1 - The rare spirits that went under the gavel at a recent online auction in New Zealand weren't aged brandies or hard-to-find liqueurs.
2 - Instead, two glass vials purportedly containing the ghosts of two dead people sold for $1,983 at an auction that ended Monday night.
3 - The "ghosts" were put up for bidding by Ashley Wells. He said they were captured in the msnbc.com newsroom and stored in glass vials with stoppers and dipped in holy water, which he says "dulls the spirits' energy." (manually-created grid inserted here)
4 - He said they were the spirits of a developer who succumbed to exhaustion working on a months-long project at msnbc.com, and a powerful, disruptive designer who turned up after a fine tequila-drinking session with co-workers in the building. Since an exorcism at the office in February led to their capture, there has been no further bugs in the msnbc.com project, he said.
5 - The auction attracted more than 214,000 page views and dozens of questions before the winning bid, Trademe auction site spokesman Paul Ford said Tuesday. The name of the winning bidder was not released.
6 - Wells said that once an "exorcist's fee" has been deducted, the proceeds of the spirit sale will go to the web development welfare group the Society for the Prevention of XSL.
7 - The rare spirits that went under the gavel at a recent online auction in New Zealand weren't aged brandies or hard-to-find liqueurs.
8 - Instead, two glass vials purportedly containing the ghosts of two dead people sold for $1,983 at an auction that ended Monday night.
9 - The "ghosts" were put up for bidding by Ashley Wells. He said they were captured in the msnbc.com newsroom and stored in glass vials with stoppers and dipped in holy water, which he says "dulls the spirits' energy." (SN-driven grid inserted here)
10 - (drawer appears below) He said they were the spirits of a developer who succumbed to exhaustion working on a months-long project at msnbc.com, and a powerful, disruptive designer who turned up after a fine tequila-drinking session with co-workers in the building. Since an exorcism at the office in February led to their capture, there has been no further bugs in the msnbc.com project, he said.
11 - The auction attracted more than 214,000 page views and dozens of questions before the winning bid, Trademe auction site spokesman Paul Ford said Tuesday. The name of the winning bidder was not released.