Weird Stuff On Ebay

If you can buy a 1metre high set of deer antlers on Ebay for less than a case of beer ( as my friend did recently), what else could available?

Needles, Haystacks.
Sure. Categories to browse are useful for computer parts or more lately, for friends who seem to acquire their second hand clothes via Ebay. And Musicthing provides a good filter for endless musical oddities available on Ebay eg actual kraftwerk synthesizers, etc. For finding genuinely weird items, that database is too big for anything but the search button. Which means choosing the right keywords. And lets limit search to items from within Australia.

Antlers? Just to see what else my friend missed. For a deer-less island, impressively no less than 5 sets of antlers could be found.
Taxidermy? Offered actual wall-mounted deer antlers with full heads starting from around $750 ( many on offer ), but also an american skunk “excellent condition” (bidding was at $207), a rattlesnake head ($45 ), a giant tarantula ( $100 ), a predictable assortment of sharks teeth, kangaroo pouches and crocodile heads, and most temptingly – a taxidermied rabbit holding a hunting shotgun and wearing camouflaged unifrom ( $90 ). Taxidermy is an artform, y’hear?

Voodoo? 166 results, but mostly brand oriented stuff, no juicy spells or 21C witchcraft..
Bizarre? 42 items – leather pants, frank zappa CDs, monster bracelets.
Spiritual? 101 items – books, ‘healing cds’ crystal balls. *yawns*
Terrorist? 11 items including a hessian “Terrorist” body bag ($18 ) , a ‘suspected terrorist’ T-Shirt ($25) and a How to survive a terrorist attack manual ( $25).
Robot ? 353 items, with an ‘Automatic Conveyor Robot Donut Maker’ starting at $5,950.00.
Rare? 12630 supposedly rare items on offer, mostly CDs.
Nuclear? 30 items : A useful ‘Map of Uranium Coal Nuclear Fuels in India & Burma’ ($75), and a British Army NBC (Nuclear Biological Chemical) Suit ($130).
Skeleton? 281 – including a Life Size Human Anatomical Skeleton Female Model 170cm – ($133 )
Ticket? Not so strange, just curious to see how many available – 1439, the bargain ‘buy now’ price of $4250 for a “Date With Destiny” and motivational speaker Anthony Robbins, being particularly alluring.
Ebola? 1 in Australia, 17 worldwide, including 1x very special “EBOLA VIRUS SCIENCE MEDICAL Custom Italian Photo Charm” yours for $17.50 at time of bidding.
Enema? Perhaps appropriately, all 7 items were Blink 182 albums.
Medical? 261, Drugs? 95, Hypnotism? 26, Brain? 137 etc etc.

Perpetual, Peer to Peer Garage Sales?
What to make of all this availability? Skeletons in closets, crap in basements, all the world’s backyard sheds all in the one shippable database? On the one hand, it means avoiding waste and clever re-use of items rather than increasing demand for more new products, but there’s something disturbing about the number of planes in the sky at any one point, that are probably be filled with Ebay gear zipping from country to country. There’s merit in maximising what can be provided locally.

Related : The Slow Food movement, which aims to work towards “local production and consumption which will exploit “best practices” of science and professions worldwide but ultimately prove cheaper due to less reliance on transport and energy and chemical and technology intensive methods.”

Where to now for Ebay?
They’ve made a few purchases of their own in recent years:
skype.com – the dominant VOIP net phone software. Presumably to faciltate even easier sales, as well as broaden how they line their pockets. Plenty of better alternatives available tho.
paypal.com – popular online payment system. Now challenged by Google’s Checkout payment system.

Related: on the payment front, ‘micropayments’ are an interesting idea that many creators find attractive – users click easily to donate tiny payments which means that artwork that has enough merit to generate an audience, can also generate an income without advertising. One such micropayment system recently closed – bitpass.com
Arguments for? www.scottmccloud.com/comics/icst/icst-6/icst-6-full.html
Arguments against? www.nothings.org/writing/upay.html

Autobot Roulette:

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