anything. Maybe Sacramento. His trade list, which has some good records, is public and not that out of date. I couldn't find scott666's Linkedin account, though. One guy with his name lives in New York, but sells insurance. Another is in IT in San Francisco, one's in Oklahoma. One day scott666 either stopped buying records or switched accounts.
One friend only bid on expensive records using his girlfriend's account, since we knew his username and he didn't want to give us the satisfaction of knowing what he paid. But he made a big mistake ... he was selling some doubles through her account and publicized the auctions somewhere, and when we looked at the account's bids we saw he was paying too much for the garbage he was buying. What an idiot. With good bidders', you'd find what they bought and search through those items' sellers and go deeper and deeper, like the thanks list on a record. I concede this wasn't something worth doing more than a couple times a year ... but just as one band named one and then another, a bidder would buy good stuff -- old Doubleworks jeans, military shirts, Voltron toys and a lot of weird Killed by Death records -- and I had to find out about them.
There was this dude trash-s on eBay who bought every record Scott didn't buy. He was even worse. He was buying everything, he had better taste than scott and wasn't American. This was the early 2000s, so trash-s was fueled by a strong Euro. Europeans buy a lot of cool stuff and make good decisions -- they've been living downtown for millennia(2). The story about trash-s is he's German and lived in a castle. It was hard to find out more. My friend Ritter said he bought a car for $100,000. I looked through his bids now and then and was disgusted. Imagine having the freedom to live like that.
Bids could show someone's taste progress. A friend I met on a weekend tour in 2001 (?) was introduced to me as someone who spent money on eBay in the 90th percentile, and he was beating everyone we knew on old US hardcore shirts. We knew his eBay name before we knew him! His interest then was straight edge music and its ephemera. So the bids were T-shirts, maybe some Nikes, and there was one 3/4 sleeve Metallica shirt in there. A year later when I checked again it was all metal stuff and a pair of Beatle boots. Pretty good!
The most popular and best and sketchiest Air Jordan seller on eBay in the early 2000s was this guy Airfob. The story was Airfob sold bootleg Jordans. Someone on Niketalk said his VIs had the wrong infrared and a messed up Jumpman. He sold one of my friends Jordan Vs covered in paint, but they were real. Fob's eBay photo was the Jumpman logo wearing a conical hat and he only bought fishing lures. New and old, used and deadstock, mass-produced and one-offs, domestic and imported, cheap and expensive. Hundreds of dollars a month for a while. I had no idea. His account has since been deactivated. The buying and selling inventories were separate but one day he started selling lures with his Jordans, and eventually he sold lures exclusively. One of the greatest eBay accounts of all-time.
eBay got rid of search by bidder maybe six, seven years ago but left the feature up on a strange URL that wasn't front-facing. You could also still see who won the auctions on which you bid. Eventually they got rid of the secret URL. Some accounts bid on everything. I took that approach, bidding early on items I didn't want and late on the ones I did. Watch lists maxed out at 100 items and bidding helped double-clock your view. Infinite penny-ante bids on expensive collectibles and a respectable watch list could account for maybe 1% of the good stuff on eBay at any given time. Which is a lot of crap. So I reflexively bid on this garbage Jerry Only bass for that reason.
eBay got rid of that too. No one knows who wins or loses auctions now, which means I won't be able to confirm that John Varvatos will walk away with this bass guitar. Buying is anonymous, and the market mechanism for rare jeans, Raptors towels, etc. is like the black box Michael Lewis described in Flash Boys in which shit goes on that no one knows about. Are these shill bids? Are they all from Europe? Is Papaman in the mix? I always assumed Bruce Willis was buying everything expensive on eBay and now that proof is gone I'm probably right.
I still bid on everything dumb and I still think paying a lot of money for cool things is like playing tennis without a net. Sometimes you have to spend money, and sometimes it has to be a lot of money. Why else work for a living? But I would rather go to prison than win this garbage bass guitar. I hate that I don't know what my friends are buying on eBay, though I don't mind that they don't know what I'm up. This is the stuff I'm forced to bid on. Will I win it? Will I leave town? Who can say.
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Leg Day Observer
Ricky Lundell's Instagram:
Pretty good quote here -- though not sure where the extra pound came from. 228 kilos is 502 pounds and 227 is 500.449. Anyways, Ricky Lundell is this dude who coaches UFC fighters -- Jon Jones among them -- and lives in Vegas. Man, imagine living in Vegas. Hot all year but not that muggy and at least five good places with cheap seafood. Plus you have a car. But I digress ... so Lundell works out at Average Broz gym, the best weightlifting gym in Nevada if not the Western United States? I interviewed John Broz, who owns the gym and is a national-level weightlifting coach, last year for a 538 article that can't run. Like my dad, he's from Cleveland and is a cool guy, but unlike my dad he collects old weightlifting stuff and wears track pants to the office. Broz is a big proponent of squat every day ... which is more correctly termed squat heavy every day ... which means squat to whatever your max is that day ... which Lundell has been doing for over a year. It's a Bulgarian protocol. Sometimes you do more volume -- lots of squats at a lighter weight -- but there's a heavy one-repetition lift in there. Lundell got a Gracie black belt at 19 and graduated college at 18 and wrestled at another college later? Not bad.
Broz must have gotten into his head so Lundell been trying to squat 500 pounds for a while, and has been maxing out squats for like 467 days now. According to him. I found his account when one of Broz's athletes squatted 500+ pounds in flip flops to roast Lundell. Lundell said 500 days to 500 pounds and sometimes he hits insane weight and sometimes he doesn't. His eye has exploded -- both eyes, subconjunctival hemorrhages -- red and bleeding, and he's cool with it. A video on April 19 has him standing under 600 pounds for 30 seconds -- it's great. He did that a few weeks before too. His son sometimes encourages him in his videos -- the kid has a deep voice and Ricky is like 31. Also cool. He says he competed at 150 and he's lifting at 176 (80 kilos). He does pause squats, struggle squats and smooth squats. He broke 500 pounds with a spot on the 4th and then did it clean the other day. Shit rocks. Then more even after. One of his videos explains that speed is very important for fighters and he's concentrating on speed and not weight with the squats. Speed is important for everything. I wish powerlifters did more speed training. You should be trying to move everything fast. Imagine how great it must be to live in Vegas and squat very fast all the time.
Peeping his account I thought of Will Shortz, the crossword editor for of The New York Times, who been playing ping pong every day for 1,000 days. Which has to be easier than squatting to max without breaks, but might not be, since Shortz likes to travel. Shortz might be the coolest person who ever lived. But why leave Vegas if you live there? They got a Sphinx casino and you can get crawfish year-round. Also one of the first Niketowns. But I digress ... Lundell has a month left to 500 days, and I bet $5 he takes a week off when he hits the round number and then gets right back on the horse.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1) Brother to Doyle Wolfgang Von Frankenstein, both of New Jersey.
(2) The situation reminded me of that Juan Epstein episode where they're in Hot97 interviewing Mannie Fresh, who brought along this Dutch guy for some reason, and the only time he joins in the conversation is to explain that he owns a certain 12" by Mannie.