Oh okay, we will put this up simply to remind you of how quickly trends can spiral into sickening territory: an Ebay auction (hoax?) for the virginity of a 19 year-old quadriplegic girl. Um:

Bidding on Dan Lacey's one-of-a-kind Pancake Head Nick Denton painting has reached $300, thanks to interest from current and former employees. Remember: the Keith Gessen remix book went for $890. Six days left, people. [Previously]

The day after Obama was elected, you literally could not buy a newspaper. They were sold out! So act now and pre-order your historic Obama inauguration day copy, for only 26 times the cover price:

Always wanted to own a President's old car, but haven't been able to find one with a Hemi engine? Now you can buy Barack Obama's 2005 Chrysler 300C for a great price!

The famously frumpy former CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman, is veering closer to entering California's governor 2010 race, quitting the boards of Procter & Gamble, eBay, and Dreamworks Animation SKG.

Far be it from us to tell somebody not to sell a useless item on eBay for an absurdly high price, but how much is a single joke from an Onion staff writer really worth?

When a tipster told me that workers at eBay France had created a lip-dub video, my hopes were high. But I should never have expected great things from eBay.

Times are tough at what was Silicon Valley's hottest startup last year. So tough that one Facebooker is auctioning off a company-issued Jack Spade laptop bag.

With her unofficial bid to be California's governor, Meg Whitman, the billionaire former CEO of eBay, is leaning hard to the right. Her support of a gay marriage ban could doom her campaign.

After making billions of dollars by changing the world, tech moguls start dreaming of ruling it. But the political career of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman seems stillborn. Why? She's just not a household name.

When we overdose on celebrities and overindulge in gadgets, where's the vomitorium to hurl it up? Why, it's eBay, on whose shores the flotsam of every shipwrecked trend lands. Here's what was formerly hot in 2008:

I could spend all day unspinning Henry Blodget's hyperbolic headlines. "eBay Traffic Plummeting" actually means "eBay traffic gradually declining." Unique visitors for October were off 10 percent from a year ago. That's a much smaller slip than the traffic at my local Starbucks. But still, yeah, we're all gonna die.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like to talk about their hopes of "changing the world." Yes, of course: Changing the world from one in which they are poor to one in which they are fabulously wealthy. The question in the air is whether the founders of companies do a better job at creating wealth, for themselves and their investors, than professional managers. With Yahoo announcing Jerry Yang's plans to step down as CEO, it would seem like a losing time for founders. But Yang is an exceptional case; he took his hands off the steering wheel when Yahoo had a mere five employees, and never really ran anything until he stepped in as CEO last June. Most founders of successful startups eagerly seize power, and have to be forcibly dislodged from the driver's seat. The best never let go. Just take a long-term look at the stock market, and you'll see why.

In recent years A Christmas Story has built its audience steadily—aided in no small part by its month of 24-hour-a-day airings on TBS—and overtaken all others as the definitively quotable holiday movie of our generation. The Cleveland home used in the film has been restored and open year-round for tours, and stands right across the street from the official A Christmas Story House Museum. But for those ACS fanatics so wackily obsessed with Ralphie's quest for a Red Ryder BB Gun that merely watching the film is no longer enough, comes the ultimate prize ever conceived: An eBay charity auction offering a Christmas spent living in the house itself. (Thanks to the Thighmaster for pointing it out.) You're bidding on an exhaustive recreation of the film's events right down to the Peking Duck dinner at Pearl of the Orient. The rest of the details are after the jump:

Hey, it's President-elect Barack Obama's head on a piece of toast! Why not? It's currently up to $202.50 on eBay, and damn, we had such high hopes for this recession. "Nothing has been added to the bread - no butter or oils." [Ebay]

Rember how Obama's election was the greatest thing to happen to the newspaper industry in a decade? People lined up across New York City to buy copies of the New York Times proclaiming his victory! And the smart ones put those copies right on Ebay. This chart shows the average of the five highest prices paid on Ebay each day for that November 5 issue of the NYT. One early seller fetched $400; today you can have your pick for less than $30. Oh, the metaphor.

Tired of endless campaigns for higher office? Sorry! California's 2010 race for governor is right around the corner. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman hasn't formally entered the race, but she's already busy making gaffes and working on her Web presence. Her reps are pursuing trademark claims against Thomas Hall, a domain-name squatter who registered whitmanforgovernor.com, meg2010.com, and others. Hall told the Sacramento Bee he felt strong-armed when contacted by Whitman's lawyers, and refused to sell. The Whitman camp is now spending $30,000 or more to recover the domain names through an arbitration process set up by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Any doubts she's running for governor?

The nascent political career of ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman just took a knife to the gut — and it was an act of hara-kiri. Whitman, speaking at an event for the Northern Virginia Technology Council, said Virginia was a much better place to start a business than California: "If we were to be starting eBay again, would we choose California? Probably no." Whitman may have a point. But the long-rumored gubernatorial prospect also hasn't learned to speak in soundbites that can't be twisted to make it seem like the pro-business candidate hates the California business culture which made her rich.

Why did Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia, an online compendium which includes the world's most detailed article on flim-flams, step down as CEO of Wikia, the for-profit website host which recently laid off some of its employees? The way Wales likes to tell the story, years later, he realized he was a free-flying entrepreneur, not an earthbound bureaucrat. So he hired Gil Penchina, a former eBay executive, to mind the shop. That's not what really happened. Wales was fired from his job as CEO by the company's investors.The cause? The same kind of expense-account hijinks that landed him in trouble at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit parent of Wikipedia. In 2006, Wales was courting Marc Bodnick, a cofounder of Silicon Valley private-equity firm Elevation Partners, in an effort to find a way to profit from Wikipedia, despite its nonprofit status and volunteer contributors. Bodnick and an assistant had traveled to St. Petersburg, Fla., where Wikimedia was then based. The talks went nowhere, but Wales, his wife, Bodnick, and Bodnick's assistant had a $1,300 meal at one of the city's finest restaurants. ($600 of the bill was spent on wine.) At that point, the Wikimedia Foundation had confiscated Wales's corporate card, so he paid for the meal himself. But he then sought to have it reimbursed by Wikia. Michael Davis, Wikia's chief operating officer, became enraged and reported the expense to Jeremy Levine, a Wikia board member and partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, which had invested $4 million into the company only a month before. Levine then told Wales he was fired as CEO, and found Penchina, who had already made a fortune at eBay. Wales must hate that: Every time he sees Penchina, he must ask himself, "Why is this guy rich and I'm not?" Penchina, meanwhile, must be asking why Wikia is still paying Wales a salary.

Did you know Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen has joined eBay's board? Why yes, it's true — and it happened last month. VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon had gotten a belated tip about the hire, and published the story without checking the date. "I made a stupid mistake," he tells me. (He was more oblique in Twitter.) Eldon rapidly took the story down, but not before it was syndicated to The Industry Standard, where it caught the eye of Nicholas Carlson, my former charge at Valleywag who has landed at Silicon Alley Insider.See the hypercompetitive pattern? Hacks have always hustled to scoop rival papers. But tech blogs are being driven to distraction by the notion that they've been beaten by a story. In the rush to publish, they're not even stopping to check their own archives. Checking actual facts is far more cumbersome. Jordan Golson, another former Valleywagger who now blogs at the Industry Standard, made a stink about a report on TheHill.com about iPhones coming to Congress. TheHill.com's overly sensational headline topped a report that merely stated that Congress's administrative arm was testing some iPhones. Golson called the flack quoted in TheHill.com's story, who backpedaled from his earlier statement that "lots" of Congressmen had requested iPhones. Tom Krazit of CNET News, one of the guilty parties cited by Golson for reblogging TheHill.com, got to the bottom of things: Congressional IT administrators were testing a total of 10 iPhones, and all of two Congressmen had asked about getting iPhones instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry. This messy process shows the blogosphere at its best and its worst. Through a series of iterations, the horde of bloggers arrived at the right result. In the meantime, however, a lot of people got the wrongheaded notion that Congress is switching to the iPhone any day now. (I'd note that TheHill.com has yet to retract its initial report; it would not be the first time a flack has said something, regretted it, and then claimed he was misquoted.) There will always be a factchecking squad on the Internet. But I think the reblogging craze will fade over time, as the Web's writers learn the deep satisfaction of telling one's own story for the first time — not repeating someone else's for the nth.