by GIDEON GINRACHMANJINJa-VITUS, Alternate Reality News Service Economics Writer
Harold Cowabunga put his entire life up for auction on ehBay. Every object he ever owned, plus his life history, including family, friends, string of failed relationships, string of failed businesses and string of failed string collections. "I was just fed up with the whole thing and wanted to start fresh," Cowabunga explained.
Unfortunately, after three weeks of less than ferocious bidding, the highest offer was $12.43.
"That sucks," Cowabunga stated. "I thought for sure that my collection of miniature replica 16th to 18th century spittoons would go for at least...twice that!"
"Oh, the indignity! Oh, the embarrassment! That a value could be put on a human life, and such a low value at that!"
Cowabunga's sometime girlfriend Endora Parker von Parker ridiculed the
[EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF: The quote above needs an attribution.]
I decided not to attribute the quote because the attribution was quite long.
[EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF: Proper journalistic style requires proper attribution.]
Really long.
[EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF: Still.]
I don't think you quite appreciate just how long an attribution can be.
[EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF: Just attribute the quote, please.]
"Oh, the indignity! Oh, the embarrassment! That a value could be put on a human life, and such a low value at that!" said technology theorist and part-time potted plant Rudolpho Garbanzo-Behan, as quoted in Hollywood Babble On: The Wit and Wisdom of Bit Players, quoting Jelly Biafra, who was quoted in the Times of Tuktoyaktuk having said it at a rally of unemployed herring riveters, giving credit for the original sentiment to KITT, the car in Knight Rider, who actually was repeating something the actor William Daniels had heard on the set of St. Elsewhere uttered by a bored Teamster who had heard it from his brother-in-law who had heard it from an attorney-at-law named Marci Plie-Grande who was quoting Orson Welles who had been quoting H. G. Welles who, frankly, ripped the idea off from Shakespeare who had borrowed (and polished) the line from Purgatorio; Dante's quote employed an idea he had gotten from an itinerant horseshoe spitter who swore he was just quoting scripture, although nobody says anything vaguely like this in the Bible, and he may actually have misquoted something that somebody in a small village he had ridden through misremembered from Homer's The Iliad.
[EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF: You could have just attributed the quote to Garbanzo-Behan and left it at that.]
I did warn you that it was long.
This is not the first time that somebody has tried to sell unusual personal items on ehBay. Micheline Asymptotic, noted for having done absolutely nothing notable in her life, put all of her possessions up for auction in June, 2006. She probably would have gotten less than Cowabunga, if not for a rare mint condition Hello Kitty kitchen apron that had been handed down in her family for generations.
Then, there was Arnold Orangutan N. Flexion, who attempted to sell not his life, but the lives of all of the avatars he had developed online. Unfortunately, they were for games such as Cerebellum Smashers, Pirates of the Lesser Antilles and Realms of Magic, Mystery and Monsoons, games which nobody actually played. The fact that Realms of Magic, Mystery and Monsoons was an attempt to set the Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Arthur Conan Doyle in a Tolkeinesque world where it never stopped raining should explain why.
"You would think that people who are bored with their own lives would jump at the chance to buy somebody else's life. But, why pay good money for a life that's just as boring as yours?"
The limitations of car wax on the etail process may also
[EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF: Please attribute the quote.]
Really? Did you learn nothing from last time?
[EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF: Sigh. Proper attribution format in news articles must be maintained. This is what separates us from the animals!]
"You would think that people who are bored with their own lives would jump at the chance to buy somebody else's life. But, why pay good money for a life that's just as boring as yours?" asked Roy Lebanter. He was, of course, repeating something he had read in an article in Elle magazine titled "23 Ways to Confuse Your Husband Into Thinking He's a Housecat" which was, frankly, plagiarized from a Redbook article called "23 Ways to Confuse Your Housecat Into Thinking He's a Husband," which quoted a study by Rather, Mathers, Blatherskite and Goldfinkle in the Journal of Errant Nights, which quoted noted Physiognomy Theorist Fricative Pudenda in an unpublished paper that was never circulated
[EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF: That's enough. I get it. Just end the article.]
Cowabunga is not sure what to do next. "Accepting the offer would just confirm that I'm a loser," he stated. "But, not accepting the offer would, umm, also confirm my loserdom. I guess the best outcome for me would be if ehBay's servers were attacked by politically rabid squirrels and lost my information."
We all live in hope.