I made my first ticket purchase on eBay last night: for tickets to Spamalot, which is just closing its run in Chicago on its way to Broadway. Two seats for $199 seemed like a good deal, as I have heard that the really good ones are going for as much as $500. I have to admit to a lot of anxiety: I purchased the tickets at 8 p.m. on a Friday night for a 2 p.m. matinee the next day. I got the seller's phone number and left him an anxious message in case he didn't check his e-mail right away. Not to worry: the tickets were there the next morning; I printed them out from the PDF file, took them to the Shubert Theater, and was relieved when they were scanned and turned out to be "as advertised."

The seats turned out to be excellent, but not for the reason the seller supposed. There was a partial obstruction from the level above, but the seats were in an area of the theater where the staff sat. And who should sit right behind us but the author, Eric Idle himself. Idle impressed us with his generosity in signing playbills (yes, I got one). Most of the time, he watched the show seriously, mouthing all the songs to himself. A little boy came up to him and praised his performance in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The show was great entertainment and will be a smash hit. It does appeal to people like me who know every Monty Python TV sketch by heart. It was not quite the hilarious, nonstop riot that the Producers was when we saw it here in Chicago in 2001. The Producers actually had a story, and there was an actual relationship between the main characters. This was more like a looney revue, a series of sketches loosely strung together, but beautifully done. Hank Azaria came up with one crazy accent after another; he was terrific, as was Sara Ramirez as the Lady of the Lake. It is tasteless, outrageous, and silly, and worth every penny if you can get a ticket. Look on eBay if you do...

In my books, I urge sellers to try to tell a good story so they get attention for their items. Well, here's a good ghost story. Do I believe it? Not really. But as a sales strategy, it's terrific:

eBay item 5545200281 (Ends Dec-27-04 16:50:16 PST) - ANTIQUE DAGGER FOUND IN WALL OF HOUSE HAUNTED GHOST

Guess who has an op-ed column in the New York Times today? Bob Greene. Yup, that Bob Greene: the former Chicago Tribune columnist who was fired after a sex scandal, the writer many in this town loved to hate. Read his work here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/22/opinion/22greene.html.

...and speaking of spam, I just visited one of the sites described in Internet Babylon, Interview with God, and found myself instantly bombarded by the Divine Spirit of Marketing. What happened to this site? It no longer seems to be run by its creator, Reata Strickland, who is at Moments With God (http://www.momentswithgod.com). The original Interview with God site now hawks Interview with Jesus DVDs and exhorts members to send out unsolicited e-mail about the site to at least five of their closest friends. Maybe Reata sold the site or the trademark to someone else. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not into the whole Christianity thing, but I loved Reata's story and found her to be a very generous person. I just wonder if she's OK with what's going on at her original site.

Even if you get the feeling that much of the world is going down the tubes, there is always hope for independent creativity. I am happy to see Spamradio (http://www.spamradio.com) is still delivering their unique and amazing audio entertainment to the world; they must have gotten enough donations to keep them going.

I was stunned by the news, at the end of the ABC program This Week, that 40 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq this week. This reminds me too much of the Friday 6 p.m. news programs I used to watch when I was a kid. Every week, they would report on how many people had died in Vietnam. Only I remember that in the case of Vietnam, the newspeople would tell you how many U.S. soldiers had died, and then how many North Vietnamese had died. I have been trying to find a week-by-week death count pertaining to Vietnam but with no luck (suggestions appreciated). However, I did discover that from this blog (http://pieterfriedrich.com/blog/entries/00000272.htm), 1,926 U.S. Soldiers died in Vietnam in all of 1965, for an average of about 37 per week. If Iraq is this generation's Vietnam, we are only at the early stages, in other words.

The Appliance Blog is listed on a site called UtterlyBoring.com. I call it utterly fascinating. An appliance repairman in Springfield, Oregon provides a daily record of his house calls and repair jobs, complete with photos of odd-looking appliance components he has worked on. He updates it virtually every day. He only goes by his first name, Jake. You can't e-mail Jake, as far as I can tell. He provides a link to an appliance store. You think, naturally, that this is where he works. You talk to the guys at the counter. "No, we don't have anything to do with it but we know who he is. We'll call him and ask if he wants to talk to you." So I wait, hoping to hear from Jake the mystery repairman. This blog (http://www.applianceblog.com) is not self-promotion. Is it art?

CNN has a couple of Internet Babylon-type stories today:

Woman offers ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich bearing image of Virgin Mary for sale; bids reach $16,000. http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/16/ebay.sandwich.ap/index.html.

Virtual hunting allowed on Texas ranch; Web surfers can point, click, and kill:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/16/life.hunting.reut/index.html.

Personally, I think Grilled Cheese Woman looks more like Drew Barrymore, but you decide.

All the outrage over the shooting of an apparently unarmed Iraqi by a U.S. soldier arises only because the event was captured on video. I am sure such incidents are common. Was anyone else watching the BBC World News last night? A crew was following another group of soldiers around Fallujah, going house to house. I could have sworn one of them said, "A guy was sleeping...I killed him." Any human body that is lying on the ground and not dead is seen as a potential bomb. The problem is not that such atrocities are occurring in the fog of war but that we are there in the first place.

An eBay cautionary tale: A seller told me about a crystal chandelier she sold online. Someone bought it with a snipe bid of $350, which was far more than it was worth. The seller happily mailed out the item. She double-boxed it and put bubble wrap in between the boxes. The buyer tried to resell it but apparently could not get the $350 back, so she claimed that it was broken and got the insurance information for the item. She then filed a claim with the Post Office, hoping apparently to get her money back that way. What's the moral? For eBay sellers, it's get insurance for everything you sell.