Snake America: Twenty
Snake, a bi-weekly email covering joints on eBay, Craigslist, etc. In today's: A commemorative boxing T-shirt, and a Fire King mug with a rabbit on it, which sold for $200. Subscribe here.
SHIRT: Riddick Bowe-Evander Holyfield fight T-shirt from the 1990s: Now this is a shirt. And since most boxing tees from the 1990s are black, and giant, and since this looks like the boxers are video game characters, this is really a shirt. Holyfield's stage-three Norwood Hamilton hairline and Konami rendering makes for a lasting graphic, up there with any Tyson tee. Bowe looks great. ... many of the T-shirts produced for boxing matches in Las Vegas in the 1990s had the fight's casino on the tag: my Tyson-Seldon, for example, has an MGM Grand tag. Did the Casino make them? No. But they paid extra money for a custom tag and passed on that luxury on to the consumer. This tee doesn't have a Caesar's Palace tag. Here's the gamer and the whole fight. Lots of fights that didn't happen, most notably Tyson-Holyfield 1, in 1991, survive in shirt- or hat-form. I guess old fights that didn't happen are funny but they're cooler than they are funny. I don't think these shirts are funny. I also think nothing good came out of the 1990s, aside from music--which doesn't count, since 1.) that goes without saying 2.) records can transcend their era and exist more as art than artifact*--and video games. Definitely the hardest decade of sundries on which to spend your money. 1990s nostalgia is kind of rough--why would you want to look like someone who hung out at the bus stop selling weed? Why would you want your headphones to be your style statement? But I digress. These boxing shirts will be put in the time capsule next to Nintendo's World Championships and the Neo-Geo.
ENDED: Bunny Bread Breakfast Club Fire King Mug: I haven't tried an ended auction in the Snake E-Magazine before but there's a lot going on here with this cup. It is the brightest shade of yellow I have ever seen and I've been to Beitar games. It looks better on a nice computer than my old laptop--if you bought a new computer recently, you are in luck. It's a Fire King, a brand of dishes that people collect. (I bought a set on eBay last winter and they came wrapped in a diaper.) I thought, looking at this for the first time, that Bunny Bread Breakfast Club might have been a lunch counter off the Pacific Coast Highway or in the southwest or upstate, wood-paneled, a story high, whose owners made an order for custom mugs produced on Fire Kings ... Bunny Bread Breakfast Cub of Wherever, Ariz., would have been a great place to get an open-faced turkey sandwich and read about, say, spring training or Barry Goldwater's rise to political power. Not into nostalgia but this is a good-looking cup. The cup looks like it coincides nicely with the Phoenix native's first Senate spell, late '50s, early '60s. But I'm wrong and Bunny Bread was--is--an American bread company that competed with Wonder, Sunbeam, Holsum, etc. Sold in stores, pro-carb-backloading ...
(Carb-backloading** junior senator Barry Goldwater seen here)
Bunny Bread, the still-going bread brand is not as cool as a legendary non-existent lunch counter. Mostly because many bread brands commissioned cool things back then, like this bread bucket promoting the Sunbeam bread company. And why not?
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Snake
*Not all. But some.
**CBL put simply: weightlifters, after a 14-day strict ketogenic (no-carb) diet can trick their bodies into synthesizing carbs into protein and build muscle. So your body thinks a cherry turnover is a can of tuna, etc. But only if you eat it at night. This was big in 2012-13. ...