A Lame Attempt to Cash In

This is really funny. I heard about this two-headed snake that the World Aquarium in St. Louis is going to auction off (with a starting bid of $150,000), so I thought I'd do a search on eBay for "two-headed snake" to see what I came up with.

Here are the results (click the pic for an enlargement):

Out the eleven results, only three were legitimate items; the rest were bogus attempts to cash in on all the hype about the real snake. In other words, some enterprising souls out there figured that there'd be some curious people (such as myself) who would be looking this two-headed snake on eBay. (It turns out now that the snake will be auctioned off on reptileauction.com, which is probably a wise choice so as to minimize the bullshit auction quotient.)

The bogus auctions ranged from mere printouts of the photo of the snake that's been all over the Internet accompanying some other item such as a love poem (no, really) to original, "pop-art" paintings inspired by said photo. Although a couple of these auctions were obviously done as a joke, this is an interesting commentary on "hype marketing."

It certainly works; a purple, two-headed plasticine snake actually had 8 bids on it with almost 1300 page views according to the auction's visitor counter. Incredible. People would by shit on a stick, if it were hyped enough. "Get it while it's hot! Shit on a stick, and shit on a stick with nuts!"

Lemmings.