Did you ever wonder what that little extra pocket inside the right
pocket of your Levi’s is for? I never thought about it much. All I knew
growing up was that if I took the dollar bill and the quarter my
parents gave me each Monday to pay for a week’s worth of lunches (yes,
a week’s worth; try to guess how long ago that was) at Wheeless
Road Elementary School in Augusta, GA, I could fold the bill around the
quarter and stick it in that little pocket where it would be safe until
I gave it to the cafeteria lady.
Well, a Heidelberg newspaper, the Rhein Neckar Zeitung, has figured it out. The blog Davids Medienkritik
quotes an RNZ editorial blasting Americans and lamenting that the
descendants of Germans and other Euros who live in this country are
still enamored of guns, even though there are no Indians or Wild West
bandits to kill. Not only are we Americans dastardly gun lovers, but
we’re surreptitiously corrupting mild-mannered Europeans even today,
say the editors of RNZ:
Unknown to us, we Old Europeans carry with
us today a reminder of this time: the small extra pocket on jeans that
was measured so five cartridges of ammunition would fit inside.
Not content to just point this out, these German editors urge direct action:
Those who want to walk around fully correct in their criticism of America should remove this detail.
So, if anyone’s taking a vacation to Heidelberg and you see a lot of ripped Levi’s, now you’ll know why. Just be glad Germans didn’t invent bluejeans. If it had to hold something they used in their history to kill people, that little pocket might have been large enough to hold a can of this.
