Snake America Sixty One
Snake is a bi-weekly email blast covering other-market goods. This week, Boeing sunglasses and a 1945 US Army machete. Subscribe here.
eBay: Boeing by Carrera sunglasses, $300 BIN: I am trying to figure out sunglasses for the summer, which is a hard thing to do. I went on eBaay to vintage accessories, sunglasses, then completed auctions, then searched for the most expensive pairs to have sold. The priciest non-lots were Cazals, which Run-DMC wore, and Cartiers. Less vintage than expensive. Mostly I found US Air Force sunglasses dating from the 1950s ... Into the $200 range, a few pages down, the sold items all resemble Wayfarers and aviator sunglasses and many are made by Ray Ban. The editorial mission here is to find something of a ... consensus product. What's the best jean for looking like you are very lazy? The best lamp that gives off none to very little light? Or something funny made out of wood for under $800? If those things haven't yet been covered here they will be. Sunglasses are not that. There are as many styles as there are stamps. Consulting with a sunglasses expert, my friend Mikey, the consensus is they look like aviators or Ray Bans unless they're Randolphs or Moscots. Sunglasses are pretty tough to buy without trying on, though so is everything else ... I think the only rule is that the lighter the shade of the glass in the sunglasses the better. Ideally there is no tint. If the sunglasses look like they're upside down, that's also good. Boeing was the main company in Seattle, like the auto industry in Detroit or Coca Cola in Atlanta. Tim Lincecum's dad was a Boeing employee, 42 years. These look like aviators, but Boeing was a whole city and now isn't ... It's hard to believe Officer Rick Ross has been wearing Carreras for almost five years. Where does the time go? The 5701 and 5706, models the former prison guard dons in his video, resemble one another but for the thing between the eye-glass-holes. Nose bridge? The 5701's nose bridge is reinforced with gold. The 5706s have a horizontal bridge above the glass. Which model is better? These Boeings look identical to each other, except to people who have serious free-time investment in sunglasses. Are Boeing's customers paying for the bridge, the name, a different lens construction, or something else? Is the best part about sunglasses that they all look the same? What's missing between these and the ones you can buy on the street for the price of two McDouble hamburgers? Is the best value renting cheapo sunglasses from the void and replacing them? But I can't tell people not to build ice sculptures.
eBay: WWII machete, $70: Nice Second World War-machete for sale here by an account occupying the paintball-vintage military juncture and who has sold numerous Hawaiian shirts for single-digit sums. The machete, which is a big knife, is US issue, 1945, of which no branch of the military is specified in the auction, though it's probably an Army. The sheath is not original to the blade. I was curious about how many of these machetes were produced that year and if making these machetes was a last-second decision of the Army owing to an increase in temperate battle fields in the late stage of WWII. Not real up on the military history of that war. "We're going to Thailand and we need machetes," a purchasing officer in the Pentagon might have said in a budget meeting that took place in December 1944. The turnaround time on however many machetes the US Army, in 1944, needs has to be at least a few months. (A 2014 article on Philstar.com, which is a misleading website URL, reports that its (Philippines') army's first shipment of new guns is around 27,000. That country keeps about 125,000 active-duty members. The US maintains 1.5 million today, according to one search result. America capped active enrollment at 900,000 in 18-month periods during WWII but I couldn't find reliable numbers of how many guys fought in the Pacific. I searched the name Billy, a popular name for soldiers, on this 1938-46 enlistment records site on the National Archives and got 10,000 results. The Social Security administration's Top Names website shows half a million Williams in the 1920s, 300,000 the decade before and 70,000 before that. Did they need a million machetes? Or just 50,000? Who knows.) Did the Pentagon know the war was ending and rushed its machetes through after thaat budget meeting? Or did it just expect to get into further action in the Pacific Theater and produced them as usual? Or was it just printing up a bunch of machetes to have around in case they needed them? Maybe they were locked into a pesky machete services contract. Hard to say. One wonders whether anyone had used a machete in a cold-weather climates, or anywhere not tropical. A search reveals machetes in Russia, but that can't count. The Army machete was in action on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when Allied forces stormed France's beaches, as confirmed by this photo of some soldiers holding a Nazi flag as capture and one guy in the picture with a machete(1). The pic was a couple of days after. The weather on D-Day wasn't very good--"thick clouds resulted in Allied bombs and paratroopers landing miles off target. Rough seas caused landing craft to capsize and mortar shells to land off the mark. By noon, however, the weather had cleared..."--following a storm on June 4 and right before the "worst weather in the English Channel in two decades," in late June. The machetes were on the beaches, but they're the hardest part of that Tuesday to picture.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Nike crop top, Versace pillow (relisted; sold)
Snake Before That: Heaven's Gate Nikes, $200 sweatpants (relisted; sold)
(1) Not putting the pic in here.