Let’s bid our time

Michael Jackson’s glittery glove is just so passé; as are baubles from Marilyn Monroe’s boudoir. Celebrity auction items today are getting up, close and personal with the highest bidder.

Michael Jackson’s glittery glove is just so passé; as are baubles from Marilyn Monroe’s boudoir. Celebrity auction items today are getting up, close and personal with the highest bidder. This week, the hammer came down on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s ‘exhaled breath’ at $523 on online auction site eBay. The fact that the glass jar ‘may contain air molecules that came in direct contact with’ the Hollywood heartthrobs did not deter the anonymous bidder. Now before you turn your nose up at this latest fad, it would do well to remember that when Scarlett Johansson blew her nose into a tissue for Jay Leno, someone coughed up a grand $5,300, beating 82 other bidders in the process.

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As if steering Britain to victory in the World War II by the skin of its teeth wasn’t enough, Winston Churchill’s war-time dentures fetched a British auction house a bite-sized chunk from a private collector last month. Add to this Britney Spears’s chewed gum to Justin Timberlake’s half-eaten French toast and it might make you wonder just what the auctioneer’s block might dish up for us next. Maybe it’s time to offer up a few items of our own to cash in on this bullish bazaar of memorabilia.

How about Mademoiselle Mayawati’s original handbag, the one that has launched a million statues? Or the hapless flowerpot launched outside the Bihar Assembly by the suitably enraged Jyoti Devi? But if projectiles or politicos aren’t your thing, then maybe you could offer up your trendy bullock cart to clear out the debris left behind in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, or your kayak to ferry tourists through the capital’s flooded streets. As for us, we’re off to hide before someone brings out that jar to trap the rarefied air we breathe.