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Barrett-Jackson Auctions has a car for sale with some history behind it. There were many ’69 Dodge Chargers used in the TV series The Dukes of Hazzard, but this particular General Lee was the one you saw jump every week in the show’s introduction (55 seconds into this video).
Featured several times in the first episode of CBS hit “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Fondly named “Lee 1″ is the very car used to jump over a Hazzard County police cruiser in the first episode. Carefully restored over a 16 month period to pre-jump condition.
Lee 1 was purchased by a California movie studio in 1978, soon to become “The most famous television car in the world.” Lee 1 was featured several times in the first episode of CBS’ hit television series “The Dukes of Hazzard.” This episode titled “One-Armed Bandits,” aired on January 26, 1979 and was filmed in the Covington, Conyers and Oxford area of Georgia. The show’s opening sequence, featuring Bo and Luke Duke, included the clip of Lee1 jumping over a Hazzard County police cruiser. That jump, for which Lee 1 is most famous, was made by a stunt man on the campus of Oxford College on Saturday 11, 1978. Lee 1′s first and only jump was 16 feet up and over the cruiser, landing 82 feet from the take off ramp. The only cast member that ever drove Lee 1 was John Schneider, who played Bo Duke. After 23 years in a junkyard, in Metro Atlanta, Lee 1 was rescued and professionally, passionately restored to pre-jump condition over a 16 month period. Lee 1 is truly an American Icon.
See plenty more pictures of the car at the auction site. Link -via Fark
The Panavision PSR 35mm camera used to film the original Star Wars movie sold for over $600,000 at auction this week, a sale price which broke the record for highest selling price for a camera ever.
The camera was refurbished back to its original state, was said to be in full working order, and now the new owner can get to work filming Episode 4 all over again! Just kidding, but wouldn’t it be hilarious if someone bought the camera then remade such a beloved movie?
In July, Sotheby’s of London will auction off the only handwritten Jane Austen manuscript in private hands. It’s the unfinished novel The Watsons, which some say Austen might have completed if it weren’t so close to her own family life.
The Watsons manuscript shows how Austen’s other manuscripts must have looked. It also shines an interesting light on how she worked. Austen took a piece of paper, cut it in two and then folded over each half to make eight-page booklets. Then she would write, small neat handwriting leaving little room for corrections – of which there are many. “You can really see the mind at work with all the corrections and revisions,” said Heaton.
At one stage she crosses so much out that she starts a page again and pins it in. It seems, in Austen’s mind, her manuscript had to look like a book. “Writers often fall into two categories,” said Heaton. “The ones who fall into a moment of great inspiration and that’s it and then you have others who endlessly go back and write and tinker. Austen is clearly of the latter variety. It really is a wonderful, evocative document.”
The Watsons was written in 1804, not a hugely happy time for Austen professionally – she had one novel rejected and another bought by a publisher who failed to print it.
The manuscript is expected to bring between £200,000 and £300,000. Link -via Holy Kaw!
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Here’s a tale of an eBay sale that grew and grew. British diver D.H. Morgan posted a wetsuit for sale. In his colorful description, he emphasized that the suit had never been peed in -and posted a picture of a bear at a urinal to somehow drive that point home. The bear picture made the auction go viral, so he changed it to a charity auction (language warning).
This listing for my urine-free wetsuit is getting a lot of unexpected attention which is nice but I’m feeling I should do something positive with all the ‘f*cking energy man’, so I’ve decided to give 90% of the money it makes to the Red Cross to aid their efforts in Japan. That sounds all ‘oh look at me I’m so nice I’m giving to charity’ doesn’t it… yeah well p*ss off.
But what! There’s more!
Just got off the phone to XCEL wetsuits in Hawaii, who are very kindly donating a BRAND NEW 2011 Drylock wetsuit to the auction, it will remain a 3/2 (summer) but will be available in a range of sizes to suit the winning bidder. So now, in addition to the original p*ss free suit, you’ll also get a brand spanker, but still no bears or doors, just TWO wetsuits free of urine, one old and knackered (m) and one lovely and new (any size).
After that, the auction snowballed. Different companies have added a lot more merchandise, like a watch, boots, surfboard, books, and concert tickets. Morgan created a separate website called bears don’t wear wetsuits to handle questions and correspondence about the auction. As of this writing, the bidding stands at £9,300.00, which is $15K US. Link -via Metafilter
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How much would you pay for a dinner date with Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell? Or lunch with original Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter? How about skydiving with a shuttle astronaut? Or maybe you’d be more inclined to purchase some astronaut autographs, or objects that have been in space. These are all up for bid now at the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation during their spring auction. The ASF was founded by Mercury astronauts, and proceeds go to fund science and technology scholarships for deserving students. Bidding will close on March 26. Link
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Phil Johnson, a homeowner in New Zealand, has put a rock up for sale. The rock found its way to his home during the recent earthquake in the Christchurch area.
For sale 1 owner 25 – 30 tonne landscape feature (answers to the name Rocky) …
He is in pristine condition (just a little bit of concrete dust). Suitable for garden feature, or as in our case a magnificent addition to your living area.
Rocky will enhance your “indoor outdoor” flow considerably, especially if you load him in through the garage roof like we did.
The other pictures at the auction site are just as interesting. The Q&A section is priceless! Humor aside, the proceeds from this particular auction go to the Christchurch Earthquake Relief Fund. The current bid is $8,000. Link -Thanks, Phil Fahey!
NASA is preparing to auction off souvenirs, paperwork, and hardware from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects. Of course, items from the Apollo 11 mission will command higher prices, such as the American flag shown, which went to the moon in the summer of 1969.
Remarkable flight-flown printed fabric American flag, 6 x 4, flown aboard Apollo 11 during its historic flight to the moon. Flag is affixed by its corners to a 10 x 12 certificate stating “This flag traveled to the moon with Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing, July 20, 1969,” and signed in black felt tip by astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. Armstrong has also added an inscription that reads, “To Rooster with sincere best wishes from Apollo 11.” Rooster Andrews was the owner of a very successful sports shop business in Texas, a keen space collector, and a friend of the astronauts.
Bidding will begin on January 13th. Link -via Bad Astronomy
The coffin that Lee Harvey Oswald was buried in back in 1963 is up for sale at an auction house in California.
The pine coffin is partially water-damaged by the 18 years it spent in the ground before Oswald’s body was exhumed in 1981 to lay to rest rumors that a lookalike Soviet agent was buried in his place.
The body — confirmed as genuinely his — was reburied in another casket, and the original is only now being offered for sale at auction.
Bids will be taken until December 18th. Link
Dean Booth of Dean’s Comic Booth was challenged to create this animation to illustrate this story at J-Walk Blog.
Think a minute -when did the first remote-control robot hit the market? It was way back in 1957 in Japan. This is a Radicon Robot, still in good shape 53 years later. It sold for almost $9,000 on eBay! But it is far from the most expensive collectible antique toy in this list of the 15 Most Expensive Vintage Toys Ever Sold On Ebay.com. Link -Thanks, Danny!
Props, costumes, and other artifacts from the TV series Stargate are up for auction September 25 and 26 in Seattle, Washington. If you can’t be there, you can bid on items via internet. Yes, it’s possible you could end up with your very own Stargate! But it won’t be cheap. Just the catalog for the event costs $45. Link -via Boing Boing
Update: You can download the catalog for free! -Thanks, MikeG!
Someone must’ve really liked Marilyn Monroe – either that or chest X-ray – because they’ve shelled out $45,000 for it:
A 1954 x-ray of the stunning starlet’s chest sold at auction in Las Vegas on Sunday for a sizable $45,000. This was well above the estimated $800 to $1,200 it was expected to fetch.
The bizarre medical photograph was one of several of Monroe’s belongings that were up for bid at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino via Julien’s Auctions over the weekend.
"[The x-ray] was taken around the time she was believed to be pregnant, and rumor has it that she had a miscarriage," President/CEO Darren Julien told the Daily News back in April.
Link (Photo: Julien’s Auctions)
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A woman in New Zealand sold two glass vials at auction for the equivalent of $1,983 USD. She claimed that they contained souls that she had exorcised from a house in the town of Christchurch:
The “ghosts” were put up for bidding by Avie Woodbury from the southern city of Christchurch. She said they were captured in her house and stored in glass vials with stoppers and dipped in holy water, which she says “dulls the spirits’ energy.”
She said they were the spirits of an old man who lived in the house during the 1920s, and a powerful, disruptive little girl who turned up after a session with a spirit-calling Ouija board. Since an exorcism at the property last July led to their capture, there has been no further spooky activity in the house, she said.
Link via io9 | Photo: flickr user Nancy Wombat, used under Creative Commons license
In 1934, electrician and hobbyist Frank Skroback built the first airplane that could be driven on a road. Or the first car that could be flown. It has six wings and an overall width of seven feet, so it can fit inside a lane. The plane will be auctioned at Red Baron’s Antiques in Atlanta on March 13.
Link via DVICE | Photo: Red Baron
When the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York had a broken step in their glass spiral staircase replaced, Mark Burstiner asked for, and received the old step from the repair crew. Over a year later, he put it up for sale on eBay. Then he was contacted by a VP from Seele, the staircase manufacturer. The VP told him Apple was very unhappy and asked him to pull the auction. Burstiner stopped the auction, but then the Seele representative called him again and demanded that he return the step!
What this sounds like to me is Seele trying to save face because Apple is furious that they were irresponsible enough to relinquish ownership of the tread. Though it may be embarrassing for both corporations, it may simply be a lesson learned at a high price. Let me put it this way: If you caught a foul ball at a World Series game, got it signed by a player, received a high five from the security guard on the way out of the stadium, and went home, that ball is now yours, right? It started as one entity?s property, and through a series of consensual transactions, it ended up in your hands. Now, let?s say a year and a half later, the player who signed it is huge, and you decide to put it up for auction. If the MLB reached out to you and said, “Hey! No way, buddy. That was OURS. Hand it over!” Guess what? That wouldn’t fly.
Burstiner put the step back up on eBay. No doubt publicity about the case brought more bids to the auction, which is at $6,300 at the time of this post. Link to story. Link to auction.
Ken Bannister, founder of the International Banana Club Museum, is selling out. The price of the museum has dropped from $45,000 to only $15,000! Before you snap up that bargain, be aware that the museum includes only the banana artifacts but no real estate, as the museum has been housed in rented space.
Bannister told the Victorville Daily Press that he decided to liquidate the collection after the Hesperia Recreation and Park District told him that he would no longer be able to rent space at the Harrison Exhibit Building in Hesperia, California where Bannister exhibited his thousands of banana goodies. He did not have another location set up and does not want to put the items in storage.
The Guiness Book of World Records says that the museum is the world’s largest collection devoted to any one fruit. Since the 1970s Bannister has done many interviews on his unique collection and has appeared on television shows including the “Tonight Show” featuring Johnny Carson. Bannister hopes that someone or some company will buy the museum and display it somewhere.
Link to story. Link to auction. -via J-Walk Blog
The US Airways Airbus 320 that landed in the Hudson River just a year ago is for sale. In the story known as “Miracle on the Hudson”, Captain Sully Sullenberger brought the plane down with no loss of life only 23 minutes into the flight when a flock of geese jammed the engines. Now the insurance company is selling what’s left of the plane.
The auction — “As Is/Where Is (New Jersey),” Chartis Insurance Group is compelled to disclose — does not include the airliner’s engines or avionics, and the lot is somewhat in pieces. But apart from that it seems to be surprisingly intact for a craft that hit the water at a normal touchdown speed with ad hoc landing gear comprising the entire fuselage and wings — which, by the way supported all 155 people aboard as they safely deplaned and awaited rescue craft on the frigid Hudson.
The offering page is remarkably bland, not even considering the high drama surrounding the most famous water landing ever. Under the formal description of the accident, it says: “Aircraft suffered severe bird strike event resulting in water emergency landing.” The description of the damage is simple: “Severe water damage throughout airframe. Impact damage to underside of aircraft.”
The craft itself is described as “1999 AIRBUS A320-214? and nowhere on the page is even the most oblique mention of the significance of this particular piece of aviation salvage.
Bids are being accepted through March 27. Link
(image credit: Janis Krum)
Recession? What recession? Edgar Allan Poe’s first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems," has been sold at auction for a record price of $662,500:
"This is known as the black tulip of U.S. literature," said Francis Wahlgren, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s in New York, which expects to get from $500,000 to $700,000 for the book on Friday. To the best of Wahlgren’s recollection, the record is $250,000 for a copy of "Tamerlane" sold at auction nearly two decades ago.
No more than 40 or 50 copies of "Tamerlane" were printed, and only 12 remain. Poe’s name doesn’t even grace the cover of the 40-page book, which is credited to "a Bostonian."
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Someone gave Mike Whittaker and his wife an old washing machine, saying it was “a bit noisey”. That turned out to be an understatement.
As the last bit of water was pumped out and it clicked into gear I immediately knew there was something strange a foot. The rumble was too low, almost subaudible but it had a clatter in it’s note that said ‘You’re going to regret living with me’. And it was right.
The temperature started to drop in the room, white frosty steam started appearing in my breath, the light bulbs dimmed, flickering as they dulled, and then it hit. Full force, completely out of no-where like a freight train roaring through an empty station at full speed in the night, while you stand at the platform clutching at your belongings as the wind roars and the scraping heavy steel monster goes hurtling past in front of you at 100mph. The difference though between a freight train and the washing machine is that in a matter of seconds the train has passed and you are back sitting in silence with your beating heart. With the washing machine it’s relentless. You have nowhere to hide, the sound will find you and bash on your skull with an aluminium frypan and snatch the words away from your mouth as you yell out for help.
I got used to sitting outside on my doorstep a lot that year. It was a concrete house and the walls were thick. Outside you could still hear the machine smashing away inside like a rock drill and but least it took away the frypan on the head element.
Whittaker also describes the time the washing machine vibrated so badly that a porthole portal to another dimension opened above it. He put the washing machine up for sale on the New Zealand auction site TradeMe with a reserve of $1. After intense bidding and over 800,000 views, the machine sold for $5,160. The retail chain that bought it may take it on tour. Link to website. Link to news story. -via Digg
We’ve seen many strange things for sale on eBay (our pal Urlesque blog even has a regular feature called Today in eBay about the strangest things sold on the popular auction site), but this one is really, really weird: drool.
The seller [of a China's equivalent of eBay] claimed the saliva was a ‘tonic’ and was asking the equivalent of £2 a small bottle, reports Hunan Online. Listings for the bottles included pictures of the 18-year-old girls the saliva was supposedly taken from. [...]
"The drool was all collected from 18-year-old pretty girls when they were sleeping. And buyers can pay later after they certified the authenticity of this product," he said.
The listings were pulled, and the seller didn’t even sell a bottle: Link
Ben Hoffman of Current TV’s infoMania (satirical) news show got a sneak peak of the highly anticipated (not for any good reasons, mind you) Michael Jackson auction.
Just when you think that Michael Jackson couldn’t be any weirder, he proved us wrong: Hit play or go to Link [Current] – Thanks Caitlin Settlemoir!
Previously on Neatorama: Jackson’s Junk to be Sold at Auction
From the Upcoming 
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Every year for Christmas, Bev Stewart of West Yorkshire, England, faces the same quandary. Her family members always bicker over the best seat in front of her TV. But this year she has the perfect solution: auction it on eBay!
It was advertised as a "a very comfy and popular item" open to all members of the family – and Bev even offered to throw in a free cushion for those with aching backs.
After the auction involving guests and family, Bev’s daughter-in-law Alexis Stewart and her 11-month-old son Mark will now be sitting pretty after trumping 17 other bids with her £13.50 winning offer.
The enterprising grandma said: "There is always arguing over who gets it, it’s the perfect seat. It is straight in front of the TV and has got the coffee table at the side for you to rest your drink on and the TV remote, so everybody wants to sit there.
That’s one expensive chunk of fungus! A 1.08 kilogram white truffle was sold at an auction Saturday for $200,000. A total of $284,000 was raised for charity at the auction held simultaneously in Abu Dhabi, Macau, London and Rome.
Macau casino mogul Stanley Ho was the highest bidder for the 1.08-kg white truffle. The tycoon was also the highest bidder for last year’s largest truffle, a 1.5-kg piece that fetched a record $330,000.
Truffle is a precious ingredient in Italian and French gourmet for its pungent aroma and taste. White truffle is considered the best truffle; a kilogram of normal size white truffle could cost over $5000.
Link (with video) -Thanks, Jee!
(image credit: Xinhuanet)
