...are afoot at the Circle K.
Check back soon. Rummaging is coming back....
Ted:
Dude, are you sure we should be doing this?
Bill:
Ted, you and I have witnessed many things, but nothing as bodacious as
what just happened. Besides, we told ourselves to listen to this guy...
Ted:
What if we were lying?
Bill:
Why would we lie to ourselves?
All the votes are in, all the bribes have been counted and the delegates wives are admiring their new fur coats and porsches. Yes, it's finally time to announce the winner of the 2012 Olympic venue.
Coincidentally, it's also time to announce the winner of the eBay Haiku Competition.
Thanks to everyone who entered - there were some great entries. It was hard to pick a winner and it was a close run thing.
Three honourable mentions. First to Krill54 who clearly knew that any James Bond haiku had to be a contender:
Trapped on a rocket
with women of loose virtue?
Clearly Bond. James Bond.
And second to Circals, who was one of the most lyrical of the entrants. His 'highly commended' haiku:
This book by Dennis
Is full of thrills and menace
Completely Wheatley.
And third to ridetheoverdraft, with this great entry in his feedback:
Thank you for the cash,
I spent it on loose women,
drugs and alcohol
But for sheer enthusiasm, volume of entries and entering into the spirit of the thing, there can only be one winner. majikthijs.
He entered dozens of haiku, in both his auctions and his feedback and the quality was consistently excellent. His winning entry:
you sent me a disc,
ingeniously packed,
like the spring blossom
Just perfect.
Congratulations to all. An iPod shuffle is on it's way to Majik as soon as he emails me an address to send it to.
Finally, it's time to announce that Rummaging is going to take an indefinite break. Other projects are taking up too much time, so the blogging has been neglected. Rather than walk around all the time with a nagging suspicion that I need to write a new entry, I'm going to call time on it for a while and come back, if at all, with a new approach and a new enthusiasm.
In the meantime, if you want other stuff to read then check out:
For ebay related stuff: Bayraider
For funny/weird stuff: Boing Boing
For environmental stuff: Small Environmentalist
It's been lovely. See you again soon.
Another flurry of entries from krill54. All for vintage and first edition books, proving that eBay haiku are as hard to stop as a packet of Pringles.
Trapped on a rocket
with women of loose virtue?
Clearly Bond. James Bond.
I cannot rival
the tension inside this book
with merely three lines
Disappointment lies
in rare offers like this one
for those who seek flaws
Poetry and plays?
How could you ask me for more?!
(ok - free shipping)
If I could prove that
the handwriting was Herbert's,
it'd be gone by now.
ridetheoverdraft leaves a feedback haiku clearly inspired by George Best:
Thank you for the cash,
I spent it on loose women,
drugs and alcohol
And I would be failing in my duty if I didn't recommend that you read some of his other feedback too, which includes "The cocaine/CD/virgin* arrived safely and well packaged. Can't wait to snort/play/sacrifice* it (*delete as applicable)."
Very light (OK, non-existent) blogging recently. I could make excuses, but you don't care.
I'm sorry.
Anyway, a stack more entries in the eBay haiku competition. The quality is getting better and better. Click here to see all the entries so far.
Krill54 has joined the party with a whole raft of entries. There are some real gems in here.
Selling this quickly
so I can buy more garlic
in case this comes true
Faint stains on cover
But illustrations are clear
Less dust than Trigger
Time's proven Shaw's worth
at far more than a tenner.
He wouldn't approve.
Just 99 p
with extremely cheap shipping
who cares the book sucks?
Useful for pricing,
but it won't help you answer
if Shane could whoop pa.
and my favourite - and possibly the only haiku ever written about John Fowles, The Magus
This massive volume,
less than $.01 a page*,
a job lot of plot.
and a few more from the indefatigable Majik. Thesse were left as feedback. His feedback 'left for others' page is becoming the standard by which others are judged:
This includes the first one in Dutch:
Snelle levering,
verrassend leuke feedback:
een tevreden man
which translates in English to:
Fast delivery,
surprisingly good feedback:
a satisfied man
and another;
super-duper pda,
and telephone all in one:
christmas came early
Also, someone has left majik feedback in a haiku, without seeming to know about this competition:
Super ebayer.
Smooth as clockwork transaction.
Bring on the summer!
The competition closes soon! Get your final entries in. There may be a one week extension because my own blogging has been so miserable recently, but whether it's in an auction or in your feedback, I need to know about it for it to count as an entry. Email me at rummaging@gmail.com!
So who is the 'mystery celebrity' who sold space on her cleavage in an auction last week?
Although the auction has closed, the 'celebrity' still hasn't revealed themselves.
Could this be because the winning bidder has just found out what they've bought and is refusing to pay?
According to snopes.com, the celebrity is in fact Teresa Ilagen, who recently changed her name to goldenpalace.com. So her fame is based purely on her previous auction. This would explain why the celebrity was described as someone who would be known 'to everyone on ebay'.
But not really a celebrity, under any definition of the word.....
There's always a catch. And more publicity for that bloody casino.
Lloyd sends in the first haiku in the description of the auction:
Blue Wrangler jacket
70s original
Now too small for me
and a fantastic feedback haiku:
Fantastic surfboard
Sold by a true gentleman
Waiting for summer
Whilst Bernard is aiming for the most entries, this time with a tent haiku:
open up the zip
when everything is wet
a tent keeps you dry
this one feels authentically japanese and also has a reference to the seasons, which is a bonus.
There's an auction online at the moment selling tips and tricks for creating your own media feeding frenzy through eBay auctions.
However, as one of their techniques seems to be comment spam, which I've just filleted from the site, then they don't know how to create the media frenzy they promise. they only know how to annoy.
And look at that, I've deleted all the comment spam and I won't link to the auction. That's the sort great publicity they could create for you, too.
There's a MiG 23 fighter for sale at the moment.
It's in Poland and the seller says: "Will post to United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Ireland, Canada, Asia, France."
But for some reason, he won't post it to Africa, Russia, South America or China.
Who does he think is going to buy it? All those countries already have airforces. Robert Mugabe isn't going to bid if he has to pay for the stamps.
Now these are genuinely odd.
One for the medical historians, this set of cervical rings is like a set of Allen keys. You just have to find the right size.
Shudder.
No commentary needed.
Here's an original ten foot bronze statue of Rocky.
But cool comes at a price - bids open at $1m. (via Boing Boing)
Another entry from Gem - full roundup coming up tomorrow:
wandering your store
what do you sell, I wonder?
oh! on the logo!
A Renault Clio closes today that was previously owned by Thierry Henry. It was the one that he drove in the adverts - the one with the va va voom. Auction here.
Craig Amshel has been sued for selling medical exam results on eBay.
The best part of this story is that he is a rectal specialist.
So you don't need to ask what he felt like after he was caught
Ok, a great entry has forced me to add a new rule.
Haiku left as feedback will now be accepted.
Why?
This great entry:
you sent me a disc,
ingeniously packed,
like the spring blossom
If you're going to leave feedback as a haiku, please label it 'haiku:' so I know you haven't happened on 5-7-5 feedback sentence!
This book by Dennis
Is full of thrills and menace
Completely Wheatley.
Internal rhymes and everything. The bar has just been raised.
Remember, you can enter as many times as you want. I'll do a round up on Monday of the entries so far.
Also, if your auction is featured on Rummaging, you're almost guaranteed an extra, say, nine hits. At least.
Once upon a time, the Internet was castigated as a place where terrorists might download instructions to build a bomb.
How times have changed.
Now, Sinn Fein is trying to sell a device it claims is a British MI5 bug. Which, if it is a genuine bug, means that Hollywood have been lying to us about the state of bug technology. It's hardly a sleek, tiny, porsche designed piece of kit.
eBay pulled it from their site, but it is now available on the Sinn Fein online store. (Sinn Fein have got an online store! Who knew?) Being sophisticated merchandisers, they have mounted it on a varnished plinth. So it could have pride of place on your mantelpiece.
Apparently, rumours that after the closure of their South American operations Sinn Fein are also selling online training courses on eBay, remain unconfirmed.
osCommerce eBook,
Learn to make Fantastic Sites
You should "Buy It Now"
You almost don't notice this one. It's also the first entry to be submitted with an explanatory haiku:
I suck at Haiku,
No need for you to piss-take,
I know already.
The Guardian today reports that a photograph of a text message sent by Brit Artist Tracey Emin to one of her 'friends' saying, simply 'Twat' is for sale on eBay. (Auction here)
'FOR ME ART IS EVERYWHERE... A TEXT MESSAGE COULD BE ART' said Tracey, whilst looking around for a petard to hoist herself upon.
Drawing the line between 'art' and 'not art' first thing on a monday morning is hard enough, especially when candidates for what counts as art include this, this and (most horrifying of all) this.
no one knows your name
that is such a crying shame
buy my store logo
Short, sweet at the to the point from Gem, who designs logos for eBay stores, as her haiku succinctly demonstrates.
David Carradine
acting
like a Grasshopper
should have been Bruce Lee
I like it.
There's no limit to the number of entries you can make.
Well done Bernard!
Well, Gorgeous George certainly bought a slice of British political theatre to the staid and pompous corridors of the Senate.
(If anyone saw the slightly bovine Senators giving their press conference after the hearing, they looked like guys who'd lost an argument telling their wives what they would have said, you know, if they'd really been able to say what they wanted to. And he should wait til next time, because next time, well I won't pull my punches.)
Things have been too quiet round here. Frankly, I've been coasting. So I'm going to hold the first ever Rummaging competition - complete with FABULOUS PRIZE*.
But it's not just any old competition. It's about eBay and it's a little bit different. After literally minutes trying to think up a good idea, I came up with the...
Inaugural eBay Haiku competition
It's simple, to enter, put a haiku in an eBay listing and then send in the link. The funnier the better.
The FABULOUS PRIZE
The winning entry, as judged by me, will win an iPod shuffle. I'm not kidding. You people are animals. You need an incentive. Frankly seeing as I can't offer that much in the way of fame or exposure, I'm hoping that a cold hard prize with real financial value gets you moving. If you win then sell it on eBay, I won't be upset. I understand irony.
Rules:
Good Luck!!
Some inspiration
Error message haiku
A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
Dog haiku
I am your best friend,
Now, always, and especially
When you are eating.
Mr T haiku
A fear of flying
Will not stop this man mountain
So we spike his milk.
* well, pretty fabulous for a blog whose sum total adsense earnings wouldn't buy an egg sandwich
** yes this is a clumsy, westernised definition of a haiku. But it'll do.
This auction shows the genius of eBay.
The seller is trying to get rid of 6 huge sheets of blue glass that probably came from a railway station. They have no idea of the provenance, no idea what to do with them and no way of shifting them should anyone actually want them.
But the auction is attracting attention and hits.
In situations like this, it isn't about money. This is about all those things you throw away and think "there's some value in that - surely somebody must want it". Even if you can't immediately think what that value might be. eBay gives you a way -through the sheer volume of traffic it attracts, of testing that point of view.
If you collect items under the category politics>conspiracy>memorabilia>homes and gardens, then Lelands, an auction site focused on memorabilia, has just the item for you.
They are selling the fence from the grassy knoll that CIA operatives/Mafia hitmen/Fidel Castro/absolutely nobody (delete as appropriate) hid behind when they assassinated/did not assassinate JFK.
With a quote that will surely be among the first entries into any dictionary of crap superlatives*, a Lelands director calls it 'probably the most famous fence in the world'.
I'm sure, if we put our minds to it, we could think of many more famous bits of fence. After all, this fence is only famous by association - it's the grassy knoll that gets all the attention. The fence is somewhat by the by. In fact, a fence near a knoll behind which assassins may or may not have once lurked isn't really all that famous.
A desperate attempt to 'big up' the fence (as I believe the young people say), leads to this lovely paragraph of hack journalism:
Some of the conspiracy theories that linger more than 40 years after the assassination involve the fence. Some films show people rushing toward the fence in pursuit of a second gunman, according to one theory
I would suggest the fence outside the White House is more famous. Or the Berlin Wall, if you want to stretch the definition of a fence.
I digress.
Bids for this wholly unremarkable piece of fence are expected to reach thousands of pounds. Bidders (assuming Golden Palace doesn't snaffle it) are expected to be ardent JFK conspiracists, with arguably more money than sense.
*There is, as far as I know, no Dictionary of Crap Superlatives. I would be happy to write one, though. It would be the most stunning dictionary of unimpressive superlatives that the world had ever seen.
"You are bidding on a chronological list of true life events beginning in 1959 and continuing to the present that have brought me to the complete failure status that I am confident that I can help you to acheive!. This list of bad decisions and totally stupid things that I have done throughout my life, clearly demonstrates the power of total lack of common sense to bring a person to blissful ruins. These events are completely true, even though some will sound unbelievable. Some are just bad luck, but for the most part they are sheer STUPIDITY!"
Nice. Get this man a book deal. His memoirs deserve more than just being stapled together on a few grubby sheets of A4. Auction here, though for some reason he ended it early. A predatory literary agent must have snapped him up already.
So, West Brom stay up on the last day of the season, in one of the great escapes of football history.
As we live in a consumer age, Baggies fans will want to celebrate by hitting the merchandise hard.
But they should consider some of the gems available on eBay. There's a Jeff Astle postcard, a t-shirt with "the Hawthorns is my church" on it, or they can splash out and buy a shirt signed by the all the players.
But frankly, there's only one reason that West Brom have stayed up. Captain Marvel, Bryan Robson. So the thing to go and buy yourself is this 1989 Bryan Robson Soccer Annual, signed by the man himself.
Boing boing (and I'm not referring to the blog).
If you can't beat them.....
You can now read the latest 5 headlines from Offbeat Auctions and Bayraider in miniblogs in the right hand column of rummaging (Scroll down a bit, no, just a bit more, there below that advert. Go on click the advert too). Syndication. It's the hot new thing.
This is quite cute.
Hans Werner the monkey is a skilled hacker, expert chef, cleaner, massage therapist and bodybuilder.
All he wants in the world is to be able to move to America.
Bayraider found a cool charity auction - props from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Proceeds will go to the Gorilla and Rhino charities much beloved of Douglas Adams.
Though to be honest, what I would really like is a Marvin the Paranoid Android action figure.
This auction, where odds_ansods tries to sell the empty lager cans that 'mysteriously' gather around his house, is notable for the Q & A section at the bottom:
Q: youre an asshole
A: Good spelling, great punctuation.....am I going to be too bothered about comments like this from somebody who likes fantasy role playing games, wrestling & BMX-ing? Don't think so, but thank-you for your input.
Q: Dear Sir, i am most interested in your haunted beer can. Please would you confirm whether the haunting has been independently verified by such an organisation as, for example, Mrs Milton's Middle Manchester Mediums' Group? i feel that independent verification of such a phenomenon is very important in an instance such as this before i risk parting with my hard earned pennies and place a bid on your auction. Many thanks and best regards, Weirdo xx
A: Dear Wierdo, thank you for your enquiry, you will be pleased to learn that this phenomenon has been witnessed by none other than Derek Akora, star of most haunted. I sent the afore-mentioned camp former footballer an e-mail and received a response which told me that said e-mail had been delivered. As yet, the silver haired medium has yet to reply via e-mail or electronic telephone, however he did send me a message via telepathy to let me know that him & Yvette Fielding were thinking of coming round our house for a seance, as long as I was willing to get a case of WKD and some pitta bread with humous dip in....
(Thanks Kaye!)
The most watched item on eBay at the moment: "Fisher Price Little People EXTREMELY MEAN BOY Lot"
$48 for a fisher price toy with some freckles drawn on it.
What's going on? How bored are people?
The Pope's car was bought by Golden Palace for 188,000 Euros.
That's it. They're taking all the fun out of it.
No more Golden Palace auctions.
Where do we go from here?
They're close to getting their own category, but goldenpalace.com have done it again. Not content with their previous purchases, they've just bought the identity of Tennessee mother Terri Illigan for $15,000.
She will now be known as "goldenpalace.com".
Why did she sell her name? To send her kids to Golf Camp.
I only hope those guys at golden palace know what they're doing.
A german man selling his car has realised that he's not just flogging any old second hand car, but one that used to belong to the new Pope Benedict. Ratzinger's motor,
a sensible golf has proved incredibly popular - perhaps because the seller promises that "Your driving will always be save and blessed in it".
Personally, I'd prefer the x-wing.
Only 300 pairs of these adidas trainers were ever made. They come in a special leather box with an engraved gold plaque and bids are currently around the £2,000 mark.
If Jaz-Z doesn't win this auction, they'll be hell to pay.
eBay is currently offering a full size x-wing and bids start at $40,000. It's had nearly 200,000 page views, as many as I have ever seen for an auction. But no bids yet.
This user has left literally hundreds of negative feedbacks for the same store. It's worth scrolling through (start here) just to get a sense of the rage this person feels.
The seller has only responded to about 10% of these, in an increasingly exasperated tone:
Let's see. You have left 841 feedbacks. Of those, 200 are Negative. Thats 25%
If you look at the feedback between these bouts of rage, they are all positive
We screw up ONE order out of 50 and she freaks out.
They were delivered complete and on time as usual. Must be a hormonal imbalance
Remember, this is just ONE PERSON We have thousands of other satisfied people
Thanks for never leaving feedback on your previous orders so you can do this
Are you done yet? Does this make you happy? Is this to compensate for something?
Just when you think eBay has become routine, along comes an auction titled "War Criminal Heinrich Himmler. Gay Interest" that reminds you of the levels of randomness that it can achieve.
The auction has a long biog of the man who set up the SS, but no explanation of the gay interest. Is it just the shiny boots?
$650,000 to name a new species of monkey?
"This species will bear our name for as long as it exists," Rowe said. "Hundreds, even thousands of years from now, the GoldenPalace.com Monkey will live to carry our name through the ages."
Whilst I once considered them maniacs, I'm beginning to think the guys at Golden Palace are geniuses, pure and simple.
And when the company collapses in a flurry of stock frauds and misstated earnings, as it surely will, I will stand by them as genuine innovators of the age.
(thanks Rob)
This is an amazing article about an ingenious homebrew drug addict, who tires of prescription painkillers bought from suspicious mexican websites and moves onto eBay - which he describes as "the official opium gray market".
Finally, I found eBay. I had been looking for old motel stationery and fake Jackson Pollock drip paintings. They sold everything--why not drugs?
I typed “poppy pods” into the search bar.
Like anyone trolling the Internet at 4 a.m., I had been looking for some kind of temporary drug fix. I found it on eBay under Crafts>Floral Supplies>Flowers, Foliage>Dried.
Crafting. Sure. I liked art.
A query turned up all sizes and quantities of poppies. Some, called gigantheums, were as big as tennis balls. A special of “600 XXL-sized gigantheums” was selling for $399. Fortunately, for crafting projects requiring so many poppy plants, financing was available for $17 per month. For all of us hard-core flower arrangers, of course.
The recipe was simple enough. Hot water and crushed poppies. A blender and a strainer or an old T-shirt to squeeze out the pulp. I ordered a few dozen dried flowers from a seller with more than 3,000 positive-feedback points and a clever handle that was a clear double-entendre on horticulture and getting high.
How true is any of this? Well, there's lots of circumstantial evidence.
The category certainly exists and there is one seller who seems to sell an awful lot of poppy pods. His feedback reads like the dialogue from "Dude, Where's my car?" rather than conservative retired crafters who consume poppyheads in bulk. But a feedback score north of 4,000 says he must be doing something right.
It used to be the case that reality TV shows gave prizes to the poor dancing monkeys who took part.
Now, they're asking you to pay for the privilege of being on a show. Although, this isn't the sedentary voyeurism of Big Brother. This is extreme!
Tornado Attack is auctioning the right to co-star and co-pilot in their show. This involves driving a specially modified car into the eye of a tornado. On TV.
Bids are currently at a staggering $145,000.
[via Daze]
Seeing as Rob of 'A Welsh View' sent over the auctions in the last entry, I was inspired to look for Welsh stuff for sale.
There's plenty there, among the Welsh Dressers and rugby memorabilia, such as the barely collectable menai bridge pound coins, and a kit that helps you to learn Welsh using the bizzare linkword system. (The Welsh for CHEESE is CAWS. You must imagine COWS producing CHEESE, in your mind’s eye.)
And of course, given recent events (of which no more will be spoken), there's lots of rugby memorabilia - including this rugby shirt, allegedly signed by the team whilst celebrating on the night of their victory.
But the auction to attract the real Welshmen is the opportunity to become a real Man of Harlech, by buying this general store at the foot of the Castle.
There are lots of devotional items on eBay at the moment (including a bible signed by JPII).
Other items include a peanut containing an image of the virgin mary and even better, the "legs of jesus" which also appear at this website.
Is this due to the passing of the pontiff, which like a comet or an eclipse, brings out religious fervour in everyday heathens?
Or is it because Golden Palace just bought a Dorito shaped like the Pope's hat?
Thanks to Rob for the tips.
Well, you can't deny his persistence...
You'll get an 'invalid item' link if you click on penis boy's auction.
They aren't normally so prudish.
Watch this fly now. I've written before about how eBay allows people their fifteen minutes in an explicitly transactional way, but it's interesting to see one of these eBay microcelebs created from scratch.
The timeline so far is:
Sunday night - ad listed on ebay - his ad has 200 pageviews by Thursday morning
Thursday night - ad featured on rummaging - and Mikivin's now famous exclusive interview - pageviews shoot up to 300
Friday morning - featured on softblog (NSFW) - adds another 100 pageviews
and then the 'proper media' get a sniff
Friday afternoon - featured on the register - 2800 pageviews (at 4pm on Friday) and counting.
As yet, still no bids....
I hope Mikivin remembers us when he is rich and interestingly scarred.
Not my penis of course, I'm not insane.
On this guy's penis.
Short and to the point (his ad, not his penis), Mikivin is offering an opportunity for a firm to tattoo his most sensitive area.
In the comments on the rummaging post below, he explains his thinking.
Personally, I do not believe for one minute that there will be any bids and I guess there is a little part of me (no pun intended) hoping they do not - but if they do then I shall keep my word.
This is madness. There are thousands of dotcom marketing directors, up to their eyeballs in crystal meth, desperately looking for an opportunity like this to 'distinguish their brand' like this.
I fear for Mikivin, I really do.Though he is about to get famous.
With Bayraider happy to churn out blog posts by the thousand, it gives Rummaging an opportunity to take a step back.
Having spoken to the Shiny team, it seems they have identified a fantastic business model, neatly tailored to the cutting edge of corporate-nano-blogging - a captive army of unpaid children who will churn out posts for food.
(This is them recruiting bloggers in Camden last week)
Rummaging applauds this model, as it means we don't carry all the responsibility for reporting the eBay news. We can take a more reflective stance, draw out the trends and spend more time on serious analysis.
It can become the site where serious debate takes place - our head won't be turned by every passing fancy like a child in a supermarket, waving "look at this, look at this" at the dayglo shelves of industrial confectionery.
Our first step, as part of our new, serious approach, is to draw to a logical conclusion the stories that started with a man selling a temporary tattoo on his forehead, then a woman selling a temporary tatto on her cleavage.
I like writing Rummaging, but the research brings me down.
For every Golden Palace story (and yes, they bought the Pope's Hat Dorito), there are a bunch of self-seeking no-hopers. I've always relied on the kindness of strangers for the majority of the links I cover.
But now, thanks to the launch of Bayraider, my life just got a whole load easier. Bayraider is a new eBay blog featuring "interesting things on eBay".
I just can't help but wonder where they got the idea from?
The blog is being run by a company called Shiny Media. They claim to be 'the UK's leading commercial weblog company', which is a bit like claiming to be the second toughest in the infants.
The head honchos (for they are commercial 'real journalist' types, with talk of 'publishers' and their 'stable of blogs') all seem to be good friends with the Guardian's Blog Guru Jane Perrone.
In July last year, Jane was kind enought to write about Rummaging.
"It's an idea that probably has plenty of bloggers wondering "why didn't I think of that"?"
And now they have. My claim on exclusivity is lost. I will have to resort to needy desperate sounding catchphrases like 'the original...and still the best', or something like that.
Best of luck to them. To be fair, they have linked up to Rummaging.
My suggestion is that we divide up responsibilities.
Their job will be to see if you can make writing fatuous stuff about eBay auctions a viable commercial activity.
My job will be to see if they can do this, lift their best stuff and to try to be a bit funnier.
When we covered this, back in February, Inishfesh was offered at £275k.
However:
This is being Reoffered as the Last Buyer Was a Total was of Time anyone with less than 10 feedback please email me first before Bidding
Bids now start at just £150k. A couple more fake bids and you'll be able to buy the whole thing on a credit card.
Another year, another scramble for glastonbury tickets.
One guy is selling his disappointment:
Why this auction? Well I am hacked off after 3 hours hitting the refresh button to see the festival sold out, what a Fiasco! I work here and Drink here, No doubt i will be at the bar tonight drowning my sorrows, why not come along!
The seller's questions seem to have turned, as they often do, to cat poo.
What's this, a whimsical auction for a worthless item?
As I was leaving my home this morning, my eyes witnessed this rock in the smack middle of my yard. It was merely sitting there, sticking up out of the ground. I couldn't help staring at it for nearly 15 minutes before it called to me. That's right, this rock called to me, and it told me my purpose in life. I was also told to spread the message to as many people as I can, and I believe the way to do this is to offer it to everyone through ebay. Call me crazy, but this rock may give you the enlightenment you seek in life. This rock has given me so much and I value it with all my soul, so I will start the price at a very high bid.
Bids in the thousands of dollars.
It's got golden palace written all over it. Watch to see who wins it.
How come so much of David Beckham's crap gets listed on eBay. First his house, now his car. This seller seems to specialise in selling second hand cars that once belonged the footballer.
The breathless listing claims:
This Mercedes-Benz S500 Limousine has been famously photographed in the past, most famously as Beckham gets a parking ticket in London (nice to see we have something in common apart from great looks!). David Beckham is, according to the Google search engine, the most famous sports personality in the world.
I'm always asking Google what it thinks but it's notoriously shy to venture an opinion, though it once said it didn't like Marmite and thought "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" was the best Elton John album.
"So, how's that new pacemaker working out for you?"
"Oh fine Doctor. Why?"
"Well, no reason to be worried, but we did buy it on eBay."
"Oh really. Those things can cost $6,000. How much did you pay?"
"About $400"
"Right, I see. Anything else?"
"Oh no. Except that it was stolen."
A seller on the eBay forums has a reluctant buyer:
A high bidder on some of my auctions emailed me to say she didn't want to buy from me anymore because she did a tarot card reading on me and it said I was going to die. She says she's afraid I'll die before I get to ship her items. How should I respond?
On this thread, they refer to the user "zerofeedback". This is the first time I've seen someone use an empty eBay "about me" page as, basically, some free webspace to make a point. The page offers a feedback form for non-paying bidders.
Are there any other "hidden pages" on the site - especially people using fake accounts to make their point on the "about me" page?
We've covered this before for the UK, but now it looks like the IRS is cottoning on to eBay as an income stream.
The IRS can apply a list of nine indicators that might prove whether someone's online auctions amount to a business. These indicators include evidence that the taxpayer depends on the income, acts in a businesslike manner, or puts enough time and effort into the activity to suggest a profit motive.
These tests look woolly. We live in a pro-am world where the line between jobs, hobbies, businesses and pastimes are increasingly indistinct. Serious amateurs can compete with the best, people pursue hobbies like businesses and run one-off projects as serious activities.
Also, the time and effort test looks suspicious. I've spent hours on rummaging, but anyone who suspects a profit motive at work is welcome to look at my google adsense receipts.
If the way to avoid tax is to treat your eBay customers ineptly, in order to fail the "businesslike manner" test, then surely something is wrong. "I'm sorry I didn't reply to you email, but I always try to delete the first couple in order to illustrate that I am just a clownish one man band".
It's difficult, as people who conduct their business online should be liable for tax, but to throw a net over every online garage sale and hobbyist seems like clumsy regulation.
Fred Durst is apparently selling his watches on eBay. Probably to pay for his large random legal bills.
I've got the picture, but can't find the auctions. Any help, people?
Couple of weird ones for you. A Dorito shaped like a Pope's hat (though, to be honest, don't most Doritos look like that?) and a mother keen to make some money out of her daughters trauma...
YOU ARE BIDDING ON MY DAUGHTERS MONSTER. THIS MONSTER ONLY LIKES TO COME OUT WHEN MY DAUGHTER GOES TO BED
***THE HIGH BIDDER WILL IN REALITY WILL RECIEVE THE PLASTIC BAG (APROX 14x12"), A SOFT CLOTH WHICH IS WHAT MY DAUGHTER BELIEVE THAT IS ACTUALLY HOLDING "HIM" THE MONSTER , AND MY DAUGHTER'S MONSTER DRAWING.
FHM magazine is selling a seven foot high picture of Kelly Brook. They write "FHM requests no sniffing, no cutting out the eyes to spy on people, no using it as a giant sled." The value they put on this auction is captured in their username: fhm_sells_crap. Though this name has just been changed from the more prosaic leecoan.
If you then google "lee coan" +fhm (i'm starting to reveal the magic that goes into putting rummaging together) then you get this article about a disgruntled witch and their dealings with FHM. Mr Coan has been asked to check that there isn't a curse on his air conditioning.
Can you imagine the sort of life Lee Coan leads? From these examples, he seems to live an entirely random life, bouncing around at the whim of his angry, capricious, coke-addled editors. They seem to be an unholy mix of Henry the Eighth, Janet Street Porter and Kelvin McKenzie.
It seems poor Lee can barely get through the door before they start barking their oddball requests. "Coan , phone up that witch and ask if she cursed us", "Coan, put that giant picture of Kelly Brook on eBay before I set fire to it", "Coan, wear this jesters uniform and interview Ricky Gervais", "Coan, go and have an enema" etc etc etc.
It's like some twisted form of slavery. For £14,000 a year, poor Lee Coan has to be someone's indentured monkey. Can we start a campaign to have him freed?
If half of what is said about BogNog the Evil Dog is true, then you don't want it.
"Cursed since the beginning of time, this charming looking canine holds more dark magic than any other stuffed toy."
He does have a great name, though. Thanks Kaye!
In the comments on this post - "How bored are you?" - "Matt" offers to share his personal dilemma for a couple of quid. He wrote:
Very bored..although to be fair that is probably because I am avoiding thinking about a real personal dilemna. Maybe that could be a new bid item, I could sell off the rights to my burning issue. Bored people with nothing going on right now could bid to have my issue, bid high enough they could even take charge of solving it.
If you believe, as I do, that Matt should put the right to share this personal dilemma in an auction on eBay, then let him know! How much would you bid to know Matt's problem and maybe, earn the right to help him solve it? Would you want to tell him problems of your own?
Matt, if you're reading this - the public wants to know!
I don't feel I'm really playing my part in the whole "blogs link to other blogs" thing and I should step up and sprinkle some link-joy around. Email me at rummaging@gmail.com or leave a note in the comments with how great your site is and I'll link it up.
Self promoting label addict, Puff Daddy, is selling 150 of his cars on eBay.
This is not celebrity memorabilia. This is Puff turning into Arthur Daley and becoming a second hand car salesman. Buying in Lincoln Continentals, slapping his badge on them and putting them on eBay. It's the merchandising strategy perfected by Krusty the Clown.
On his website, his official biography says:
It is a rare and significant occasion when a musical artist captures and expresses the sentiments of a generation and expands his horizons to make an impact on society, creating a union between music and life.....Sean has torn down the barricades that continue to segregate music and society.
It's rare to see such unadulterated self congratulation for someone best known for resurrecting "Every move you make". He should also remember that those musical barriers were there for a very good reason - until he broke them down, we had happily contained Sting behind them.
There's a lot of original art on eBay these days. Like these fantastic Original Robot Drawings.
Original/Repro: Original-Listed by Artist
Style: Pop Art
Medium:Crayon
Date of Creation:1990-Now
Subject: Deadly Robot Assassins
I'm a sucker for deadly robot assassins (and if you are, check out the Japanese film Casshern) and these pictures are great examples of the genre.
7 year olds really know their way around this subject. This kid is going to make a fortune.
I've been sent a link to Inspector London.
Inspector London is an arts project sited on eBay, which operates as the Inspector London shop. The Inspector stock-list is a response to new possibilities of consumption emerging through virtual shopping and new technologies. Inspector London is interested in the way in which these developments have redefined our interaction with the product and have transformed the notion of manufacture itself.
I think that this means its a bit like rummaging, only it's eligible for the Turner Prize. I have been looking at their essay about what they're trying to do:
"Virtual marketplaces such as eBay are symptomatic of the tendencies of innovative consumer involvement in the determination of the product within the wider current consumption landscape."
I think this means eBay is a website.
"Established as the alternative marketplace worldwide eBay created a new exchange process. Similar to catalogue purchasing systems goods can only be evaluated through information /documentation provided by the seller. Actual physical contact with the object is deferred until the point of delivery."
I think this means eBay is an auction website.
"The crucial difference is that, rather than the standardised, objectified information provided by most consumer spaces, such as supermarkets or catalogues, the shelves of eBay have been reclaimed by the language and imagery of the individual. Products here are photographed from within and bare the trace of home environments of mini-entrepreneurs and living-room niche-service industries. Significantly evaluation of the offered product relies more on the imagination of buyers evaluating the symbolic information provided and therefore on pre-existing knowledge rather than physical contact with the objects at the time."
This means people have to write the descriptions for the things they sell.
These "artistic insights" are striking in their banality. We are in real Nathan Barley territory (and that's the good Nathan Barley on TVGoHome, not the crap sitcom*). You almost expect to read "The Internet am like a telephone, with a television in it. This creates new models of television, using the paradigm of speaking into a telephone. Our collective is attempting to subvert this new aesthetic by creating a non-commerical space where artists can talk and watch television at the same time."
It's quite wearing to read. The examples on Inspector London read like every 'funny' eBay auction you've read, as transcribed by desperately earnest art students with an aversion to using commas. "Don't you see we're being subversive?" you can almost hear them cry. To which the only answer is "Yes, but please stop it. You are less interesting than you could ever imagine."
*I mean, a SITCOM. On what godawful planet was a straight-down-the-line sitcom the right way to deal with that character?
A few auctions picked up by readers:
- A month by month Doggy Doo Calendar.
- The naming rights for the Boston Fleet Center were won by Fark.com.
- An Atari Cosmos. Only 5 of these were ever made. This went for £9,900.
On the serious side of the ebay street, sellers are up in arms about the recent fee increases.
Even Business Week are covering it - which is normally a sign for rummaging to leave it well alone.
But the gripes (and the volume) suggests real dissatisfaction among the hardcore of pro sellers who talk about the "growing un-usability of the site".
Maybe soon all that will be left are the pregnant advertisers and barking mad conspiracy theorists.
Damn.
File this in the "I wish I had thought of that column."
Jeremy Wright, who writes engadget ensight* auctioned his blogging services for three months.
He promised to write about the winning bidder on his blog.
He made $3,350 and lots of buzz.
It's certainly made me think....
* got it wrong the first time. but if you're going to be fact-checked, it's as well to be fact-checked by the person you're writing about. Sorry Jeffrey.
A tile that looks like Elvis. Or at least, as Elvis looks when drawn by a five year old. Who has never heard of Elvis.
It also looks like part of someone's floor. So it's not clear how they are going to get it out.
<Insert "Suspicious minds" pun here>.
Boing Boing points us to a custom iPod cover made of duct tape
Bids are less than $10, as it seems there is very little for the golden palace casino to get excited about.
Norwich is today named as the eBay capital of the UK, with the highest percentage of it's population registered as users.
It's followed by Cambridge, Reading and Ilford.
Ebay usage is a clearly related to how little there is to do in a town. Maybe they should run a new campaign - "Why not look on eBay? You already know that there's nothing outside. The town you live in is empty, desolate and depressing. Stay in and look at pairs of second-hand jeans."
A proper island for sale, with it's own beach, a two-bed cottage and biting winds off the atlantic.
Valued at £275k, though the buyer would prefer cash - this island is uninhabited and a mile from the mainland.
This is the sort of place to disappear off to with a crate of whiskey to "write that novel" or indeed just "drink a crate of whiskey".
If half of what this auction promises is true, then it's a bargain.
xilliontherockopera is offering a lecture for i. the precise location of heaven ii. the secrets to peace on earth iii. a cure for cancer iv. a reconciliation of the world's religions.
The summary of the position is given in the ad, of which there two versions, here and here. Given the importance of the subject, the last sentence is a killer:
WHEN WE DIE AND BECOME STARS WE, TOO, WILL BE BLESSED WITH WONDERFUL SPECIAL PLANETS WHICH ORBIT US AND WHICH BRING US GREAT HAPPINESS AND JOY. GOD ALSO IS A STAR. THE FIRST AND THE GREATEST. TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO JESUS SAID "I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD" AND "I AM THE BRIGHT MORNING STAR." WHEN HE SAID THESE THINGS JESUS WAS PLANTING THE SEEDS FOR MODERN MAN TO UNDERSTAND THAT JESUS IS THE SUN AND WHEN WE DIE WE WILL HAVE HEAVENLY BODIES LIKE HIS (STARS.) JESUS REVEALED TO ME THE SOLUTIONS TO SEVERAL OTHER MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE. THESE INCLUDE THE CURE FOR CANCER AND THE SOLUTION FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT OF WORLD PEACE. I WILL SHARE THESE, OF COURSE. AND JESUS HAS A MESSAGE FOR HUMANKIND. IF WORLD PEACE COMES (THROUGH HIS SOLUTION) THERE WILL BE NO MORE NATURAL DISASTERS. IF WORLD PEACE DOES NOT COME (SOON) THE EARTH WILL BE DOOMED. I WELCOME ALL QUESTIONS VIA EBAY.
One buyer is sceptical, commenting:
Q: No offense at all, but Jesus is a big man. If you were sent here to talk for him, you're really telling all these people that he wanted you to express his ideas on EBAY? And you gain a few hundred thousand dollars to express Jesus to ONE PERSON? How do you sleep at night?
A: Unfortunately, Jesus did not tell me HOW to spread His messages. I thought ebay might work.
Then, in a move that probably saves most people the bother the trouble of bidding, you can read most of the theories in the seller's Q&A.
The secret of world peace is simply about setting a few targets: "I can't tell you how many times I have attempted to contact the presidents througtout the years. They simply must not get my mail."
Cancer is caused by people biting their nails. "But what is THE PRECISE CAUSE OF CANCER? CANCER IS CAUSED WHEN WE EAT OUR OWN FLESH (for example if we bite our cuticles or lips..) So the piece of flesh is digested and enters the bloodstream to be utalized as food. If a vunerable cell picks up a microscopic piece of flesh (DNA) to use as food, the nucleus of the cell identifies the 'food' as 'self.' The nucleus 'circuit is blown' and so the next time that cell goes to divide, it divides into four instead of into two and the mutation (the tumor) continues. There is an interesting correlation to Christianity here. Jesus said "Take my body and eat it and you will live." Now Jesus wants us to know that we must not eat our own flesh because it is deadly. I realize research needs to be done. Until I gain acceptance in the scientific community I will answer questions here"
I can't believe the billions of pounds spent on cancer research has missed this.
According to Popbitch, this German Farmhouse for sale on ebay is currently owned by Mick Jackson, who wrote "Blame it on the Boogie".
His website sells "blame it on the boogie" ringtones.
Guess who just spent $4,000 to advertise on a pregnant woman's stomach?
Our friends at Golden Palace.
No doubt they'll be placing their bids for bits of crap from Donald Trump's recent wedding. Celebrity scavengers can bid on bits of cake, wedding invitations and menus on the site.
Meanwhile,personal space advertising has really taken off. You can advertise on a boxer's back, a white mercedes benz, the shirts of three college guys, a bald head, the roof of someone's home and someone's two dogs.
Use this search keyword "advertise on" to see all the copycat ads.
Without sounding like Naomi Klein, why are these people suddenly expecting payment for brand advertising on their person? Why should I pay to advertise on your forehead when YOU PAID NIKE £15 TO WEAR A T-SHIRT WITH THEIR LOGO ON IT?
We should set up an auction - the right to wear the rummaging logo on your forehead for a month - for $100. Be the envy of all your friends. Be first to get the most exclusive brand semi-permanently attached to your face.
Here's something I bet you didn't know.
What do these recent eBay auctions and other acts of attention-seeking have in common?
1. the toasted cheese sandwich with the face of the virgin mary (sold for £15,000)
2. the woman who sold adspace on her cleavage (£422)
3. the ball that David Beckham kicked over the bar (£18,500)
4. a series of streakers at sports events
All of them were bought by the same firm - the golden palace casino.
In fact, when you click on their link,it seems like they have bought every single "funny item" on eBay over the last few years including special edition cabbage patch dolls, the world's most expensive hockey mask, autographed celebrity staplers and a haunted cane.
They have spent at least a couple of hundred thousand pounds buying these items and taking them on tour around the US.
I've always been fascinated with those small towns in the US that pride themselves on owning "the world's largest ball of twine" or "Da Vinci's Last Supper rendered in butter". "Roadside America" is a great digest of those places.
So, rather than dismissing them as a firm where the marketing director is on medication psychotropic drugs, salute them as proud bearers of an American tradition.
So what started with the selling ad space on a guy's head has taken the inevitable step downmarket, with this "advertise on my cleavage" auction.
As ever, being first is everything. The guy who sold space on his head got £20,000 and a premium advertiser in snorestop.com.
Second place brought just £422 and the low-rent advertiser "golden palace casino".
The ad opens with a picture and the statement:I'm an ample size 42GG, and I usually wear low-cut tops."
The story was first reported in the Greenock Telegraph. In the same
edition, it revealed that 1 in 20 young men under 25 were hooked on
either valium or heroin.
You can draw your own conclusions.
This 1996 set of Batman toys is described as the "absolute holy grail of Batman collecting".
Guess what the current bid is?
Guess again. Higher.
At the time of writing, the high bid was just short of $13,000 and the seller's reserve HAS NOT BEEN MET!
That said, it's claimed that the empty box for this toy once sold for over $9,000, so the full set must be worth a lot more.
Going back to my earlier comments about comic book types (who pays $9,000 for an empty box?) I just don't get it. There's no craftmanship, no exclusivity, little artistry. They're just little toys that look like they fell out of a cereal packet. But they're worth, apparently, between $20-$25,000.
For me, it's the Emperor's New Clothes. These are crap. Tell my why I'm wrong.
David Beckham's first house is for sale for £450,000. Beckham paid less than £200,000 for it in 1998, according to the Sun.
For our international readers, the extra quarter of a million pounds isn't an extra 'celebrity premium' you have to pay for the privilege of living in Beckham's house. All houses in the UK have gone up by that much in that space of time. Which why our economy is so very very fragile and we're very scared of falling house prices. It's like a suburban dot-com bubble. Instead of stock options, fast cars and
venture capital, we've got homebase, 100% mortgages and the cheapest TV show in the world - "Location, Location, Location".
Well, he pulled it off.
The guy who sold a month of advertising on his forehead got $37,375, from snorestop.com.
Well done to him. Too often, novelty auctions get all the press and none of the money. Snorestop get worldwide PR for less than £20,000.
It's one of those things where you're torn between two thoughts: despair at the commercialisation of everything in the world and "why didn't I think of that?"
The CEO of the firm said:
“I can never thank either Andrew or my daughter enough for this wonderful opportunity,” said De Rivel. “While this is a fun and highly original way to get our message out, snoring is often a serious problem that affects millions and often doesn’t receive the attention I believe it deserves. I look forward to an enjoyable association with Andrew – a man who clearly has a head for business in every sense of the word.”
As he said, the winning bid was actually placed by the daughter of the CEO of SnoreStop, which is a family-owned firm. It's too early to say whether this means she will be running the company next year, or whether she has just written herself out of the SnoreStop fortune entirely.
They do say that you can buy anything.
The Register have unearthed this affiliate link for the site. Here's the google group thread discussing it.
Nice. Though it's an old trick. It also works for vomit, facist and moon on a stick.Can you fund any more?
There are some interesting nuggets in this USA today article - such as "pink" being one of the top ten search terms on eBay - as well as some self-indulgent navel gazing about what eBay means to society as a whole:
It's a societal seismometer. When events happen, they show up instantly on eBay. When Ronald Reagan died, 6,000 Reagan-related listings popped up on eBay within 48 hours. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series in October, and listings of Red Sox paraphernalia tripled.
"What it tells me is there's a market for anything," says Paul Dholakia, a marketing professor at Rice University who studies eBay. "It demonstrates the power of eBay, that it can create a global market for people on the fringes doing weird stuff."
Message to USA today: Stay off our turf.
There's a old Russian military missile launcher for sale on eBay at the moment.
The seller writes:
The Taliban had two of these and a lot of Northern aliance and US special forces were used in tracking them down and destroying as they were a credible threat. These were commonly used by the Iraqi forces in the first Iraq war.
The "buy it now" price is £18,990, so you could feasibly stick it on a couple of credit cards. Especially as insurance is apparently less than £100. Once you've sourced a couple of scuds, you could head down to the Middle East. Who knows, you might be asked to form part of an interim Iranian adminstration in about 18 months time.
eBay shares today dropped 18.4% - the financial equivalent of negative feedback - as some commentators claimed that the market in the US was saturated.
A good indication of this saturation is the man 'selling his left nut to finance a tractor'. He writes:
You never know. I've decided since I'm not getting any younger, and my wild and wooly days are gone and I've settled down with a wife and lots of kids and a nice piece of Texas property, that I'd just as soon have a tractor to work the land rather than my left nut.
This is accompanied by a picture - hold your breath - of two peanuts. Do you get it?
It's pretty poor. What's worse is that he's done it before, selling a ' Mysterious mechanic rag!!Not Ghost, Cane,Haunted' for $6.50 in the past.
Hilarious. No wonder their shares collapsed today. There's just no originality left in silly auctions anymore.
In the style of ComicBookGuy from the Simpsons, this auction should be labelled, "Best Auction Ever!"
As the internet becomes more mainstream and more woven into the fabric of everyday life, we forget that it was once the exclusive domain of geeky comic book store types.
However, a comic book collection on eBay reminds us that these groups haven't gone away, they've just been diluted. Also, because they were on the internet first, they've now got all the money. The collection includes:
Superman 1 (1939), Flash Comics 1, All Flash Quarterly 1, All Star Comics 3 (1st justice Society), All Star Comics 8 (1st Wonder Woman), Sensation Comics 1 (1st Wonder Woman in her own comic), Amazing Spider-man 1, Uncanny X-men 1, Tales of Suspense 39 (1st Iron Man), Fantastic Four 48 (1st Silver surfer & Galactus), Incredible Hulk 1 (1st Hulk), Giant Size X-men 1 (1st new X-men), Hulk 181 (1st Wolverine), X-men 94 (1st new X-men in own title), and Avengers 4 (1st Silver age Captain America)
The high bid at the moment is.$43,100. The NM guide value (whatver that is) of this entire collection is over $1,000,000. For comic books. These, as I understand, are paper magazines with drawings for children in them. But who am I to judge what people spend their money on in this world gone mad? When you can buy the "crazy frog" ringtone - little more than a badly edited, staggeringly annoying midi file - for an incredible £3.50, then £25 grand for some comics doesn't seem so unreasonable.
No doubt more bids will come in over the last four or five hours.
More charity auctions in aid of the Asian Tsunami. This time, Radio Aid on Monday 17th January, is offering a range of auctions, including lunch with George Michael and Kenny Goss, a tour of the Big Brother house and a New York cruise.
Whoever is currently bidding over £9,000 for the lunch presumably has some idea who Kenny Goss is.
Also, you can go to the Brit Awards with Chris Evans. The high bidder at the moment is thought to be Chris Evans. (Boom Crash, thank you very much, goodnight).
The most watched item on eBay Uk at the moment is a catsuit once owned by Justin Hawkins, lead singer of the Darkness. This is one of the Sun's Tsunami auctions and bids currently top £16,000.
thesuntsunamiappeal is the username for the Sun' auctions and it has now got its first postive feedback. Whilst not wanting to knock someone who was prepared to pay £3,000 for a Elvis boxset, the feedback left by alfj2005 (his comment: "very efeicent with the handeling of the auction iteh thanks jonathan") does somewhat confirm the prejudices people hold about Sun readers.
This is a story of small town eccentrics taking ill-advised steps on the internet. It’s The Crucible rewritten by the authors of boingboing.net. It’s going to be just about the longest rummaging entry ever, but stick with it.
It starts innocently enough, as these things do, with an eBay auction.
Our first character, who in the film of this story will be played by Billy Bob Thornton, sells some medical equipment on eBay to a volunteer fire brigade in Arizona. The head of the brigade goes under the handle “FemFireChief”.
(For the rest of this article, we’ll sidestep what it says about a country that doesn't provide a fire service for everyone who lives there, because it gets pretty weird pretty quickly.)
Billy Bob is puzzled about FemFireChief’s refusal to pay for the supplies until they have been delivered. This is pretty much the opposite of eBay policy. Caveat Emptor and all that.
He goes to the eBay forums to ask what other members think about this. After all, sales to a charity might deserve special treatment.
No way, say the chorus on the message boards. “Caveat Emptor” they cry, or would do if any of them knew any latin. “Buyer beware” they cry instead. They have no time for fancy-pants dead foreign languages in these parts.
In the style of message boards everywhere, there is also much discussion about the grammar and vocabulary used by “FemFireChief”. Among many accusations it is suggested that she isn’t really very clever and “she’s too arrogant to use spellcheck”. Other posters google her username and find that she posts on other messageboards and has something of a reputation for annoying people.
Then it gets weird.
“FemfireChief” weighs in. On reflection, she would probably consider this a mistake. In the same way that shaking a stick inside a beehive is a mistake.
“Hello everybody” she writes “if we may have a few minutes of your time please wed like ti thank you for all of your responses BUT...this Seller DID NOT explain the whole situation...and since he DID NOT then we will...”
“Things said on our About Me page is simply put there,not by me becuase i have nothing to do with the board for i am just the Chief,but by my board for Sellers that have SCREWED us before or Sellers that might INTEND to screw us.It is NOT meant for ALL Sellers for we have ran into some really GOOD Sellers...but the whole idea of this site is TRUST and once you lose TRUST,then things start failing and EVERYBODY loses out.”
After a couple of thousand words, she runs out of steam. I can’t admit that I understood much of it.
In response, the fabled “friendly eBay community” turns nasty.
They go crazy, attacking her post, her abilities as a firefighter, her grammar and diction, her eBay selling policies and the general crappiness of her webpage. A small breakaway crowd start hunting her across the internet, perhaps crossing that fine line from “concerned public citizen” to “bloodthirsty vigilante mob”. The message thread is now over 88 pages and several thousand messages long.
At this point, the allegations of the mob are worth documenting. I hope they’re true, because they paint a wonderful character.
Cut to rural Arizona, where we see “FemFireChief”, now identified as Donna, in her home town.
Donna isn’t really a Fire Chief. She’s a rich old woman who owns four antique fire trucks from the forties and drives around the area, often responding to emergency calls that real fire services have already responded to. She’s obsessed with fire and medical memorabilia and is well known to the local emergency services, who gently but firmly tell her not to come to any more fires.
A lazy casting director would at this point suggest Kathy Bates for the role of Donna, but I’d hope the script could get to Anjelica Huston or maybe even Rene Russo. She’s got to be mad, sure, but it’ll be a better film if she can charm the real fire officers.
I hope, in the film, there are lots of scene-setting shots of Donna bothering the locals, all dressed up in her vintage firefighter gear.
Meanwhile, on the internet, when the mob is hysterical, the local is global. A small town eccentric has become a threat to civilisation.
Ebayers start not one, but two “stop Donna” websites. She is dubbed in true tabloid tradiiton, the “fire liar”. Ebayers call up local agencies, emergency services and the press, they out her as a fake on firefighter websites and send detailed tips to CBS News.
On the internet, there’s no investigator more tenacious than a bored vendor of old IT spares. One writes:
“Just got off the phone with the Yavapai County Emergency Services. She is not registered with or recognized by any county. She has no formal training or resume. They were shocked to hear about the new equipment she has bought through eBay.”
The press, bless them, seem nonplussed. The editor of The Grand Canyon News writes to one member (dr_strangelove99), who posts her response on the message thread:
"Can I ask where you're from and why you have such a burning interest in what looks like petty squabbles over buying and selling on e-bay? I looked at the links you sent out of curiosity and don't see anything that rises to the level of misconduct or fraud. Being mistaken and less than articulate are not really the basis for stories against public officials."
What does this mean? According to Dr Strangelove, it means “the editor is a blithering idiot”.
Clearly. This story is bigger than Watergate.
Though I have to applaud the use of the word "blithering" as it hasn't been used in public since 1956.
It’s scary. Yes, FemFireChief seems eccentric and perhaps a danger to those she tries to rescue, on the off chance that you would see an old lady in 1940s fire truck and think that she was the official emergency response. But she seems well known to the local authorities and the press who seem happy to tolerate her.
But a small group of people, spread across the world, will stop at nothing to have this woman locked up and “exposed”.
It raises a wider point about relationships on the internet. Blogs are often credited with doing the hard work of print journalists who are either asleep at the wheel or too cosy with special interests. In this view of the world, the concerned amateur can step up and hold the world to account. The problem with this view is that the concerned amateur might have absolutely no perspective, nor sense of restraint. There’s nothing stopping them conducting an informal but forensic investigation about some small-town character and then making all sorts of unsubstantiated accusations, that people, myself included feel free to repeat.
As one reader emailed me : "This whole affair is, without any doubt, the most bizarre group situation I've ever seen arise on eBay in my seven years onsite. I can no longer tell who deserves the majority of my pity, or scorn, or laughter."
The only upside of this whole story is that it would make a great film, a bit like “Midnight in the garden of good and evil”, but on the internet.
Read the whole thread here.
(Thanks again to magbot for the great tip and the detailed research!)
A question from a bidder on this auction:
Q: Is the script already written
for the storyline in which the winning bidder will take part? If not
does the winning bidder have any say in the selection of the story and
which part he will play. In other words do I get to play a stud with a
scantily clad blonde or would I be the not very well endowed husband of
a woman who is about to have an affair!
A: Hi - the script cannot be
written by the winning bidder but they will be able to have a few
choices of what kind of Casebook they appear in.
For those readers not familiar with Deidre's Photo Casebook you can subscribe online here. One week of letters for just 50p, in what appears to be the world's most bizarre pay per view experiment. It probably makes millions of pounds.
What better way to celebrate the 70th birthday of a man who died in 1977, than revisiting his work.
All of Elvis' number ones are being re-released week by week in the year he would have been 70.
A fitting tribute to the man.
And nothing to do with the fact that copyright laws mean that most of his songs will soon be in the public domain.
Hardcore fans swept up in the nostalgia, especially those who have promised themselves that this year they will downshift into an easier, more 'elvissy' way of life can bid on this fully fledged Elvis Museum, for just $1.5m.
Again, another kid trying to pay his way through college. This time, the seller is offering to sell an temporary tattoo on his head for a month. Bids currently stand at $15,000. Find the auction here.
The BBC reports that the entrepreneur said his mother was initially surprised by his decision but following all the media attention she felt he was "thinking outside the box".
These auctions follow a template now. He's even set up http://www.humanadspace.com/ in anticipation of the flurry of media attention.
These just aren't funny anymore. I can't even make jokes about it anymore. Come on readers, let's build a celebrity. Think up some element of someone's dignity we can auction. We'll split the money.
Of course, when it comes to actually sleeping with some divorced BT phone engineer, we'll be waiting for you in the bar.
Kottke.org has found a link that shows eBay founder Pierre Omidyar promoting his new site 'AuctionWeb' - the company that became eBay.
It's amazing that such a modest ad dropped for free on usenet became the seed for a multi-billion company. It's also interesting how little (apart from the name) has changed about the core business.
Hello folks,
Here is the current listing of non-computer items for auction at AuctionWeb:
http://www.ebay.com/aw/
All items are offered by the individual sellers, and anyone is free to bid
on any item, or to add items, free of charge.
For more information about any of these items, please visit the AuctionWeb
site at the above URL.
Cheers,
Pierre
www.ebay.com/pierrre doesn't work anymore. Omidyar's site, like rummaging, is now hosted by Typepad and can be found here.
It's quite hard to articulate what's so very very crass about this.
Whilst you're trying to put your finger on exactly what it is, you can bid for the right to feature in Deidre's Photo Casebook...and help the people of South-East Asia at the same time.
Rummaging, as you may have noticed, takes numerous frequent, unannounced and unexplained sabbaticals. Ebay UK certainly has. That can be the only reason why it has launched eBay pulse, a look at 'what's cool' on eBay.
There are no jokes, no editorial and it appears to be automatically assembled by a complex algorithm and two students on work experience. It's the online equivalent of the freebie newspaper Metro. Which means that in about two months time, everyone will be reading it.
After a reasonably straightforward and non-controversial election process (one that has left the owner of the domain name disputedelection2004.com with a pretty worthless asset on his hands) Pres. Bush has been declared the winner.
One of the few areas of clear blue water between Bush and Kerry was energy policy.
So with Bush back in the White House, it might be time to book up those 'once-in-a-lifetime' trips to see the Alaskan wilderness, whilst it's still there.
(As an aside, the headline to this linked Reuters story is "Bush victory could boost Big Oil, analysts say". Amazing. Who are these analysts and where do they get these fabulous insights?)
I was hoping to find thousands of acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for sale on eBay for pennies per acre and stick it on my credit card.
The best I could do was this lot of 600 acres near Fairbanks for $1.8m. Anyone want to chip in?
Sorry. This isn't a very funny post.
The Bush and Kerry race to the White House concludes today. Or at least, it's supposed to; there isn't an official timescale for the Supreme Court ruling. With the world's political analysts turning to Alan Hansen clichés, "It could go either way", we have to turn to the one source of social commentary in which we can all believe.
I refer of course to eBay.
If you ever wonder what the cost of an election is, or how trustworthy the candidates are or the general opinion of the people, then eBay can tell all. Anti-Bush merchandise is a small industry of its own with sellers engaged in an aggressive competition to out-rubbish the man. Kerry critics stick to the "flip-flop" allegations. Why footwear?, I have no idea.
Stars of film, television and music have already attacked Bush and the volume of anti-Bush stuff currently on auction suggests that most eBay powersellers are lining up behind that flag as well.
Poor Nader. Doesn't get a worthwhile mention on eBay. You have to discount all the George Nader photos if you want a items/popularity contest conclusion. But remember, Nader merchandise only takes away one more buyer from Kerry.
With the results drawing every closer, the rest of the world wonders if it can all happen again?
But George Bush said today that he was confident, because the election was "in the hands of the people" and that they would decide. What he didn't tell you was that he knows exactly who those people are. His dad, his brother, Karl Rove and a special detachment of the secret service.
(This is the first article by new rummager, Daze. Be nice, he's new)
500 million billion people watched the Man Utd - Arsenal game on Sunday and all the commentary today is about the standard of refereeing.
Arsenal fans were left irate at referee Mike Riley. Even the erudite, cliche-hating Frenchman Arsene Wenger used the phrase 'we were robbed'.
One fan has put the referee up for auction, with the allegation that he is a notorious Man United-lover, who never fails to award penalities at Old Trafford.
Although used, user comments are glowing:
Wayne from Liverpool said:"It didn't take me long to work out how to use Mr Riley, when you're wearing a Manchester United shirt it's as easy as ABC. For best results i've found that if you make your dive as dramatic as possible Mr Riley's "penalty to United" function never fails, I'd never consider going back to my old brand of referee...not now i've used Mr Riley"
Someone, calling himself "Sparkydog", registered three domain names on the 22nd October.
twinklydog.co.uk
twinklydog.com
twinklydog.net
As yet, there's nothing on any of the sites.
Either, this is the world's most ambitious piece of domain name squatting, or twinklydog is planning to launch a forum for his much misunderstood poetry.
Like the other wedding guy before him.
The progression of "Wedding Invite Guy", (as he will no doubt become known) is following the inevitable trajectory described in yesterday's post.
Today he was featured in the Star and even real newspapers like the Independent and the Guardian.
His identity will be no doubt be revealed at the weekend and he will have his flashbulb moment of fame.
"Fame" like this needs a new description. It's like being famous for fifteen minutes in dog years. (This would be equivalent to being "famous for 2.14 minutes" which still feels like too long.) Maybe we need a new unit of time to describe this sort of microceleb.
How about: An "Abi Titmuss Year", or a "Big Brother Year".
As in, "The guy who sold the wedding invite on eBay was famous for fifteen minutes, in Big Brother years."
Things Magazine writes about how the traditional "Arthur Daley" style of secondhand car salesmans schtick has become part of the language of eBay motors ads.
It would make an interesting research project to trawl through ebay motors and count how many adverts reference women ('the wife', 'her indoors') as a reason for making a car sale. Either seller has too many cars (a common complaint), or 'the wife' doesn't like to drive the car, hence it must be sold, etc. etc. We suspect such research would provide a fascinating insight into gendered thinking about cars, that they are somehow toys which matriachal figures have the power to deny. This cliche (which frequently tips over into misogyny) has probably always existed, originally as an oral tradition, passed on by private sales and motor traders. Now ebay, with its extended scope for written descriptions, has made it a written tradition.
mr_bo11ox has left some distinctive feedback, with comments including:
The "Burton's Wagon Wheels" of sellers! What does this mean? I do not know. A+
MEGA! I think it's safe to say this seller does NOT have a £300/day crack habit.
One guy, who offered a free joke in return for a positive feedback note brought out the cruel side in mr_bo11ox, leaving him a negative comment:
NICE ONE - Here's your 'free feedback' mate!!!!! HA HA HA! GET A JOB!
This left the seller, big mez, hurt and confused:
Reply by big.mez: ITEM WAS FREE OF CHARGE. WHY LEAVE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK?
But mr_b had a life lesson to hand out.
Follow-up by mr_bo11ox: FOR A LAUGH. THAT'S LIFE KID. GET OVER IT.
Another guy fishing for a website/book deal/series of nightclub appearances, twinklydog is offering "2 invitations to a wedding I don't want to go to"
He doesn't like the bride, so he's offering his +1 invite to the highest bidder.
It's foolproof. He writes:
"No one will know you're not me except the groom and he'll be so pissed trying to forget his new wife's a dog he won't notice. The only thing is, because she's such a dog, they might not get married, so I reserve the right to cancel the bidding."
Hew also doesn't pull his punches when it comes to the bridesmaids.
Unfortunately I'm going to have to dissappoint most of you by telling you that the bridesmaids are likely to be dogs too. I know, it's a marital travesty. The bride's best mate works in a chippy in Colchester, and they always used to go boozing in Stoke with her aunt who I seem to remember had a penchant for DKNY tracksuits, Pineapple Bacardi Breezers and cafe creme. Now, on the basis there's a 100% certainty that at least one of them is a bridesmaid, there's not a lot of optimism I can inject, is there?"
A new microceleb is born.
No doubt the most junior member of each tabloid's features desk is hunting him down as we speak. I'm betting that "The Sun' will find him first. They normally do.
And then all the people involved will become public knowledge.
And the tabloids will publish their pictures. They will run a text message poll asking "Do you think she's a dog?"
And then a private joke becomes national property.
And a wedding invitation, possibly offered out of politeness, has detonated in a way the bride and groom could never have imagined.
So, be careful who you invite to your wedding...
Our message board correspondent, magbot, sends news of an interesting debate on the eBay US forums. It seems that many people are buying up the contents of house clearances and selling the individual items for auction.
This thread covers one of the more interesting problems facing house clearers:
I’ve tried scrubbing, I’ve tried soaking, but I still get Dead Body Odor!
This summer we purchased an estate where the deceased went un-discovered for a few weeks.
Items’ closest to the body immediately went to the trash. I was able to clean and deodorize many items but, I still have some things quarantined that still have that faint dead body smell. There is a computer work station with an executive chair and some electronics equipment. I have used ; Lysol, 409, Febreze, Fantastic and some commercial degreaser with a little success. Any home remedies or suggestions?
The entire thread is awesome, veering between those who are sickened by the very idea, those who are inspired to write long meditations on the nature of death and those who chip in with "have you tried rubbing vinegar on it?" Priceless.
(Oh, and Paypal is broken. Or fixed. Or something. It's far too much like 'real news' to hold my interest. You can read entertaining outbursts of anger over on paypalsucks.com as well as the eBay message boards.)
You kids just love Rebecca Loos. It's beyond me. But if you're still not sated, eBay seller dealboy claims to have the actual glove for sale.
He writes: A great opportunity to own a piece of British television history - would look lovely framed"
No it isn't you maniac. It's a poor replica of a disposable glove that a slatternly no-mark used to rub down a farmyard animal. Do I have to write the Big Brother piece all over again?
1. "If we put you on TV, would you beat off a pig?"
Loos, as one of the "celebrity" guests on Channel Five's The Farm, donned white gloves to collect a third of a litre of a semen from the animal.
Reports suggest that afterwards, the pig sent her a text message saying how much he enjoyed it.
An animal rights spokesman, complaining about the cruelty of the show said "It doesn't help to see Vanilla Ice jumping on the back of a pig and riding it around or someone feeding croissants to ducks." Which is certainly the most absurd sentence I've heard all week.
Also, describing "feeding croissants to ducks" as animal cruelty is laying it on a little thick. Unless they are little UKIP ducks who particularly hate the French. Watch the show to see if there is a little perma-tanned talkshow duck strutting around, trying to take over the brood for his own ends....
I digress.
The Loos news sent rummaging reader Daze off to eBay in search of Loos related merchandise.
Where he uncovered a monster. The clippings monster, currently selling Rebecca Loos related clippings, among others.
The monster's trade is australian magazine clippings. Which he cuts out, arranges by celebrity and sells for A$16.50. (There must be about 1800 australian dollars to the pound, which explains why six months of bar work in London will buy the average australian a village in the outback, before they blow all their money on shrimp, beer and hats with corks around the rim).
But the loaf-stealer's grandson explains what he does in his own inimitable style:
RAA!!! I AM THE CLIPPINGS MONSTER!!!HELLO!!! YOU ARE BIDDING ON A NUMBER OF EXCITING - <...REBECCA LOOS...> - CLIPPINGS SAVAGELY RIPPED BY MY SHARP MONSTER TEETH (RAA!!!) FROM VARIOUS AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE or other MAGAZINE/NEWSPAPER PUBLICATION/S!!!
Bizarrely, his feedback is almost uniformly excellent. Except for one recent neutral rating, to which he responded: OBVIOUSLY YOU ARE AWARE OF THE PRICE WHEN YOU BID!!! RAAAAAAAA!!!!!!
Which is undoubtedly, just like dealing with a real monster.
(check out his store here)
My name is "DalekTom" and I am the coolest nerdy Dr Who freak in the world.
1. I have a tardis in my bedroom*. I paid £1,050 for it.
2. I have cool Dr Who props for sale
3. I have a girlfriend!!!!!
4. She will pose in her pants so I can make more money!!!!
There are more ebay usernames with 'dalek' in than you might think. Or maybe not. In any case, they must all bow down before DalekTom! The only one of them with a girlfriend.
*Bizarrely, the guy who sold the Tardis wrote "I have waited a long time to own this great collection piece, but reluctantly due to the morally wrong political policies of the Sunderland City Council I am forced to sell. May the councillors of Sunderland City Council sleep well at night knowing how imoral their policies are. EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WAR PENSIONERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY!"
I suppose 'morally wrong political policies' beats 'unwanted prize' as a reason to sell.
(link stolen from dan p)
Search eBay for "unwanted prize" and what do you get?
A miscellany of consumer electronics, DVDs, computer gear and sports equipment.
And the niggling sensation that if I had stolen goods to sell, then that's how I might describe them.
We've covered a lot on feedback recently. The good, the bad and the ugly.
But we just can't get enough of it.
Magbot sends me news of a thread on the eBay forums, where users are sharing their "awfullest feedback ever".
It includes gems like:
Totally unprofessional and crass. I pity his wife. Follow-up by seller: Your welcome to come get her, she's a pain in the @#$
Magbot also generously describes rummaging as "performing invaluable cultural anthropological documentation" whereas all I thought I was doing was writing silly posts about Knight Rider. Whatever, she's my new favourite reader.
Everyone has a website. Every industry. Every group. Every niche.
Take, for example, UK lapdancers. They have what amounts to a trade website at mypole.co.uk
It's a professional website, apparently run by lapdancers for lapdancers. Forums discuss the deals offered by various strip clubs. You can buy your own pole. It's even safe for work. (Time spent investigating the features of the site was purely for journalistic reasons).
One of the features of the site is a place for pole dancers to sell their old gear on eBay.
Most of the auctions are unsurprisingly for little dresses with accessible zips.
However, selling kit on the site is not without its risks.
Take this exchange, between a seller of DVD called "Bikini Bandits" and the purchaser, Ralph Sobek.
It starts badly and gets worse, when Ralph sends an email to the seller with the question "What girls are the Bikini Bandits? Do they have BIG breasts?" and subsequently tries to claim a refund based on the fact that girls breasts aren't big enough. It's classic and a must for anyone who has had someone try to reclaim money under dubious pretences after an auction.
The Telegraph reports that the Inland Revenue is starting to take a keen interest in the goings on at eBay.
eBay suggests that up to 10,000 businesses in the UK are run on the site.
The Inland Revenue has replied, gently, that all sorts of VAT and Capital Gains Tax is probably being dodged. (For example, the capital gains tax allowance is £8,200, with anything above that attracting tax.)
Like compilers of blogs about eBay, the taxmen have found that reading the tabloids is often the best research.
The Telegraph reports:
"eBay junkies who have appeared in the press or on television boasting of the fortunes they have made have frequently found themselves examined by Inland Revenue investigators.
"We do read the papers," a Revenue official says ominously."
eBay, as ever, are stout defenders of their customers. Whilst they are unwilling to reveal their own address and phone number, they willingly surrendered all records of their Powersellers to the authorities.
At the same time, they denied any responsibility for ensuring proper tax compliance.
It would be interesting to find out if any Powersellers received a 'sorry we've just dropped you in it' email from eBay suggesting now might be a good time to get their accounts in order.
We covered eBay feedback recently, looking at some of the more oddball comments.
This clever site looks at feedback in a far more scientific way, querying the eBay database to find the best and worst eBay members in the world. The highest rating goes to jayandmarie, who were covered by rummaging back in March when they tried to sell their feedback rating.
But the worst user ever to appear on eBay is the the german user "wer_ich" with a spectacular ranking of -96.
And the Germans don't hold back with their feedback, with comments like "Absoluter Mist", "Was für ein Arsch" and "Konto Falsch!!!" Which speaks for itself, if you happen to speak German.
(link from the always excellent boingboing.net)
In the UK, car number plates are transferable between cars and Cherished Numbers is an eBay category for people to sell their "interesting" registrations.
There are very few genuine crackers in there, because they rely on the randomness of the way the British allocate their number plates.
In the US, it's much simpler. You apply for your chosen vanity plate, which is vetted by a panel for offensiveness. If it passes that test, then you're on the road. But anyone on the road can complain and apply to have your licence plate revoked. (Which reminds me of an interesting digression about the phrase "licence revoked". See the tenth bullet point.)
These letters show a series of complaints and responses about a number of allegedly offensive vanity plates, including RUNUOVER, KSSMYSS and XSTACIE. In each case, the owner successfully defended against the complaint. Except for LIL-PMP.
This list however, shows the names that have been disallowed including EARGASM, STUDMFN, and for some reason DNWTOPP (please comment if you understand why this is rude.)
Few posts recently, but it seems that the 'comedy ebay item' story has become every newspaper editors last-minute space filler. So whilst there's been lots of coverage about Britney's chewing gum or football fans putting their players up for sale, very little of it has been interesting or worth reading.
All summer there's been an absolute overload of stories following the formula: "Ms X (insert crazy fan name) a crazy fan of Y (insert microceleb name), has put an A (insert nasty, tiny, hopefully biological item of tat here) on crazy internet auction site eBay. Bids are now running at $50,000. Ms X said 'it's crazy', I never thought it would happen. Celeb Y had no comment. eBay, is a crazy internet auction site where people buy pez dispensers, autographs and sex with minors. The internet is like a telephone, with a television in it"
And whilst the point is that this is exactly what this blog writes about, this avalanche of drivel has left me with a rather sickly feeling, so there haven't been any posts recently. We'll try and focus on the rare diamonds and maybe some non eBay stuff and probably less celeb stuff. Unless it's really cool.
One thing that has caught our attention are the auctions being held by "Kucinich Winddown". These auctions, for signed Dennis Kucinich memorabilia, are being held to make up the shortfall in funds his ill-fated run for the Democratic nomination.
His auctions, for must-haves like a laminated convention pass and official beanie babies are currently running at $80-$260.
Unlike the official sites for Bush and Kerry, Kucinich's website has an official 'debt countdown' clock, currently running at $170,000.
Whilst Howard Dean is credited with being the pioneer in using the net to build up a campaign machine, maybe Kucinich will become known for using it to close one down.
By selling his beanie babies.
The TV equivalent of hayfever, Big Brother has been ruining our summers for five years now. This year like every year, a self-regarding horde of disposable tabloidmeat is locked up in an unpleasant corner of East London. Each prepared to humiliate themselves in search of job as a presenter on a shopping channel.
But celebrity is a fickle mistress and for those already evicted, even the chances of getting a gig presenting the weather on LiveTV are receding fast.
So it's time to cash in.
Emma, one of the early evictees, is selling the suitcase that she was given to take into the house.
"Hi, do you want to own a piece of history?" she writes in her ad.
She has clearly had her lawyers look at her advert.
Had she written "an important piece of history" or "an even remotely interesting piece of history", then she would have been on shaky legal ground with trading standards.
But given that everything that has ever existed can legitimately claim to be "a piece of history", then she is strictly correct.
And bidders, like idiot seagulls, have flocked in. If you want to bid on it, you'll need to go north of £10,000. Compare that to "pieces of history" that you can pick up for £20, like Victor off Big Brothers Army clothes, or a piece of the Berlin Wall and you'll understand what a bargain it is.
Given the size of the studio, the number of contestants and the fact that the whole place is stripped down after the show, there will no doubt be enough rubbish to go around for anyone who wants to claim their own authentic pieces of history.
It's auctions like this that make you think that we need to completely rethink our definitions of the words "collectible" and "memorabilia", as well as consider psychotropic medication for large portions of the population.
erostratus99 is the Barack Obama of eBay.
Both men have recently announced themselves as new stars in the firmament with stirring words and unique voices. Whereas Obama positioned himself as a rising star of the Democratic Party, erostratus99 wants you to buy his jacket.
In both cases, the personal story is what's important. erostratus99 doesn't just want to sell you his old jacket, he wants you to buy into the entire notion of erostratus99-ness.
He does this with some of the purplest prose seen on the site. He opens:
"Before I expatiate at length about the jacket, please note that... the jacket is used, but in excellent condition, that is to say, it is free of rips, tears, stains, foul odours, scuffs, snags, repairs, or any other negative attributes of worn clothing. Allow your eyes to continue along their path to find out how I feel about this jacket and how you may be the next fortunate owner.
Expatiate means to write at length, or wander freely. He could have written 'ramble', but if you think he should have done, then you have a long way to go before you fully understand the complexities of "erostratus99ness".
He continues: 'Because I was enamoured with Hedi Slimane's insatiable desire to see the return of the style of a well-tailored man and perhaps the resurrection of the gentleman, no amount of money would impede my similar desires, thus I immediately acquired the jacket, forgoing penury and starvation. O, the lines of the stitching kept me in a fervour for many weeks as I remarked about the silhouette when passing by a mirror. '
I think this means he enjoyed wearing the jacket.
'My vanity was becoming sated and my narcissism was increased exponentially!' he writes, but now it is for sale to those who would join him 'in my quest to regain the valour and pride of the French aristocracy under Louis XIV, the Sun King.'
Such careful work over descriptions are few and far between. Compare the grunting, finger-waving style of the Manhunt sellers. Like leaving creative feedback, a more thoughtful, individualised style of writing on the site can only be encouraged. If only to give us more to write about.
Crueller observers might suggest that instead of being the true prose stylist he hopes to be, that he's a long-winded, dilettante auto-didact and that anyone can use big words if they sit next to a thesaurus. But that would be wrong. In fact, erostratus99 is a dead cert to be the Democratic nominee for President in 2008.
(Thanks to Adam for the link!)
If the 'war on terror' posting got you all fired up, then maybe you should sign up for one of the "Iraq Security Training Courses" run by PSD training and currently available for sale on eBay.
The course, designed for civilians who want to get jobs in Iraq, has the terrifying goals of providing attendees "with the tools and skills that will get you on a team, keep you on a team and keep you alive to collect your pay checks!" Though why you would want such tools and skills are beyond me.
Course modules are presented on the website as if it were any other corporate training awayday, though they have titles including:
- Intro to Iraq - the people, the culture, the languages
- Current threat levels and M.O of the bad guys - in depth briefings on all Ali-Baba!
- Kit to take with you - the rubbish and the good stuff!
- Places to avoid
- Who are the good guys?
Any course that has a session promising an "in-depth briefing on all Ali-Baba!" will no doubt offer a culturally sophisticated "Intro to Iraq". However, they don't appear to have a module on "what to do when you are kidnapped, which appears to be the only thing you can guarantee as a civilian in Iraq".
Also, I can only imagine that the scheduled classroom hour on "places to avoid" involves absolutely no tuition, just a white board with the word "IRAQ" written on it in foot-high letters.
Whilst not knocking anyone who wants to take a civilian job in Iraq, it seems unlikely that potential buyers will be found among the casual browsers on eBay. Someone sitting at work riffing through the site may choose to buy a DVD instead of a CD or an Aeron chair instead of a new printer, but I'm not sure that many surfers think to themselves, "Hold on, I was going to buy that despicable Playstation game Manhunt, but instead I think I'll go on a close protection course in the Brecon Beacons, learn all about Iraq and go and get a job driving a minicab for Halliburton in downtown Baghdad."
Maybe I'm wrong. After all, they are offering £250 off for bookings made through eBay. People do love to get a bargain.
(Thanks to petite anglaise for the link!)
The controversial playstation game Manhunt reveals eBay sellers at their most red in tooth and claw.
As Dixons and other high street retailers ban the game from their stores, eBay sellers are flooding the site with auctions, imploring buyers to "buy it now, before it gets banned".
The scaremongering is both hysterical and strangely illiterate. It is best shown in this auction, where the seller writes "THIS GAME WILL VERY SOON BE BANNED EVERYWHERE IT IS IN VARY GOOD CONDITION WITH INSTRUCTION WAS BOUGHT FOR £40 FOR MY SONS BIRTHDAY JUST A FEW DAYS A GO AND IS FAR TO SICK TO LET HIM PLAY IT .GET IT NOW WHY YOU CAN"
I count at least six spelling or grammatical errors in there, even allowing for an abbreviated, telegram style of writing. I would have put 'sic' before every spelling mistake, but I don't have a free hour.
From Michael Knight to Baywatch via ending the Cold War, David Hasselhoff has had an amazing career.
(His role in ending the Cold War is often overlooked in favour of his Saturday afternoon TV action roles. The man himself has said "I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie." But at least the Germans appreciate him.)
Hasselhoff became famous in Knight Rider - “A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist”. However “arguably the real star of the show” in Knight Rider, the KITT car, is now up for sale in this auction after a retirement spent on the gruelling celebrity car circuit, alongside Magnum's Ferrari and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
| KITT's Dad |
 |
KITT’s most famous feature, the sweeping red light on the front, was actually stolen from the robots in that other rubbish eighties Saturday afternoon series, Battlestar Galactica. Both shows were produced by Glan Larson, who not only had an eye for what the kids wanted in the eighties, but also a keen sense of cost-consciousness.
Wedding Dress Guy and Virginity Auction Student represent the self-publicising faces of eBay, hawking their personal lives for their five minutes in the Sun.
Today, rummaging salutes those who work their magic in an unsung corner of the site - the feedback rating. Too often, feedback between buyers and sellers is meaningless, upbeat, happy-clappy stuff.
Not so, for 'scott_abraham'. Scott has worked hard to receive some of the worst feedback ever seen on the site, including:
- BEWARE THIS ILLITERATE, OFFENSIVE RETARD WHO ENJOYS GIVING NEGATIVE FEEDBACK
- REFUSES REFUND! Biggest jackass on ebay!!!!
- Quickly turned psycho; sent harassing e-mails & left neg. feedback for no reason
- SELLER BEWARE!Won Nude Elvira&left NEG FB for GAY PORN?Either confused or A-HOLE
'Scott' hasn't taken any of this lying down. The feedback he leaves for others, might just be part of the problem. Negative comments he has left on other users profiles include:
- SENT NUDE PHOTOS OF HIMSELF AND ASKED ME IF I WAS INTO DUDES !!
- I WOULDN'T TRUST THIS SELLER AGAIN WITH STOLEN MONEY !!
- INTENSELY ILLITERATE FRAUD OF A SELLER !! SENT WRONG ITEM !! MORON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- FLAMING LIAR AND HARRASSING CHARLATAN !! EBAY COMPLAINT FILED !!
- SPINELESS COWARD !! FELT A NEED TO STEAL $13.84 AND SENT CRAP ITEM
'Scott' is no longer a registered user. It might have something to do with this bit of feedback he left after a recent transaction. The buyer wrote that Scott "Emailed me nude photo performing obscene act w/himself.COMPLAINT FILED w/EBAY"
If Scott represents the devilish side of eBay feedback, then andy46477 and phoneloser-rbcp and spessa are on the side of the angels. They leave cryptic, haiku-like postive feedback like:
- When these items arrived, I immediately duct taped them to my dog's butt.
- What's a little spinal fluid between you and a friend? A++++
- I'll bid on you til there's nothing left but crumbs! Then I'll bid on the crumbs
- The Lord only granted me one child, and she died. Anyway, you were great. A+A+
- It makes me so hungry I feel like I'm in the zoo
and my favourite, from spessa:
- Thanks for putting up with my violent mood swings. A-OK Seller! 5 Stars!
All this is to be heartily encouraged. I'll never leave anything as bland as 'great ebayer, prompt payment, A++' ever again.
The 'war on terror' is many things to many people. For some, it is a clear sign of an emboldened, neo-imperial America. For others, it is symptomatic of the centrifugal forces at work in contemporary Islam. For others still, it is about the nexus of religion and oil.
For some, it is a merchandising opportunity.
These enlightened few have obviously decided that eBay is the way to spread their message.
There are 'war on terror' fridge magnets, with the punchy slogan 'Airedale Terriers are fighting the War on Terror'.
| Fridge Magnet |
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You can buy 'Don't mind my driving, I'm looking for terrorists' bumper stickers.
There are Talking Donald Rumsfeld dolls that say things like "Oh, it was your rhetoric that made us do that..." and “I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said. But I know what I think. I assume that’s what I said.”
These are mere trinkets compared to this commemorative bronze ingot. I can't describe it better than the seller himself:
The Iraqi Mobile Scud Missile Launcher ingot depicts a camel with a scud missile upright in his mouth and Iraqi soldier swinging a sledge hammer at the camel's exaggerated testicles laying on a tree-stump. The reverse shows a depiction of Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein and the message "War Criminals Must Pay For Their Crimes." A unique satirical memento to anybody who served (or is serving) in either of the Gulf Wars or for the collector of military memorabilia.
The seller usefully adds this disclaimer: Please note: this is not an Anti-Iraqi or Anti-Muslim item. Its messages is directed at Saddam Hussein and his political arm that promoted terror.(Which, according to the US Senate, was just about the one thing he didn't do).
As ever, items on the site are trumped by the hysteria of the tabloids. The Mirror reports that 'TERRORISTS are buying discarded marked emergency vehicles on the internet to mount an attack on Britain's most sensitive buildings, police fear."
Note the important 'police fear' in that sentence. That means it's speculation. Which means the rest of the sentence isn't true. But the Mirror, like any good tabloid, whips up eBay, Scotland Yard and its readers into a frenzy of fear, which always sells newspapers.
It's clearly jealous of eBay's PRs giving a week of exclusives to the Sun and is trying to trash it with its readers in retaliation.
You can bet that junior Mirror reporters have spent all day typing 'anthrax' and 'weapons of mass destruction' into the site looking for negative stories.
Yesterday Rummaging was the Guardian's 'blog of the day'. They wrote:
Top blog
Blog pick: If it's good enough for the Sun, it's good enough to be blogged. Rupert Murdoch's red top is currently obsessed with the strange world of eBay, which is handy for a weblog called Rummaging. Its manifesto reads: 'An occasional blog focused on bizarre eBay auctions, celebrity property news, islands in the sun and fantastical travel destinations. But mostly bizarre eBay auctions,' and boy there is plenty of material to work with. All the key auctions are scrutinised: Glastonbury mud, is it art? Possessed Coke cans, are they possessed? And why did a photo of Ian Hislop sell for £10m?
Fame at last!
David Belbin is a British author who has written a how-to guide about eBay UK.
Today, he was on Radio 2, talking to Jeremy Vine about the site. In a very smart example to show how effective the site was, they sold one of Jeremy Vine's ties for Children in Need.
The one-day auction closed at £930.
I looked at eBay's guidelines about when to use a one day listing. It didn't include 'when you're on a book tour', though perhaps now it should.
It's also another example of eBay crossing into the mainstream in the UK. It's getting more and more coverage in mass market media.
What it needs next is it's own reality TV show.
A programme about eBay that sits in the Big Brother/Changing Rooms/Bargain Hunt part of the world is surely only weeks away. (This prediction is to be filed along with the prediction that the Sun and eBay are cooking something up together).
The Sun, it seems, has gone ebay crazy.
It has done a story on the auction site every day this week.
Which leads calm minds to question their motives.
Why is the Sun plugging away so shamelessly for the site? At last count, they've had an 'exclusive' a day for the last three days.
First, it led the coverage of the Kate Garraway Charity Banana.
| Banana |
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(For our international readers, GMTV comprises of some bright furniture, incoherent snippets of news read out by the Teletubbies and some slo-mo consumer stories about how the sky is falling, or how dangerous pop tarts are. It is aimed at the infantile and colour blind who need to watch twinkling shiny shapes whilst eating their breakfast. It is television to watch in hospitals.)
Kate Garraway is a presenter on it. She bit a banana and signed it. The Sun wrote about it. Now it's selling for £1,000. For charity, so that's OK.
The seller writes: "I am offering this banana bitten into and signed by Kate Garraway on ITV'S Good Morning Breakfast Television on Friday 2nd July 2004. She signed the banana live on air in response to a joke by her colleague Ben! I mentioned that I would sell this on eBay for Charity and here it is!"
Then the Sun featured the 'eBabes', women who were in love with the site.
It featured hard-hitting quotes like "When I realised I could also buy stuff [on eBay] from America that wasn't even available here yet, I couldn't help spending even more." and rentaquote academics like Professor Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University who said that "Getting a bargain is like winning – and people want to do it again as quickly as possible".
| eBabes |
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eBabe Lorraine from Greenwich said "When somebody told me about eBay and I first logged on I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. All the stuff I would normally spend weeks looking for was at my fingertips."
Lorraine's quote was definitely not placed by a PR agent.
Today it covered the sale of Lady Penelope's pink Rolls Royce.
What is going on? The only other things the Sun hawks so aggressively are Premiership football and Sky TV. Both of which it controls.
Can we expect the Murdoch empire to launch a bid for the auction site? Or have the Sun offices recently had broadband installed?
Forgive me for looking for base and cynical motives, but it is the Sun, after all.
The newspaper which is currently conducting a circulation battle in the North of England based on i) signing up Wayne Rooney ii) printing yet another fullpage apology for their coverage of the Hillsborough disaster and iii) blaming their bad reputation in Liverpool on two (Trinity Mirror owned) local newspapers.
The Wayne Rooney stories have been fabulous slices of tabloid non-news. The headline on Tuesday was shocking: ROONEY - I ALMOST QUIT FOOTBALL.
The revelation was that when he was a teenager, he didn't want to go to practice all the time, but his mum made him.
It's the same hunger for a headline that means that every celebrity autobiography has to fabricate a "I THOUGHT ABOUT SUICIDE" story, in order to generate publicity.
So I'm keen to find out what's going on. The only guarantee is that there will be some sort of News International/eBay announcement in the next few weeks. The only question is what the announcement will be.
The
Strangely, the lump of mud in a frame is still available, with bidding nudging £7.
Which proves, if nothing else, that the British punish those who try too hard.
The BBC reports that auctions are appearing from people selling lumps of mud from their shoes collected at Glastonbury.
As ever, rummaging goes the extra mile to actually find the auctions for you.
In this one the seller claims the mud to be 'Freshly scraped from the boots of my son this morning'. He is selling a loose lump of mud in a plastic bag.
However, in an attempt to capture the Chris Ofili style high ground,the seller has actually framed his lump of mud. It 'is imprinted with the symbols of the wellington boots sole, making this piece of dried Glastonbury mud very cool.
We watch with interest. Is it conceptual art or is it just mud? In this money crazy world, the only way we can be sure is to see how much it sells for.
Anything under £15, it's mud. Anything over £15, it's art. Anything over £10,000, Charles Saatchi has an eBay account that he's not told anyone about.
Cherie Blair has been identified as a keen user of eBay. She's taken to it in a big way, registering at the start of June and completing 5 auctions in the first couple of weeks, buying up Disney merchandise and strappy shoes.
In a world where politicians and their families are often derided for being out of touch and not knowing the price of a pint of milk, it's fantastic that the PM's wife is buying shoes from missbling.com.
Her username was initially the cute 'cherie_boo', but since the first appearance in the press it has been changed to 'cb23954'. Her feedback has been uniformly excellent. Unfortunately, since this username will now be watched by every tabloid hack on the planet, she should probably abandon it and start again with another one.
Talking about tabloid hacks, Dominic Mohan wrote that the people who had outed Cherie Blair had broken the rules of eBay. He wrote "The first rule of eBay is you don't talk about eBay. The second rule of eBay is, YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT EBAY."
I can only assume that he's been buying some very interesting stuff on the site.
Please, can someone find out his username and email it to me?
Two main stories dominating at the moment: the rash of auctions relating to posh cabbage-patch faced satirist Ian Hislop and the auction of the new Google Gmail accounts.
Ian Hislop
Ian Hislop is one of the stars of the topical news quiz Have I Got News for You. It was pointed out on a recent episode of the show that an autographed photo of him on eBay hadn't attracted any bids. Bids on at least one version of the photo finally closed at ten million pounds.
Subsequently, there has been the predictable torrent of Ian Hislop related (and unrelated) merchandise onto the site.
And so, the original comedy premise, which was shaky at best, has been flogged to death by the sort of people who think saying "allegedly" at the end of their sentences marks them out as ironic, hilarious iconoclasts, when in fact they are tedious, tedious, tedious people.
Which (with best Angus Deayton autocue sneer) will come to no surprise to fans of the show.
Pre-release Gmail accounts from Google have been offered to selected customers and predictably, people with these accounts have been auctioning the good names off.
ebayuser@gmail.com went for $12.50, napster@gmail.com went $127.50 whilst "invitations" to gmail, which allow you to choose your own sign-in have gone for even more.
Personally, I'm very disillusioned with this whole idea, having registered the Kinja usernames "wonkette" and "instapundit" in order to attract the ire of two popular blogs, as well as coin the word "kinjacking", but nothing came of it at all.
So they're yours for a pony, cash in hand.
Finally, take quick look at the ad placed by James Butler, Creative Genius. The ad - offering one page of James' "Creative Genious" is hosted here, after being ruled invalid by eBay. Presumably for the spelling of "Genious".
This post has grown out of some comments I left on Scobleizer's blog, where he relays some Guinness Book of Records style facts and figures (highest, longest, deepest, fastest) leaked to him by an Ebay exec sitting next to him on a plane.
As I read the article, I couldn't help but feel that the exec on the plane somehow misses the point about what makes eBay different.
Beyond all the slightly cold (though impressive) statistics, the most interesting thing about eBay is the way it's a prism through which you can view contemporary culture.
More and more, eBay is becoming a vehicle for people to express themselves about their relationships, their views about the world and all their hopes and fears.
All human life is there, as someone cleverer than me once said. It's Speakers Corner, Tyburn Gate, a freakshow and a bazaar all at the same time.
All on nothing more than an online trading system.
At a simple level, the reason for this is straightforward: auctions are guaranteed an audience. Popular auctions can attract rapid, global exposure.
Look at the international press attention gained by people selling their virginity, or a coke can, or an old wedding dress via an eBay auction. These people got to express themselves to a far wider audience than most can ever dream. Compare this to the criticism frequently levelled at weblogs: no-one reads them.
At another level, it expresses something about the increasingly transactional nature of our culture. We live in a world where every idea, opinion and experience can be translated into a financial return.
Celebrity culture provides something of a financial insurance policy against the trials of life, because no matter what happens to you, there will always be a book deal or a personal appearance to soften the blow of the experience. What was once a embarassing story you told only to friends becomes your platform to fame and fortune. Your wife left you? Never mind, you'll get paid to open this supermarket.
And eBay is central to that view of the world. It offers a mechanical formula for celebrity success, in that something will only spread virally around the net if it's adjudged to be worthy (by whatever criteria). Hits attract interest and interest attracts celebrity and celebrity is, unarguably, the greatest prize you can win.
eBay allows people their fifteen minutes in an explicitly transactional manner. In that, it epitomises the age. This seems far more important than statistics about year-on-year revenue growth.
Listen, you and I live in a world where a celebrity personal trainer has bought an allegedly possessed coke can on eBay for $212.50 which he will keep under his desk until he can find out how to use it as force for good.
On the planet where we live there are celebrity personal trainers, people getting surgically attached eyeball jewellery, dvd's for parrots, 3 billion people living on less than $2 a day, sex offenders being tracked around tesco's by the government and japanese lunches with kitten faces.
Voltaire was allegedly the last man alive who had a comprehensive understanding of everything there was to know and after that the world of knowledge grew too large and complicated to be understood by a single man.
Now I can't hold these six facts in my head without getting dizzy.
This is, in many ways, a tragic story.
But it's brilliant because it's delivered in such a matter of fact style. This is pure news, with no commentary.
"The hen was slaughtered after the incident".
Since I've been away, so much has happened in the world I choose inexpertly to cover.
Here's a roundup of some stories, written in the style of a local TV reporter wrapping up a few stories before the weather.
The Daily Mirror reports that a UK man (John Stephens, since you're asking) put his wife's underwear up for sale after she left him to run away to the Canary Islands with a man named Richard. Angry with his wife, in a lovely piece of tabloid journalese, livid John 'dubbed her a slag' in the online auction.
The Sun counters with a UK Special Constable who sold his uniform, a story proudly sponsored by The War on Terror(tm).
In investment news, Riverside County Airport is up for sale at $2.7m. With just $7,500 in annual revenue against annual maintenance charges of $80,000, there are perhaps better places to invest your money. And who better to ask about investments than the homely billionaire tyrant Warren Buffett. He's going to auction a charity lunch on eBay in June. but remember your wallets, as last year bids went for $250,000.
Quote of the week comes from an article about stolen goods on eBay.: "It just never occurred to me, even though I was aware of eBay, never occurred to me someone would sell stolen equipment on eBay.”
And finally, in the eBay category "Motors>Classic>Questionable Taste", the hearse that carried the body of Martin Luther King is for sale with bids currently running at $15,000. The owner 'has a dream' that it won't be judged by the colour of the bodywork, but by the quality of its character.*
I'm Chip Parsons, and you're up to date. Now Carol, with the weekend's weather.
*Insert your own excruciating final-word-on-the-local-news joke here, ideally based on an 'I have a dream' pun
Apologies for the delays to your regular rummaging service. Normal(ish) service has hopefully been restored.
To wrap up the Larry Star story, he's been commenting on weblogs like this one, where serious minded semioticians have been discussing the intentionality of the word 'hoax'. Larry (for it is he) writes:
If you are still cynical about being 'deceived' then you should really lighten up and take a good look at the world around you because there is alot more shit out there than this fat guy making a joke in a wedding dress. Thanks. From the heart of my bottom.
So thank you and goodbye Larry Star, another mayfly in the garden of eBay-created celebrities. As we've said elsewhere, did somebody say perfect game?
Stay tuned for the next episode...
I'm sorry, this is a pretty lame post on my part, but there's something about the description in this auction that made me laugh:
DESCRIPTION
adjustable tuck-in fabric strap, for small/women heads and engineered to be worn by girls/ladies with a pony tail through it for athletics/ sports - a real gem
I can't decide whether it's the enthusiasm and hype poured into a perfectly ordinary baseball cap or whether it's the phrase "small/women heads".
Also, I've been looking for funny feedback and will be doing a selection next week. If you have come across any, please email me, or stick a link in the comments field.
So now he's got a website at:
http://www.weddingdressguy.com/
Which is a sign that the whole thing is now officially over. Did somebody say "perfect game"? Expect to see him take the middle square on Springfield Squares this summer.
Andy Warhol is rarely quoted in his entirety. The full quote reads: "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. On the fourteenth minute they will set up a website selling caps, scarves and personal appearances. But it will be too late."
Local reporters all over the world employ the same house style for writing about the Internet. It involves artificial wide-eyed naivete, a tone that randomly writhes from shock to confusion and a missionary zeal to be the first person to expose the Internet for the nasty, unregulated place it is.
A standard story opens "The Internet is like a television, with a telephone in it. Local residents have been shocked to discover that it's not like a normal television, but full of scary paedophiles and people who rarely go to church. In fact, prisoners can make your children take drugs, by encouraging them to lick the screens. Your fearless reporter investigates..."
So, in this great tradition, possibily on one of the slowest news days in the history of the Seattle Times, reporter Nicole Brodeur was sent to dig up some news about the "ebay wedding dress guy", Larry Star, covered here and just about everywhere else on the Internet.
But Brodeur didn't write a small, local, human interest piece. She had a front page scoop. Her findings were shocking:
NOT EVERYONE ON THE INTERNET TELLS THE TRUTH!
PEOPLE WHO MAKE YOU LAUGH AREN"T ALWAYS NICE PEOPLE!
Pulitzer prize winning stuff. In the middle of the interview, Star says "You're digging?" with what appears to be slack jawed amazement. Little did he realise that Brodeur had a deadline and just 25 minutes to crank out the pointless non-story. Perhaps she should just give up and start a blog.
aguilera7599 has only just joined eBay, but he's certainly got the hang of how it works.
Check out this auction to see how he has managed to get 50,000 page views for $150 watch.
This auction, in which a man sells his ex-wife's wedding dress whilst recountng the reasons for his divorce, attracted nearly 7 million hits, 5 marriage proposals, 113 bids and $3850 for a $1200 dress. It's also made him a star, with appearances on breakfast shows up and down the US.
Look out for the book deal...
Now, first off the bat, any auction that starts "NOW, PLEASE DON'T FREAK OUT" is both brilliant and a slam dunk for inclusion in rummaging.
So settle down and don't freak out. Our man "Cultbuster" is selling the purest of products: The Internet Conspiracy Theory.
PRESIDENT BUSH AND SENATOR KERRY BOTH ADMIT MEMBERSHIP IN THIS SATANIC CULT WHICH WORSHIPS THE PAGAN GODDESS ELOGIA!
He has a point. Both Kerry and Bush were at Yale, where they were members of the Skull and Bones society. Towards the end of this interview, where Bush is by his standards candid about the parlous state of the economy, the difficulties of Iraq and the intelligence failures prior to 9/11, he admits membership of the club.
But Cultbuster is onto him...
our 2 major Presidential candidates simply refuse to reveal anything whatsoever about their lifelong dedication to the same secret,racist,globalist,german,pagan cult that Adolf Hitler belonged to...our sold out, castrated media are letting them get away with it.
BUT THEY CAN"T STOP THE FREE MARKET POWER OF EBAY!!!
Indeed they can't.
But then again, neither can Cultbuster. Reading the feedback for Cultbuster's other items, one buyer says "This video should have been advertised as only a bootlegged copy of a TV expose!" revealing very little about the Skull and Bones Society, the importance of the number 322 and the pagan god Eulodia.
So maybe Cultbuster too, is guilty of little deceptions. Is he an alien bent on taking over the world, $19.99 at a time?
Who can say? Rummaging however, as an elitist, world-government loving, fully paid-up member of the Bilderberg Group, offers coverage both broad and deep, for free. How can I afford to do this? Because our seat at the table has been underwritten by both the Illuminati and the Knights Templar. When we turn up as Head of the UN, remember that you read it here first.
(Ok, this is little more than an excuse to link to some of the cool conspiracy sites on the web).
DMOZ links about Skull and Bones
A "sensible" article on Skull and Bones
A hysterical article
While the battle rages about ID cards in the UK, the Sunday Mirror reports that a British Man bought a machine on eBay used to create fake US military IDs.
So whilst the arguments against ID cards (expense, irrelevance, civil liberties, rule of law, failure to stop crime) seem pretty clear to anyone with a brain, the fact that you can BUY MACHINES TO FAKE US MILITARY ID CARDS ON EBAY seems to close the issue.
A little bit of politics, as Ben Elton used to say, before he did some bizarre deal with Rupert Murdoch, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the surviving members of Queen and his eternal soul.
In other invasion of privacy news, the brother of cake-making Milken-wannabe Martha Stewart is to sell family mementoes on eBay.
In the quote of the day, when asked what he will do with the money, Stewart's brother replied "I'm looking at charities -- though, of course, charity begins at home.''
Bondedsale.com is a new auction website launched this week, according to Auctionbytes.
The highlights of the first week's trading is a costume worn by Sandra Bullock in the the film "Speed" for $2,500.
As well as lots and lots of decorative spoons.
eBay seem aware of this new kid on the block, as their marketing team are aware that auction sites stand or fall on their ability to attract and retain lovers of Sandra Bullock merchandise. Accordingly you can pick up a signed "Speed" script for $80, which also been signed by some guy called Keanu Something and a prop gun used in the same film, for about $110.
A Chinese Man has just paid $1.1m for the mobile phone number "135 8585 8585".
Apparently, the number sounds like "let me be rich, let me be rich, let me be rich". Though if you can afford to pay that, then you must already be pretty rich.
I'm presuming he isn't on pay-as-you-go.
The auction was held on Eachnet.com, a Chinese auction site. I'm not sure of it's affiliation to eBay, but it has a cool little animated .gif on it's site.
I'm starting from scratch. Mid-life change in philosophy. I'm selling everything I own and starting over again"
Home, car, furniture, antique bottle collection.
There's something a bit sad about all this. The listing reads like a character in a Paul Auster book. And I'm not sure that those characters are ever happier once they've come through the other side of their supposedly deliberate and considered attempts to change their lives like that.
Part of me hopes he won't get any bids.
Part of me thinks that for $300,000, you'd be getting a bargain.
Although I don't claim to fully understand it, this is brilliant.
| kristallogidratov |
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The seller, known as "water-scientist" is based in Minsk, Belarus. He claims:
"Water from Mars any country of the world yet has no. Therefore the opportunity to become the first owner of water which many years have been covered with a secret is represented to you."
I think what he saying is that there is a Russian rocket that's recently crash landed in Kazakhstan after a trip to Mars. He suggests he could buy the rocket for you and then extract the water elements, or "kristallogidratov", leaving you with authentic Martian water. For just $2m.
That's what I think he means, as "water scientist" appears to be using English vocabulary with Russian grammar.
It sounds a bit like the Nigerian 419 scam - "My uncle, General Samuel ABACHA died recently, leaving me a fortune worth $17m and I need a gullible foreigner to help me extract the money." Only it's Russian, so space rockets and martian water are used as the important nouns.
(According to Google, I am only the fourth site ever to use the word "kristallogidratov". Babelfish translates it as "kristallogidratov".)
So I sat back, thinking that I'd probably written the definitive entry on that nichest of niche subjects: celebrity hair on eBay.
Today I realise that I missed the story entirely*.
I'm such an amateur.
(*probably not office friendly, depending largely on what sort of office you work in.)
Douglas Coupland was once asked why none of his books had been turned into films.
He said that "Microserfs" was due to be a film, but the studio had bought the rights and immediately put the project into hibernation, with the intention of making it into the first "nineties retro" film some years in the future.
This freeze-drying of history struck me as the most couplandesque thing that could happen to film rights.
I was reminded of this by the auction of the domain name "dotcomguy". It's not quite old enough to be retro, but it's best days are well behind it. The solution? Attach a screenplay to it and sell it to Miramax.
eBay Powerseller lou728 describes himself as the world's leading seller of historical human hair.
His auctions sell hair belonging to Lincoln, Kennedy, Nelson, Elvis and John Lennon. His feedback is almost uniformly good. "Hair was too small for price" seems to be the only complaint.
The benefits of historical hair are clear:
Your friends, associates and relatives will be awe-struck upon viewing this rare and beautiful hair artifact. Weight per weight hair is considered the most valuable commodity in the world. Hair can last forever and be handed down limitlessly to future generations where autographs fade through the years especially if exposed to sun light.
The Maine Antique Digest offers more details on hair collecting, which according to lou728 "isn't weird at all".
I'm more worried about the Jurassic Park style possibilities. Couldn't you blend the DNA with some recombinant frog DNA and create a Dead President's theme park?
eBay are describing it as "their most expensive auction ever" and it has already received two bids.
"The Sausalito Challenge" is offering the right to sponsor their 2007 America's Cup bid. Bids opened at $18m and quickly raced up to $18,500,100. It's more than just a name on a sail, though. Sausalito Challenge are offering the whole "reality TV" package.
This is the second time they have offered the sponsorship pakcge on eBay. First time around, with a $30m reserve and no bids, manager John Sweeney described it as "a great success".
The "buy it now" price set by hopeless optimist Sweeney is $35m, but by America's Cup standards this is still cheap. Larry Ellison's team spent well over $100m on their failed attempt to win the last race.
The America's Cup is typically hosted by the country of the winning boat. Last time, the winning boat Alinghi came from landlocked Switzerland. After considering an invasion of Italy, the Swiss decided to host the 2007 event in Valencia, Spain.
Auction is here
Orbital Development is offering the chance to lob 22 pounds (10 kilos) of whatever you want at the Moon.
Whatever you want. Smashed into the Moon. Just bid on eBay.
Your package will hit the moon at 5,500 mph, so the condition of the contents cannot be guaranteed upon impact.
The company site offering the service is sponsored by a manufacturer of NASA approved beef jerky. Their slogan is "When you think of Space, remember beefjerky.com".
Gregory W. Nemitz is the the CEO of Orbital Development. He recently sued NASA for non-payment of a parking fine, claiming that one of their spacecraft had parked illegally on an asteroid he owns.
None of this is made up.
I have died and woken up in a Kurt Vonnegut short story.
When I was young, I really wanted a Millennium Falcon. Had eBay existed, I might have tried to buy one online.
| Worth £3/4m? |
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I do not believe that this was a mistake. When you're that age, this seems a perfectly reasonable amount to pay.
Unfortunately, the story is ruined by the Sun, who insist on reporting that the seven year old's mother thought "she would even have to sell her house to pay for the toy".
Just like those stories you read about nine year olds who are sent credit cards, ballot papers and human body parts, you can't help but cast a long, suspicious gaze at the parents.
(WaterAid update. BBC News ignored me. WaterAid have gone home for Easter (well done), but No RockandRoll fun have featured it. Bids stand at £1,125.)
Water Aid are auctioning three pairs of BACKSTAGE Glastonbury tickets. They allow access to the secure area, with tickets usually reserved for the music industry.
With 4 days to go, bids for a pair of tickets already stand at £1,105.
Given all the publicity about tickets this year and all the various ideas knocking about for how ticket sales could better serve sponsors and the public, it's surprising that this auction hasn't received more publicity.
In fact, I'm going to email them now. BBC News will probably put it on their front page.
Watch the power of rummaging at work.
Time for a recap.
It's been a washout for many of the auctions featured over the last couple of weeks.
Whilst many of the auctions we wrote about were ruled invalid, or attracted no bids, bidding for the Eurotunnel drill now stands at £28,250. When featured on rummaging, bids for the drill were only £1,600. However, after its exposure on the "world's leading peculiar auction and other things which grab our frightenly short attention span site", bids raced up to nearly thirty thousand pounds.
The power of rummaging at work. Think of the little kiddies.
Recently featured auctions:
Hits
Eurotunnel Drill: Bidding stands at a ludricrous £28,250.
Poisoned Turf: Bidding stands at £310
Misses
Please sponsor me through Law School: Auction ruled invalid.
Cuban refugee boat: No bids
Castle lee: Reserve not met
Courtney Love's Coffin: Reserve not met. (And if you can't shift Courtney Love merchandise this week, you ain't ever going to)
Glastonbury tickets: The nightmare continues. A hit or miss depending on whether you got through on Monday night or not.
Too early to tell
"teamoffshored": Sold for $910. Not bad given they were selling a meeting.
jayandmarie: Auction ruled invalid. Jay kindly emailed me to say they were "in discussions with potential purchasers*, so we'll continue watch developments.
*As far as I'm aware, this is an absolute world exclusive.
Manchester United have stopped their players signing anything other than cards and programmes.
No more signed footballs or shirts.
Man U stuff is so common on eBay UK, it's one of their most popular keywords.
However, the club say that players are being bombarded by requests to sign items that are then immediately resold on the Internet. It is, they stress, a small minority.
When foreign leaders make state visits, they exchange gifts to remind them of the firm bond that exists between their nations.
Then, fifteen years later, these gifts are put up for sale on the Internet.
Auctionbytes reports that the White House is clearing out the attic, getting rid of all the crappy knick knacks they've been accumulating since the Reagan administration.
You can bid on all the old china the Reagan's once got for Christmas, ceremonial daggers, big bags of flags and other knick knacks that get collected over the course of time.
This is not, unfortunately, about someone selling their Pet Shop Boys collection.
Eurotunnel are auctioning one of their boring machines.
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(A thought arises. Have eBay got a new PR team? They seem remarkably active at the moment with their "headline auctions". They also seem to have their own login to the front page of the BBC News website. Not that I'm complaining. It makes my life easier.)
Boring Machine auction is here.
Since the Rugby World Cup Final, eBay UK has been littered with collectables featuring Johnny Wilkinson and co.
Now a 30cm square of turf from the Telstra Stadium, where the Final was played, has just gone on sale.
The turf has been flown to the UK after being donated by the Australians, with all proceeds going to Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Naturally, a display of magnanimous, charming and charitable behaviour by the Australians raises the suspicions of any right thinking Englishman.
Then we discovered an interview with Telstra Stadium Head Groundsman, Graeme Logan, where he explains how he likes to drench every inch of his turf in a cocktail of pesticides.
A clandestine plot to poison England rugby fans makes a lot more sense. Expect to see lots more pieces of "hallowed turf" turning up for auction in the UK. No wonder they're not allowed anywhere near the Ashes.
The auction can be found here, under the grammatically bizarre title "Own World Cup Winning Turf!"
Despite all the publicity, it looks like Castle Lee is not going to reach its reserve price. There have only been two bidders, who have bid each other up to £5.2m
Unless someone is going to leap in at the last minute with sniping software (and really, does anyone actually use it?), the chance is there for you to become Lord of the Manor.
No. Sorry. Still no real tickets.
But No Rock&Roll fun has a nice idea. He suggests a few things, including selling a tranche of tickets that are sold in exchange for "community service". He suggests doing this offline, through Oxfam stores.
But why not run an auction like this as well? Instead of bidding cash, whoever is prepared to give the most time gets the tickets. Eight weekends volunteering for a couple of tickets, why not? I think it would be surprising what people might bid.
Not really.But if the eBay hit counters are any indication, there's only one way to get people to look at your auction at the moment.
Write "Glastonbury" somewhere in the ad.
It appears to be nearly impossible to buy tickets through legitimate channels, with 300,000 people hitting the official website at 8.01pm last night.
Nevertheless, tickets have already started to appear on eBay.
Glastonbury organiser Michael Eavis approached eBay UK to have them remove the tickets. eBay declined with an official response saying (and I paraphrase) "go away", "leave us alone", "it's none of your business" and "ticket touting isn't illegal anyway".
This seems a touch hypocritcal, since only last week, eBay banned the sale of Eurostar tickets.
But Michael Eavis is only a farmer, so eBay can happily ignore him.
Meanwhile, eBay is ablaze with Glastonbury fever, not just with resold tickets, but fake auctions complaining about the availability of tickets, to people just putting the word "glastonbury" in their auctions to get attention.
(For example, whoever thought up the title Get A Flat Tum For Glastonbury (Ticket)" as a way to sell a toning belt, deserves some sort of prize, or at least an increase in medication.)
Real tickets seem to be changing hands for up to £350 each. Which is a lot of money to pay to get rained on.
AliBaba.com rules.
Forget eBay*. These days it's the preserve of desperate undergraduates and unemployed software developers. The future is Alibaba. This Chinese-owned, English language site offers a world of amazing wholesale offers. I'm not so impressed about all the funding it's received, or it's hot products. (Though it surprises me that China has enough left over to export shackles**). I'm more amazed at the access it offers an everyday punter to the crucible of twenty-first century manufacturing.
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A fairly random trawl brought up:
Tombstones
Electronic Skating Dogs
Barrio Fiesta Bagoong (Presumably to make your Fiesta in the barrio go with a "bagoong". There goes that job with Saatchi).
Duck and Cock Toys (note to China WorldBest Group. Better run that through babelfish again).
Energy Drinks for Muslims to take on the Hajj
Pet Washers
and finally,
There is, quite literally, something for everyone.
*Note to eBay. This is just a fling. I love you really.
** I can be nasty about China because i) they're nasty and ii) they've shut off typepad already
The Guardian and others report that a 3d graphics team from the firm Discreet have put themselves up for auction after their jobs were "offshored".
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The team, led by Gus Grubba, describe themselves as having "collective, synergistic talents" and "believe in the power of innovative learning environments".
It's clear that the shock of redundancy has rendered them incapable of using English.
They also write:
"We are in love with what we do and we are the best people on the planet to do it."
"The product of our work has touched the lives of every person who has ever enjoyed a movie, played a computer game, or watched television."
Alas, it seems that the team is being "offshored". Not because of their penchant for meaningless corporate babble, nor for their collective modesty, but because of evil corporate America's relentless focus on the bottom line.
They write: "What happened to us is nothing new. Our jobs were offshored because companies need to focus on the bottom line. We feel it is THEIR LOSS, YOUR GAIN. High-tech is really shaken up by offshoring."
It's true. High skill, low wage, English-speaking economies can provide a real alternative to home-grown high-tech. This team have been hit by nothing more than their inability to compete with low-wage economies.
Like Canada. Their jobs have moved to Montreal. (Come on, it's practically the Caribbean).
The true power of offshoring is demonstrated by the current high bidder, who is of course, based in India.
OK. This is absolutely the last word on the subject. (As opposed to my last, last word). The girlfriend for sale bandwagon is now leaving town. (Thanks again, Natali.)
Didn't eBay use to sell Pez dispensers or something? Have they replaced all the category managers with ritalin-addled teenagers, too busy bouncing off the walls to notice that every other auction is either a press release or thinly veiled prostitution?
I'm off to look for funny medical equipment.
This is absolutely the last "please pay for my education" story.
Ananova reports that an American law student is auctioning the right to pay for her Law School education at Vanderbilt University. "jaa237" is asking for $119,100 to cover books, tuitions and loans.
Remind you of anyone recently?
When recently deflowered lesbian pragmatist Rosie Reid offered her virginity for £8,400, (c.$15,000) she set the bar pretty high in the "education sponsorship" stakes.
In order to trump that, for a fee of $120,000, you expect something pretty amazing. So hold your breath and get ready to bid.
You get an unframed photocopy of her degree certificate.
If nothing else, this auction offers a study in contrasts between carnal lust and simple altruism as motivating forces in eBay bidding. Rosie Reid closed at c.$15,000. The high bid on this auction currently stands at $26.
We've missed the boat on these. They sold for just 99p. Had I been Frank, I might have tried to buy them back. It's amazing what vets can do these days.
Do you really want to know what these are?
That august journal of note, the West Palm Beach Florida Channel reports that a Cuban Refugee Boat has been put up for sale on eBay by a seller from Margaritaville, Florida.
Described as a "conversation piece", bidding starts at $750, with the buyer to collect.
The ad reads:
"On the boat was left behind personal belongings such as clothing, shoes, tools, with a yo-yo, (old style spool & line for fishing), along with metal hooks we guess was used for retrieving fish & crudely made funnels used for the gas & oil. The makeshift sails are made of a combination of vinyl, tarp & plastic sheeting tied together with rope."
When you read between the lines of the ad, it becomes pretty clear that the seller just found it on the beach. No connection to the four refugees who abandoned the boat at all. Someone found it, now they're going to sell it. Proper, old-fashioned seacombing combined with US immigration's "wet-foot dry-foot policy."
If selling this boat strikes you as distasteful, don't worry. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the Key Largo Animal Shelter, which makes everything OK.
Courtney Love's had a busy few weeks. She's been managing her new album/tour/court case/publicity campaign, whilst at the same time scaring half the life out of most of New York. But then, she is one of the few remaining Proper Rock Stars, and this is what Proper Rock Stars do.
A downside of Proper Rock Stardom involves sneaky members of your entourage nicking your stuff and selling it to fans. Had it been around in the 1970's, enterprising roadies would no doubt have been selling off Hendrix's headbands or Mama Cass's half-eaten ham sandwiches on eBay. Natali pointed out that the coffin from her new video "mono" has just gone up for grabs.
You might think you want Michael Jackon's glove for $3m, or Britney's "snake" costume for $25,000, but what you really want is Courtney's coffin, for just $520.
So maybe I was right...in a way.
Described on Usenet (hello to all of you, by the way) as "a grandstand cry for attention", it seems that the jayandmarie auction may not be all it seems.
Reports suggest that the auction is driven by the couple's desire to make a statement regarding a number of eBay policies. However this plays out, such obvious tension between eBay and their number one seller can't be good news. eBay has a symbiotic relationship with its Power Sellers and if "music's big dog" (copyright:cd2u) bail out, this sends a pretty clear message to all the Power Sellers in that category.
Recent posts by jayandmarie on the eBay message boards bear out this theory, claiming that eBay thinks that the era of the traditional "semi-pro" power seller is over, making way for Walmart and Best Buy to list all their overstock crap. (I may have paraphrased a little).
In this thread, there is a long post by jay, criticising the elimination of sub-categories in the music section. He writes:
"...eBay is moving, I believe, toward a non-category system where everything on the site is found by searching, much like Amazon.com. You don't 'browse' Amazon, but you DO 'browse' eBay. Most of what I sell, I believe, is found by 'browsers' and not 'searchers'. I believe this is a short-sighted, disastrous decision. I have been hoping and praying for months that whoever's son-in-law is running this program within eBay will lose his job or give up on the project, but it hasn't yet happened."
He seems, to be fair, pretty pissed off.
"...I have repeatedly voiced my opinion that eBay is only as good as its sellers, and as sellers become alienated or frustrated and die off then the site is weakened."
And Marie seems lined up alongside him, writing "My husband and I are heartbroken over these changes" about changes to the books category.
More on this as I get it, though I stand by the fact that no-one will bid for it, but maybe that's the point.
Those links again:
jayandmarie auction
jayandmarie store
jayandmarie don't like the category changes on eBay
(note: at last look, eBay hosted discussions about jayandmarie were dropping like flies. Please email me if you find broken links or more news on this story.)
eBay's most powerful power-sellers, jayandmarie are selling up. They are asking $5m for their well known eBay store, which sells CD's starting at one cent.
What do you get for $5m?
You get real property of about $100,000, an ongoing operation with sales of about $1m a year,a website and a massive feedback rating of 167,032.
You also get to be the best customer of the Sierra Madre Post Office.
For the accountants among you, this basically values the goodwill of "jayandmarie" at about $4.9m, largely attributable to the jayandmarie brand.
Now, if your only route to market is through eBay, your brand is inextricably linked to eBay and the trust, reputation and value of your brand is based on your feedback rating, then your brand, pretty much is your feedback rating.
So with a brand worth $4.9m and feedback of 167,032, jayandmarie are actually selling their feedback rating at $29 a point.
Seems a little steep when you're selling CD's for $12 a pop.
Last year, the owners of Castle Lee tried to auction their castle. They used their own site (warning:site plays Auld Lang Syne) so whilst they got a lot of publicity, they didn't get any bids.They seemed to have learned the same lesson as Rosie Reid/Harmen - unless the auction is on eBay, you might get the publicity, but no-one can ever find it to make bids.
The vendors claim that the castle is going back on the market due to the high number of hoax bidders first time round. They also claim that John Travolta was interested, but he must surely be focused on his Jumbolair ranch right now.
So this time, they're doing it all again, using a more traditional eBay listing. Which is obviously a better way to avoid fake bidders.
Like all good eBay sellers, they're starting with a low reserve of just £4m to get the bidding going, although they hope final offers will be in the £8-£9m range.
With the dollar in the toilet at the moment, it's likely that bidders from the US will be deterred. So it's likely that the new Baron Lee might be someone looking for a bolthole from the newly re-elected President Putin. Just a thought.
More attention-seeking-through-the-medium-of-online auctions, with the news that a leading thoroughbred handicapper in Southern California is offering his services to a private bidder for a year.
Mike Superstein's ad says:
You would get direct daily advice about when to pass and when to bet, pick six strategy, the benefit of my extensive video library, and northern California information from my consultants in the Bay Area.
This is a bargain at just $52,000 using the "buy it now" facility, because not only do you get his tips on guaranteed winners, you also get to borrow his copy of "Rocky II".
There are no bids so far, probably because you could take the virginity of four Bristol University lesbians for that amount of money.
A few questions present themselves. Namely, if it's such a dead cert system, why doesn't he just use it to get rich, rather than nanny some bozo around the tracks for a year?
And if you're that bozo, for $52k, wouldn't you be better off lining yourself up with a Malaysian betting syndicate and have jockeys throw races at your convenience?
More suspicious minds than mine might wonder if Mikey isn't in need of a bit of quick cash. A quick look at his recent auctions offers few clues. The feedback for msuperstein9amr is good and the last things he sold were 4 opening day tickets to see the Anaheim Angels. So no easy answers.
Maybe, just maybe, it's for the publicity? I don't know. Age has made me cynical.
Personally, I'm not going to bid for this sort of service unless the seller's user id is "kfallon1".
If you put your head down, and really make Google sweat, you can find anything.
Whilst eBay removed the auction (story below) from their site, the auction continued on the girls' personal website, rosieharmen.co.uk.
The story about the cash strapped lesbian who sold her virginity on eBay has been widely reported. In addition to the £8,400 she reputedly made from the auction, she also presumably made a slug of cash from selling her story to the hysterical rag the News of the World, who have also started the predictable witchhunt for the successful bidder.
The ad apparently read:
“Eighteen-year-old university student looking to sell virginity. Never lost it due to lesbianism. Will bung in free massage if you are any good. Picture on request."
Although we've been unable to locate the auction - presumably eBay have removed it, I for one am waiting for the feedback from the two involved. If you can find any links to it, please, please email us.
Another eBay PR has a heart attack
These personalised statues are very, very cool. You send them a photo, a team of Mexican artisans make you a little clay caricature.mylittlestatue's feedback suggest that they are the real deal.
So why the lawsuit? Back in December 2000, I posted an idea for a Marziman - personalised marzipan action figures. Now don't tell me those ideas come along more than once in a lifetime. I've been ripped off.
In fact, worse than ripped off. Wouldn't you rather have a Marzipan statue?
Better in Marzipan?
The Boston Herald is obsessed with the property holdings of Kerry and Bush. No wonder perhaps. In these celebrity-obsessed times, the bling of one's crib might swing an election.
They report that Kerry's holding's, entirely funded by the millions inherited by his wife, frosty ketchup heiress Teresea Heinz, include "a 90-acre estate outside Pittsburgh called Rosemont Farm, a townhouse in Washington's swanky Georgetown neighborhood, a vacation home on Nantucket and a luxurious Idaho getaway near the exclusive Sun Valley ski resort" as well as their $13m Boston townhouse.
In contrast, Bush's 1,600 acre Crawford estate looks positively modest. In his annual submission to the Office of Government Ethics, he valued it at "between $1m and $5m", showing that laser-like attention to detail that has proved so successful in his presidency.
Crawford, Texas describes itself as "home to the Western White house". They report that Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, bought a "Friends and Allies" mug from the gift shop there, apparently to give to Tony Blair as a birthday present. Which is just odd.
Pictures of the Crawford Ranch are pretty hard to come by. Email us if you come across any good links.
The text of this soviet propaganda poster is apparently "a better nipple never existed, I'm ready to suck it until my old age".
There must be a hidden meaning to this.
Mustn't there?
A senior eBay category manager once gave me a sideways look and said, "Check out the scientific antiques section. That's where all the really strange stuff is."
I smiled and thought no more of it. Until now.
I don't think I will sleep well tonight.
You can find brand new female speculums for just £15 (there are male speculums??), vintage military amputation kits and antique leech jars and a picture of three-legged man, Frank Lentini. Charmingly described by seller dpclub1 as a "FREAK", the picture was taken before the existence of Photoshop, so must be true.
A picture of a naked man holding a plastic leg
Frank Lentini aside, the star of the show has to be the Victorian Electro-Shock Therapy machine. It can treat all manner of nervous ailments and I've no doubt is effective today as it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Bidding starts at just £25, which given the price of prescriptions today, might be worth considering if you have a child on Ritalin.
In the days before Prozac....
The Evening Standard reports that Jude Law has his eye on a bachelor pad currently thought to be owned by comedian Alan Davies. Which makes you wonder how Alan Davies made all his money. Then you remember that he long ago sold his soul to the Abbey National. Law, who was bullied as an effete and whey-faced child in Lewisham, South London, is unsurprisingly looking at places North of the River.
Law's new place will have to drip with enough elan and panache to impress the string of starlets he has been attached to since his recent split from haggard drug mum Sadie Frost. Presumably, being able to say "Did you know Alan Davies used to live here?" offers the cachet he is looking for.
The 3 bedroom flat in Highbury is on the market for £2.1m through Hamptons.
A good place to take Natalie Portman?
In other news, fatuous millionaire attention seeker Geri Halliwell has a new place, a £5m town house in Kensington. (Does she actually do anything else these days, apart from move house and hound members of the public).
Most of the auctions in eBay's slightly bonkers "businesses for sale" category are pretty bogus. The whole category is a bit of a shambles, full of eBooks, crackpot patents for sale, templates of websites with no traffic, crappy domain names and membership to wholesale clubs that you could join for free.
The ambition for the category must be to turn into a genuine business transfers site like Businessesforsale.com, but at the moment, it's mostly hot air.
Proof of this is found by looking at the number of completed items that actually attract bids. Very few meet the absurd reserve prices.
Some of the more sophisticated scams are to set up vending machine rounds and sell them on to an unsuspecting buyer. Bouncy castles and quad bikes should also be looked on with some suspicion. None of these are the route to being the next Bill Gates. Be wary of the innocent sounding "I set this up three months ago and haven't got time to dedicate to running it." It's bogus too. No business is worth anything after three months.
In almost all cases, it would be easier to start your own business from scratch.
On top of the scams, there are also those who are clearly mad. For example, £3m for the domain name "FootballonTV.com". The seller clearly thinks it's still 1998 or something. It makes the auction for www.churchetiquette.com look a like a bargain at just $100,000
But let's not denigrate the category too much. There are gems in there if you look carefully.
Imperial Watches for example, seems to be a genuine e-commerce store, though the price is a little steep given the revenues.
But by far the best business for sale at the moment, is here. The Banana Museum and Club in Altadena, California is yours for just $100,000. Would suit buyers who already own, say, the world's largest ball of twine, or a two-tonne butter Elvis.
The Banana Museum
It offers "all the contents of the world's first and largest banana museum...There is the original "Banana Club" golf putter, banana telephones, the boudoir banana from Italy, the gold sequined Michael Jackson Banana, and the world's only Petrified Banana."
I'm tempted to bid myself.
Castles. Evocative of knights, chivalry, medieval nobles and the tribal and religious wars that tore Europe apart for hundreds of years. Which makes it surprising that there are so many for sale in America, like this one in Florida. Brimming with authenticity, it features a 60ft replica of a Spanish Galleon in the moat.
For real castles, only Europe will do, with agents like Fortress, Viviun and Dalli specialising in Castles for Sale.
For example, this castle, in the south of France, is being sold by the current owners for €7m. What sets it apart from its New World cousins isn't the 48 bedrooms, but the fact that it was built in the 12th century and has been in the same family for 500 years. The new owner can apply for the title of "Viscompte".
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Germany is also littered with castles, like Burgbrohl Castle, 20 miles from Bonn. There has been a castle on this site for nearly 1000 years.
But bargain hunters should look east to the countries of "New Europe".. The "accession countries" of Eastern Europe, due to join the European Union this year, have a wealth of stately homes, mansions and castles available at, relatively, bargain prices.
The Czech republic, for example, is described as "thick with castles", like this Chateau, available for just €650,000. One of its key attractions is its proximity to the German border.
Funny how, over time, things once considered weaknesses can become strengths.
For the more ambitious, this castle in Poland is in the midst of renovation. Currently available for $1m, the developer estimates it will be worth up to $7m when finished.
John Travolta's central Florida home on the Jumbolair estate nears completion. Described by the developer as "a cross between Dynasty, James Bond and the Crocodile Hunter, the estate was once owned by the inventor of Nautilus exercise equipment, who also regularly flew african elephants in the US. GAFF thought it was a joke, but Jumbolair is so serious, even the Guardian's architecture correspondent has written about the self-styled "aviation community" of 550 acres. Other plots have been bought by a German racecar driver who owns a Russian MiG fighter and Hamptons residents who buzz down in their leased Learjets. Plots start at $350,000 for two acres and Travolta's is the first house to be finished. Why not check out the aerial photo before putting down your deposit?
Jumbolair
In other news, Diana Ross' apartment is for sale for $9.2m This is confirmed by Gothamist and Gawker, which makes it double-sourced, which makes it true. Eat that Andrew Gilligan!
Diana Ross
