Snake America Sixty Eight
Snake is a bi-weekly email news-magazine covering after-market salable goods, usually on eBay. This week: Reading this not in email? Subscribe.
eBay: Barclays bank checque from 1968 from Prince Buster to Bunny Lee BIN $300: The first thing to note is that this check is for 4 pounds and 13 pennies, and has been cashed. But if it wasn't cashed, would it be worth more now? Probably not, since the bank would only give you the four pounds and 13 pennies. Pennies are worth one 240th of a dollar. Shillings are worth one twentieth, like a nickel. What a stupid currency. Sensing that, Jamaica switched over to the dollar from the pound in 1969. The government voted in January 1968 to make the switch ... was that why Buster gave Bunny the money? If Bunny cashed the check and didn't touch it ... we can calculate how much it'd be worth by doing some abhorrent math.
This is going off indexmundi.com, with inflation in 1968 at 5.9% and rising as high as 77% in 1991. Calculating the rates out, we see it would have hit the seller's asking price (in 2015 dollars) sometime through 1992. Inflation in 1991 was 77%(1). The math is below. If you kept going through today it'd be $4,059.84662542(2). This is assuming direct concurrence of pounds into dollars. Looking at the math, which really can't be right, it's easy to see why foreign nationals living earning American salaries get so entrenched and rich. (They do, right?) Our stable dollar's buying power goes up when whatever hot country you're living in has a bad year. How did Jamaica get a 77% inflation rate in 1991? The World Bank says:
Real costs of goods (toilet paper, chickens, brillo pads, motorcycles, etc.) were passed on to consumers in a year where a new tax appears to have been rolled out pushing one-sixth of the population under the poverty line. I guess that went away in 1995. Who's the Jamaica Commodity Trading Company? The World Bank says it's them. A cursory Google search yields fewer usable results than you'd think a price-setter would generate. One usable context-free hit is Caribbean Yellow Pages, which lists its phone number and address, which is 25 Dominica Drive (5), , Jamaica - (876) 926-2768. I think (5) is Kingston. Is one guy setting the market? My friend Rob, who passed the link along, said they're an IMF front. (Jamaica's loans to the IMF are a deathcrush...) A 1989 Jamaican government report printed on what appears to be tea-soaked paper has some depth. Maybe that address is a big government building. How much of this money got into Bunny Lee's pocket? Couldn't he just give him a wad of bills and a shilling? What could you buy with an old Jamaican shilling? Old Israeli shekels made good necklaces when I was a kid, second only to stolen Mercedes Benz ornaments. These checks are from Buster's original place in Kingston, which his son is fixing up. "All the Jamaican record hustlers," per Rob, tried to holler for anything tucked away since they realized people love weird musical ephemera. I don't follow that market much but have to agree. Prince Buster did this song, "Islam," after he met Muhammad Ali in Miami and joined the Nation of Islam. His record label was also called Islam. One of the toughest songs of all time. He didn't need the money.
eBay: button-up Champion crewneck sweatshirt: I like that Champion mass-produced grandma sweatshirts but these are of a weird era. The fits are give and take. There's no way to tell the fit of any Bush-41-admin Champion from photos and only a couple stores in America have this type of stuff still. So all are a gamble. One store on Nostrand had a few dozen, mostly purple, some with tags, but shut down between 2012 and 2014. The store owner had another store, next to it, and I went and asked him where the old went, and he said not to worry about it. What kind of damage could me having that information cause? Nothing... Will the sleeves here be billowy? Are these for obese customers only? This is why Champion is the best company to ever make clothing. Champion produced kangaroo-pouch crewnecks and mock-necks around the same time, which fit better(3), but look worse. Was Champion too big to be talked out of these things or big enough to be creative? The bread-and-butter sweatshirts they didn't stop producing stand out more than evolved curiosities like this one. I guess you can wear this to the opera. Or a soup kitchen, either as a volunteer or a soup-lacking recipient. Not recommended.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: WW2 Deck Shoes, Hudson Bay paddle (For sale, sold)
Snake Before That: Denim pullover from WW2, Bloomsday shirts lot (For sale, sold)
(1) Here's the math: 4.0541666667(1.0593* 1.0630 * 1.1473 * 1.0534 *1.0543 * 1.1768 * 1.2716 * 1.1738 * 1.0979 * 1.1119 * 1.3490 * 1.2908 * 1.2731 * 1.1274 * 1.0655 * 1.1158 * 1.2781 * 1.2567 * 1.1511 * 1.0665 * 1.0827 * 1.1433 * 1.2196 * 1.5107 * 1.7730) - hitting 295.500690134 Jamaican pounds in 1991. This is of course assuming that pounds could be exchanged straight up for dollars.
(2) 4.0541666667(1.0593* 1.0630 * 1.1473 * 1.0534 *1.0543 * 1.1768 * 1.2716 * 1.1738 * 1.0979 * 1.1119 * 1.3490 * 1.2908 * 1.2731 * 1.1274 * 1.0655 * 1.1158 * 1.2781 * 1.2567 * 1.1511 * 1.0665 * 1.0827 * 1.1433 * 1.2196 * 1.5107 * 1.7730 * 1.2207 * 1.3506 * 1.1991 * 1.2641 * 1.0966 * 1.0863 * 1.0595 * 1.0817 * 1.0699 * 1.0708 * 1.1032 * 1.1363 * 1.1530 * 1.0859 * 1.0929 * 1.2202 * 1.0957 * 1.1261 * 1.0753 * 1.0690 * 1.0934 * 1.0829)
(3) Fit is subjective ...