Snake America Ninety One
Snake is a weekly email blast covering cool stuff on eBay. Leg Day Observer is to yoga and powerlifting what Grant's is to negotiable debentures. This week: fanny packs, K-Swiss. Happy birthday to my friend Royce. Subscribe
Kelty fanny pack from the 1980s, $40: Old fanny packs are really incredible ... aesthetically anyways. On first glance they're all garbage -- all fanny packs, I mean. It's hard to tell a good one from a bad one. Le Sportsac, a French company, makes new ones every couple of months but you don't want those. People also sell them at the airport and at highway rest stops, between the Roy Rogers and the sunglasses. You don't want those, either -- the leather is lousy. Contemporary clothing companies take their chances making them every few years -- Stussy made some a decade back, they were tall like this one, but are not worth discussing. Gucci ones look good, though they have more pockets, like something a hot dog vendor wears to take change. Gucci is also making Donald Duck sweatshirts now and jeans with bees on them -- they're awesome -- so between that and the fanny packs I'd say it's a golden age.
It used to be that if you wore a fanny pack, you were one either a roidman or from Norway. The Gold's Gym by Fenway always had people wearing fanny packs, and they were the strongest fellas there. This was in the dark ages -- 2003, 2004 -- and no one was squatting heavy back then, but they were putting a lot of weight on the pec deck. The best way to wear a fanny pack, if you hung out at the gym, was wearing big balloon pants, flip flops, and a ratty tank-top. Generally the fanny packs were the cheapest money can buy, filled with steroids, and maybe a banana.
That kind of aesthetic still exists, but I haven't been to Los Angeles in a year and a half. But like I was saying, the second-best fanny packs money can buy are from American camping companies from the 1970s and '80s, like the one here.
K-Swiss sneakers, pre-Czech republic, $100: There was a time when up was down and K-Swiss sneakers were the worst shoes on the planet. It appears that time has passed. These things are pretty good. They look like they got rid of all the bad design elements of K-Swiss -- the awful leather, bumpy outsoles, and a width that could only be described as 'Transworld Skateboarding' -- and kept the one good design element, which is white canvas with no embellishments -- not exactly a monopoly on K-Swiss' part.
Two Swiss guys founded K-Swiss near Oxnard in the 1960s. I can't find what the K stands for; they mostly made tennis shoes. The ones in the auction here were made in Czechoslovakia sometime before 1993, when the country peacefully dissolved into two republics. I bet Vaclav Havel wouldn't wear these pieces of garbage. There was a Made in Czechoslovakia pencil in our family car's glove box when I was a kid, but it was a short pencil, the kind you get at the dog track or a city office -- as long as my fist now, or my whole arm then. The indication of origin was etched on the pencil's side and took up its whole length, and when we sharpened it the first time, half the country got erased.
Now that I think about it, the best thing the shoes have going for them is their stark resemblance to Adidas' Adicolor shoes from 1983, pictured above.
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Leg Day Observer 7:
Amazing video of this Korean lifter going for triple-bodyweight plus squats five times. He's not really sweating it. It's incredible. There's another video of a North Korean lifter doing about the same weight ratio except he's 4'11, which makes him luckier in life than this guy. From a competitive perspective, at least. The North Korean guy grunts every time he gets out of the hole in the squat and his teammates grunt along with him. It's a nice thing to do for your friends. I think about how they're probably working out right now. Tomorrow, when I go to the movies, they'll be working out. And 10 years ago they were working out all day too. The story is that the North Korean lifters get more red meat after they win gold medals, and some get refrigerators. Meanwhile the president over there, or whatever he is, is getting a top-tier fade every other day. Following the news is no longer conducive to a Buddhist lifestyle.
Thanks for reading. Happy birthday, Royce.
Snake