Whale of a sale.

An amusing snippet from the deadtree edition of The Age earlier this week.

Whale of a sale
February 3, 2006.

LONDON. It used to be a practice confined to pacts with the devil, but now an anonymous US vendor is attempting to sell the soul of the whale that died two weeks ago after swimming up the River Thames. Internet auction site eBay has said it can’t sell things that people don’t own and will take the item off its site. But the vendor is 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,” he said. The whale was actually female.