An Ebay Winner - SEIKO 5 4227 00B0

 

 

This is a mint condition SEIKO 4227-00BO from January 1980. It's pricey but there are people who value a mint condition. I bought one some time ago but when it arrived it wasn't keeping time so I returned it. One thing that is brilliant about ebay is the returns policy. Even if the seller states no returns, ebay will usually step in and refund either partially or fully depending on the claim. It's built into the pricing but I've returned a dozen or so watches usually for losing or gaining 5 minutes or more  a day. That's my threshold because it's over half an hour a week but for a really desirable model I'd probably swallow it.

 

The version I bought was a real fluke (I've been very lucky in my time). First off nobody else bid on it which is highly unusual as there's an army of lowest cost SEIKO watch buyers who will bid on anything low priced from 99p upwards to a starting bid of say £20 eventually reaching about £50 sale price. But where I had an advantage was that I knew the model, knew it's value and could see that the seller took an out of focus primary image photograph. There was a better shot in the film roll but it was smaller and as I mentioned I wasn't sure what I was getting till it arrived. Anyway for 25 quid it wasn't going to disappoint massively - I've just noticed there's two bids on it so somebody tried to outbid my by raising the price a few pennies but I think I rounded up my only bid. An extra pound could have robbed me of the prize.

 

Even the more focused shot is ambiguous about the casing colour but as previously mentioned, when it arrived I was stoked. It's in terrific condition and even has a slight patina of wear on the bracelet edges for authenticity.

 

I also have the smallest model in this range, the SEIKO 5 - 4207-00N0 that I purchased from a Japanese seller. It was produced in November 1985 and is very dinky but I love wearing it. Because it is near mint condition I also don't feel guilty about wearing it more than the older models I have.

 The reason for these watch posts is I've a gut feel about something. I always liked the idea of an Automatic watch and I've explained why I focus on the SEIKO TV models from 68-73 but the manner of my immersion into the field was so not me. Firstly I'm absolutely not a materialists. I like and value luxury items but I don't need them. My first watch was a sort of long held hankering that turned into an ebay search and purchase, but it wasn't accurate so I returned it. I then bought my first SEIKO 5 6119-5000 from the year of my birth and was delighted with it. I started looking around and next purchased a RADO Manhattan (a model Gorbachev wore during his Reagan nuclear summits) but that too began to stop and start and even though it wasn't in the price the Tokyo seller apologised profusely and shipped it backed to Japan with a full refund (very honourable those Japanese). After that I stuck to the SEIKO 5 Automatics TV models and for a couple of years it took over me but the timing was right because as I began to question my materialist leanings, the 6119-5000s started to dry up so I think I may have the largest collection but it's very hard to verify.

There's no advantage to me posting about the watches as any price rises affect me too but I do believe everyone should have a 1968 to 80's automatic SEIKO 5  as they are diminishing in availability and represent a unique view into human nature and global mass production of the most complex of mechanism by one manufacturer worn on most humans at any one time and forever too.

I don't buy watches to make money. I buy them out of love for the design, mass manufacturing and a never again repeatable episode in most moving parts. 

The Jew of Linz - Kimberley Cornish

I first heard about this book in 1999 through Mark Piper who informed me that Wittgenstein went to the same school as Hitler for a period of time. Wittgenstein was always my favourite philosopher though not so much for his work but for his life which I came to learn about through the book Wittgenstein - The Duty of Genius that my drug dealer and friend of mine who studied Philosophy under Ray Monk (the author of the book) at Southampton University loaned me.

The Jew of Linz digs deep into the astonishing coincidence that Wittgenstein attended the same school as Hitler. The first question it answered for me was how could the son of one of Europe's most fabulously wealthy families attend a school of the middle-class Hitler? The answer is Ludwig's father sent him there and it's obvious to me that it was to toughen him up as he stammered and was homosexual, as were two other of his four brothers, three of whom committed suicide.

Kimberley Cornish's main assertion is that Wittgenstein and Hitler had an interaction that triggered Hitler's quote unquote antisemitism (most Palestinians are Semites, most Jews aren't) despite Hitler also having Jewish blood. Hitler made many references to this unidentified Jewish interaction throughout his life, and I think Cornish proves it. Furthermore, Cornish goes on to make an astonishingly robust claim that Wittgenstein was a Soviet spy recruiter involved with the Cambridge Five.

The book starts off great but then wanders off into a long investigation into the crossover between Hitlerian/Nazi metaphysics and Wittgenstein's Theory of Mind. This is the kind of meaningless philosophy that the controllers have misdirected great minds into and which can be most informed with the simple act of inhaling DMT and which holocaust huffers like Kimberley will never do, demonstrating they're pseudo philosophers who can't explain the dental clinics, maternity wards, theatre and orchestra groups at Auschwitz as well as ignorant of the unity consciousness experience provided by entheogens.

I'm fairly sure there's quite a bit more to the Hitler/Wittgenstein story we're unaware of, but Kimberley has made great strides into the topic. I'm reselling the book on ebay if you want it for a few pounds.

The Heart of Darkness - Pol Pot's Car For Sale

Update: International Herald Tribune

Update two: The Car is being sold here

One of the things I love most about Cambodia is that on each visit I see new growth. I don't mean the X.X% GDP growth that will choke us all in good time anyway if we don't rewire the economy, I mean the kind of growth that means the kids look a little cleaner, and a little less grubby. I guess it's the kind of growth that is really a reversal of growth in some ways, as a diminishing number of children are seen running around wearing shabby rags as clothing.

On my first visit, my driver called Elephant, took me around the killing fields and the notorious Tuol Sleng prison which was a school before it became a dark horror story of a torture concentration camp, a place where the Khmer kids were more barbourous than any of the adults could ever be, where they thought up the most ingenious ways to cause pain and suffering to the prisoners of the Khmer Rouge regime, which really only came to power because there was a hell of a shit fight going on in that part of the world through Vietnam and another war on something terrorful for safety. I'll never forget when I asked Elephant if he had lost any family members, how dispassionate he was retelling the story where his brother was killed by the Khmer Rouge after he stole a car to run away from the commune. He was caught, bound and immobilised before being run over in the same car he had taken. Stories like that are two a penny a Cambodia and few people want to think about the bad old days.

Anyway I could go on about how 300 kilometres or more north of the capital Phnom Penh lies the temple Angkor Wat, which in my mind is profoundly mysterious to the history of civilisation with it's Indian architecture dedicated to the God Vishnu, and how much fun I had hiring a motorcycle trials bike and generally just whizzing around on my own, playing with M16 guns and grenades on a range, and partying hard in the Heart of Darkness, but maybe that stuff isn't really interesting but it was a part of my life that I look back on fondly. Or maybe it was the butterflies that flew over the burial pits in the killing fields, on a beautiful day as I reflected on the whole thing that gave me a lot to think about.

One of the oddities of that period was the discovery by a friend of mine that Pol Pot's stretch Limo (Don't all agrarian economy Marxist tyrants run around in stretch Limos?) was being used to ship melons to the market in the capital. I felt at the time it was wrong to profit from that vehicle but like those kids who not only look cleaner on each visit but also have no recollection of that insane time, I think time has moved on. I'm particularly pleased that a portion of the profits now that it is on sale will go towards a charity. You know who you are if you are reading this but the bigger the chunk that goes towards the growth of Cambodia the better the Karma. What goes around comes around.