Whale soul for sale, one tragic owner

**sligoman** · 03/02/2006, 7:36 PM

It used to be a practice confined to pacts with the devil, but now an anonymous vendor in America is attempting to sell the soul of the London whale.

Internet auction site eBay, where the soul of the whale that died two weeks ago after swimming up the Thames is being offered, has said it can't sell things that people don't own and will take the item off its site.

But the vendor appears undeterred.

"I was accompanying the poor whale in his last journey, and he handed his soul to me. He asked me to sell it, so I could invest the money raised in other bottlenosed whales," said the seller from Minneapolis, giving the whale the wrong gender.

It is not the first item of whale-related memorabilia to go up for sale on eBay.

The watering can used to keep the female whale wet as rescuers vainly tried to ship her back out to sea on January 21 was sold on Wednesday for 2,050 pounds, and someone is even trying to sell water from the river on the grounds the whale swam through it.

The soul seller describes the proud possession as "100 percent soul" and promises to ship it anywhere in the world.

"This soul will only increase in value in the future," wrote the vendor.

Illustrated with a picture purporting to be of a whale's brain, a late spurt of interest boosted the bid price from $1 (57 pence) to $17.81 with just 19 hours to go before the offer ends.

"It is a listing that will be taken down," an eBay spokesman told Reuters. "Our policy states clearly that people can't offer for sale things they don't own."

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/03022006/80...gic-owner.html