Sometimes, it's hard to tell what's a joke on eBay and what's not. Selling grilled cheese with the Virgin Mary's face is a joke. Selling Clay Aiken's handprints in cement is apparently not--high bidder is currently $10,800 (at least it's for charity):
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3851111309&category=58

...and there's an old left-handed bottle currently at $9,800, with two days left in the sale:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6131233770&category=890

As far as I am concerned, we are blessed to have eBay. Just as blessed as the BVM herself. On a day when deadlines are pressing down on me and editors are nipping at my heels, I do a search for "grilled cheese" and am heartily rewarded:

Blessed Grilled Cheese Virgin Mary Kit with Quesadilla Option:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=1469&item=5536406729&rd=1

VirginMaryGrilledCheese.info domain name ($500 BIN price):
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=3767&item=5732798857&rd=1

Virgin Mary in Grilled Cheese watercolor painting:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=20135&item=5536211107&rd=1

A reader writes: "GCW is a dead ringer for Marlene Dietrich." Absolutely--why didn't I see it before?

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.