For the last few days we have been tracking this auction where people were bidding on a piece of dried glue which resembled Homer Simpson – if you ask us the resemblance is nothing special, but for some reason other seem to think it is.

The glue-lookalike measures in at roughly 1cm tall and we have embedded an image below showing just what all the fuss is about, the person who listed the item claims you can see his neck, bald head, big eyes and grinning mouth – we agree, but still think that the World has gone mad!

The 7 day auction just finished, on day 1 someone bid roughly £2000 for it and this stuck for a couple of days, however on day three dozens of bids were made and it had climbed to a whopping £55,555.00, this soon jumped to £122,222.00 and then settled at £152,200.00 – this equates to roughly $235,000.00 USD.

Since this auction went live the tube of glue which made this “masterpiece” has also gone on eBay and is currently selling for £100.00 – you can see the auction here and the listing promotes its “massive earnings potential” – I guess if one small squeeze led to over £150k, there’s at least one million pounds of potential in this tube (sarcasm). Alternatively you can bid on the ‘Homer Simpson Dried Glue Collectable Mug’ here to forever remember this ridiculous phenomenon.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen sold on eBay?

James Ellington is a decorated 100m, 200m and relay sprinter, however due to a serious injury he missed the opportunity to secure a major sponsor. Despite the previous injury and the lack of finances he has just finished his best-ever season by setting a season’s best time for running 200m faster than any other British athlete this year at a non-altitude venue.

James has set his reserve at £30,000 and this pays him a £15,000 wage and covers expenses such as travel, accommodation, kit and nutrition, in return he will wear the sponsor’s branded kit at “every possible opportunity where appropriate, including at training and press events, until after the 2012 Games”.

We first heard about this roughly two hours ago as it was retweeted by someone that we follow on Twitter, originally we didn’t think much of the idea as he was only bid roughly £500, however at the time of posting this article he had received a bid of £4,100 – the listing still has over 9 days to go, so it looks like if it finishes as well as it started he should have secured the sponsorship he needs ahead of the 2012 games.

Currently to pay for his expenses he has been coaching under-privileged kids in South East London, however with roughly 233 days until the 2012 Olympic Games kicks off he ideally needs to train round-the-clock like his rivals.

You can check out the eBay listing for yourself here, we will post an update on the situation when the auction ends, hopefully he reaches his reserve!

Please use social networking to spread the word about James’ auction, why not share this page on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ it will only take a few seconds of your time and could make his dreams reality.

The service which boasts $21 billion in payments over the second quarter of 2010 left thousands, maybe millions of users unable to use the online payment scheme who blamed a network hardware failure as the reason for the downtime.

Although the problem is thought to be solved, users residing in the UK are thought to be still having problems connecting to the service, PC Pro report.

Are you still affected by the PayPal outage?

Source: IT Pro Portal

Our favourite car auction this week was a 1957 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud 1, which was first bought by the London Borough Council back in 1957, and was serviced to the Lord Mayor of London. Not cheap at a staggering £42,000.

The Rolls Royce Silver Cloud was first unveiled in April 1955 and was replaced by the Silver Shadow. You can read about the history of the very rigid Silver Cloud on Wikipedia.

Have you found any good car auctions on eBay this week? If you head over to autoblog, you can see the awesome camper they found last week, the 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado GT.

In other news, eBay has launched recyclable boxes to show a little of its environmental friendliness, more details on tamebay.com.

Looking at the eBay listing I love how the seller starts the description “Here’s an item you won’t come across everyday!” The Vault explains that Jerome David Salinger had owned the toilet for a number of years – maybe it was here where he got some of his inspiration?

The toilet as you can see has that vintage look and was dated from 1962, the disturbing thing is, the seller will send the item uncleaned in an original condition as it was when it was removed from the house.

There are so many great items on eBay, giving you the chance to own a piece of history – not certain that J.D. Salinger’s toilet is one of them though?