And with one palate-cleansing Britney Spears post, we return to our regularly scheduled Lindsay Lohan Meltdown (May '07) coverage, which we shall divvy up in handy, bulleted fashion:
· In troubling times like these, there's nothing like a reassuring NY Post headline to put things into perspective. [NY Post]
· Fragments of the accident wreckage recovered from the scene have appeared on eBay, and currently have a top bid of $800. Just to make it clear: You are bidding on pieces of her crashed Mercedes. The two items on the right aren't her ribs. [eBay]
· Leslie Sloane Zelnik's much-anticipated official statement on the matter is something of a letdown: "Lindsay admitted herself to an intensive medical rehabilitation facility on Memorial Day. Because this is a medical matter, it is our hope that the press will appreciate the seriousness of the situation and respect the privacy of Lindsay as well as the other patients receiving treatment at the facility." Sure, the press gets a light scolding, but it's woefully lacking in accusatory venom. [TMZ]

TIM FAULKNER — Patricia Handschiegel, founder of Stylediary.net and self-labeled "entrepreneur/fashion/tech veteran," is auctioning her entire "mammoth [Sic.] wardrobe that spans thousands of dollars, designer names and cool indie labels" estimated to be worth around $25,000 on Ebay for charity. One wouldn't be tempted to question her motives: she is requesting submissions of underserved charities and states "I always hoped to someday get to a place where I could use my success in business and help other people and I'm finally here." $25,000 goes a long way in helping any charitable organizationand. It doesn't hurt that the campaign will help promote her and her ventures ...and, after all, today's fashion and tech entrepreneurs can't "speak at conferences, sit on advisory boards, and share what [they] know about owning a media company" wearing yesterday's fashion. In fact, one must applaud the ingenuity of Handschiegel's endeavor: it's both philanthropic and self-serving. [Photo Credit: stylediary.net]

Look familiar? Frazr, a new German blogging service, is a complete rip-off of Twitter, right down to the design and pitch, as Venture Beat notes. "What are you doing?" Frazr asks. I've heard that question before. Foreign clones of US internet concepts are nothing new, but their nimbleness is.

CONFONZ — Waaaaaaaaaaaay down at the bottom of a San jose Mercury news story on from Tuesday mentioned that Wonkette's favorite Walnuts! candidate, John McCain is visiting Google today. A shiny new dime to the first person to point us at the photos. A shiny new quarter to the first person to paste up some McCain search queries! After the jump, we lead you on with a photo of Mitt Romney, Steve Jurvetson, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Meg Whitman of EBay.

NICK DOUGLAS — When a tech company actually builds something, you'll hear about it first at a news source like CNet or TechCrunch. But while it's still a glint in a startupper's eye and anything can happen, we're ready for the pre-op interview. Our two strategies: Be cruel, and drink beforehand (in this instance, a double screwdriver). Our first subject, 16-year-old college student Jessica Mah, already built and sold a company. Now she's working on what she calls the eBay of hired services. In the following interview, she tells me why she plans to make a billion dollars before she's 25.

We all know that perpetually embattled songstress-natureforce Courtney Love has shed a few pounds recently by some means or other. ("No doctor would do gastric bypass, even if I begged. No lipo, no gastric, no tummy tuck. I can't believe how cynical people are," she told Us Weekly. Us neither!) Now, she's shedding her old large stuff, like this pair of size 8 Marc Jacobs pink and black pinstripe pants, via eBay. Sure, $99 seems like a lot to pay for a pair of slacks that have contained Courtney Love, but all proceeds go to the Chrysalis Organization, an organization that helps homeless people and ex-cons find jobs. It turns out that Courtney Love is a big humanitarian! Well, not as big as she used to be.

Because even the most utilitarian of office furniture becomes highly desirable when you're told it once belonged to a former child star turned helmer of blandly palatable Hollywood blockbusters, we offer for your online bidding consideration this blocky, brown specimen, which, an eBay seller tells us, once sat in The DaVinci Code director Ron Howard's Imagine offices.

Okay. This is how it all went down. See, Vice's party, at SXSW the other night? Tooootally out of control! They'd switched the party location to an Elks Lodge in Austin, far from all the action but presumably more hipster-white trash-cool? Or something. Anyway, right after Against Me!'s set, the balcony began to collapse. Right away, some enterprising soul from Brooklyn (obvs) has put pieces of the rubble up on eBay.

Seriously, who wants to bid on Britney Spears' nasty hair? Bid on a quite probably imaginary bag of "downtown" artist/heir Dash Snow's coke instead! If that isn't enough enticement, let's look at the pitch:

As even the highest-altitude Tibetan monks with access to WiFi know by now, on Friday night, Britney Spears finally succumbed to the relentless voices in her head telling her, "We can't hear anything with all this hair on top of us! Get rid of it, please!" Moments later, a tidal gust of Santa Ana winds swept through the now famous salon and carried the shavings to the far corners of the globe, where entrepreneurial spirits lucky enough to be visited by one of her locks instantly took to the World Wide Webs to capitalize on their good fortune. Be warned, however, that eBay is a grifters' playground; we leave you to sort out the authentic strands from the impostors with access to a head of fried brown hair and a pair of scissors, keeping in mind J.T. Tognozzi, husband-to-the-Tarzana-hairstylist-stars, has already warned the LAT that any such offering comes from "scam artists." He claims the genuine article is in safe keeping, where they plan to "sell the shorn hair on EBay, give it to a charitable organization," or possibly donate it as the centerpiece exhibit of the Britney Spears Nervous Breakdown Museum, breaking ground in Kentwood, LA sometime in 2009.

Because we here at Defamer like nothing more than to play marketplace matchmaker to merchants of slightly used celebrity undergarments and their devotees, we'd like to now divert your attentions to eBay Lot #280076499409, consisting of two manificent examples of the satin and lace contour bra, dating to the late 20th Century and guaranteed to have been worn by Katherine Heigl during her Foxy Extraterrestrial period:

NICK DOUGLAS — The only auction site that matters is now delisting all auctions for virtual goods from the site, according to Slashdot. An eBay spokesperson says anyone who repeatedly tries to sell virtual goods will be punished. So much for eBay founder-chairman Pierre Omidyar, who also invested in Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world Second Life. "This generation that grew up on video games is blurring the lines between games and real life," he told BusinessWeek in May. Guess blurring doesn't count when eBay's money is on the line.

Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn may be suing Lloyd's of London to pay up for his self-damaged Picasso, and he may even be taking a courageous stand versus the whole insurance industry. But now you can own a tangential piece of the story yourself, as blogger Ironic Sans is auctioning a poster featuring Wynn's painting — Picasso's "Le R ve" — from a 1997 Christie's New York auction where the painting was sold for $48.4 million. (Not to Wynn; he bought it in 2001 from the anonymous Christie's purchaser for an undisclosed amount. A pretty good return on the $7,000 investment made in 1941 by Victor and Sally Ganz, whose collection the Christie's event was selling off.) Ironic Sans promises that the poster, going for a mere $0.000012 million as of this writing, remains unpunctured by the elbow of Steve Wynn or any other elbow. What you poke it with after purchase is your own affair.

We kind of can't believe the bidding is still only at $30. Come on, people, act now! As you can see, Gabe is getting bored of sitting around, clutching a wad of cash and waiting for your call.

Maybe eBay China execs never learned to speak the native Chingchong tongue, or maybe its Chinese auction site sucked ass, but for whatever reason the company's adventures in the Middle Kingdom have been a spectacular failure. Now—"hundreds" of millions of dollars later—eBay is calling for backup.

Recall the tale of Stephanie Green, a researcher at Star who in 2004 began shopping Dishalicious, her Devil Wears Prada-esque novel featuring a Bonnie Fuller caricature. Green was promptly sued by American Media for violating her confidentiality agreement, though the lawsuit was finally dismissed in 2005. Sadly, the public lust (or publishing's interest) in this genre appears to be waning, as Green has been unable to find a buyer for the manuscript. Ergo, she's hawking copies of the text on Paypal, with plans to upgrade to eBay v. v. soon! After the jump, Green's philosophical take on the death of her book, plus hopes and dreams for a brighter tomorrow.

Yahoo! MySpace. eBay. E*Trade. Why can't these people spell their own names? Mangling the Valley's biggest brands in your writing makes you look stupid. Yet inserting capital letters and punctuation marks into the middle of proper nouns feels like a different form of stupidity — a voluntary one. Is there a rule for handling them?Technically speaking, doofy Net names fall into three categories.

Rupert Murdoch may have gotten into the holiday spirit by ordering a good, old-fashioned book burning, but that hasn't stopped several leaked copies of If I Did It, O.J. Simpson's description of how he might have gone about committing the heinous crimes he pretends not to have done, from finding their way onto eBay. Both HarperCollins and the Brown family have taken legal measures to see that every copy be destroyed, but eBay reps insist typing "If I Did It" into a search bar isn't as easy as it looks:

Despite legal threats from counsel representing the family of Nicole Brown Simpson, plus "concern" from HarperCollins, copies of OJ Simpson's If I Did It that escaped the pulper keep popping up for auction on eBay. An early copy was bid up to over $1 million by spoofers before the auction was halted; the copy listed above had received 59 bids to a more "reasonable" $6,600, but eBay monitors deleted it before we could click through. Oh well — at least you can marvel at base human behavior through the magic of Google cache.

We thought a handsome companion item to our post about Alec Baldwin threatening to shit on an Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary is this photo, brought to our attention by our friends at BestWeekEver.tv, of a lovingly handcrafted Christian-Bale-on-the-crapper figurine, as precious and detailed as anything Hagen-Renaker has ever produced, and sure to only increase in value with time. The eBay craftsman selling "The Bathroom Man" is willing to hand sculpt your purchase to look like you, but why have a boring, non-celebrity such as yourself immortalized talking a miniature, poorly aimed crap (or are those cinnamon buns?) on the floor, when you can proudly display an unmasked Batman doing the same? And for those for whom the $139.99 price point is not an issue, may we suggest ordering a second sculpture, featuring the likeness of Bale's The Prestige co-star, Hugh Jackman—a handsome, bookend companion that would complete a diorama scenario of the two magician nemeses going head-to-head in a mantelshelf crap-off.