The things they try to sell on eBay - how about a used granny?

For sale: one used grandma
They’ve tried to sell just about everything on eBay, but there are limits
By NICK KREWEN
(Review of The Grilled Cheese Madonna: And 99 Other of the Weirdest, Wackiest, Most Famous eBay Auctions Ever by Christopher Cihlar)

Ever had the urge to sell your grandmother on eBay?

Someone in California tried to sell theirs in 1999, setting a starting bid of $10 for an "authentic grandma" who had lived through two world wars, came with her own dentures and was equipped with her own coffin.

For the two days the ad was posted, bidding reached seven figures before someone at eBay woke up and pulled the plug, citing a clause in their company policy that rejects human trafficking.

However, the Internet retail giant appears to be a-okay with allowing people to rent out parts of their anatomy for advertising purposes, as 20-year-old Omaha college student Andrew Fischer ingeniously did to help pay off his student loan.

Snorestop, the makers of an oral spray touted to relieve snoring, famously paid $37,375 (U.S.) to stamp its logo on Fischer's forehead last year for 30 days. The canny company undoubtedly received a hundredfold investment return on the amount of publicity generated in news coverage alone.

Those are just two of the many bizarre listings that eBay has had to contend with since its 1995 inception, and Maryland-based author Christopher Cihlar adds 98 more in his grab bag of a collection, The Grilled Cheese Madonna: And 99 Other of the Weirdest, Wackiest, Most Famous eBay Auctions Ever .

It seems that the pursuit of commerce knows no bounds, as everything from human souls and dream dates with Carmen Electra (oh, if that April, 2005 bidder had only waited another year, soon-to-be-ex-hubby Dave Navarro would have been out of the picture) to the front grille of an automobile personally wrecked by Billy Joel and the entire state of West Virginia have been sold — or at least attempted to have been put on the market — through eBay.

Some items have been quite profitable for their vendors. For example, the partially eaten Grilled Cheese Madonna netted Fort Lauderdale's Diana Duyser $28,000.

The story itself is priceless: In 1994, Duyser made herself a grilled cheese sandwich, took a bite out of it and realized she was staring at the face of the Virgin Mary.

Duyser further claimed that she although she saved the sandwich, she had not preserved it in any way or by any means for a decade. Further, she said she had enjoyed $70,000 in casino winnings since making her Madonna meal ticket.

There is no word whether Duyser, 52, received a message from her lunch on to make some extra dough, but she did find a willing buyer for her tooth-marked relic: a casino website called GoldenPalace.com.

It turns out the website proprietors have amassed quite a collection of weird and wonderful eBay offerings: so many, in fact, that you begin to wonder whether author Cihlar should have signed a publishing agreement with them, considering the amount of free publicity they reap in his pages.

The website owners have been active since Cihlar's book was finished, saying it has purchased actor William Shatner's kidney stone for $25,000 (with proceeds to benefit Habitat For Humanity); obtained an official invitation to Britney and K-Fed's wedding and — as a postscript to the whole Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich incident — paying Duyser an additional $5,999.99 for the pan in which the "sacred sandwich" was supposedly conceived.

They've paid for Duyser to get a likeness of the delicacy tattooed on her chest.

And that's the ironic twist to this lightweight, mildly amusing paperback: Via the subject of eBay, author Cihlar has perhaps unwittingly played into the hand of a casino website devoted to the notion that the true value of publicity is anything but a gamble.

(Nick Krewen is a Toronto writer and editor.)