Own a piece of Lost: pretty much everything a cast member touched or looked at being auctioned in August 

The debates and arguments continue, but Lost itself is over and done with, meaning that ABC has six years’ and a whole alternate world’s worth of props to dispense with and (the execs no doubt hope) profit hugely on. Mr. Eko’s Jesus stick, Kate’s little toy plane, Locke’s wheelchair, Sawyer’s battered childhood letter to “Mr. Sawyer,” Charlie’s electric guitar, Hurley’s VW van… It’s all going up for sale in August, alongside a ton of random detritus like empty Dharma Initiative-branded beer cans and “System Error” printouts.

The hundred-item “auction preview” is already live online, and it makes for moderately interesting browsing for fans of the show who also enjoy seeing how the sausage is made, so to speak—items like the Swan/Pearl Station Computer (“an Apple-II Plus system running an Apple-III monitor”) show some of the work that goes into set dressing and planning these environments, while thoroughly ridiculous who-would-want-that crap like “Roxana Castillo’s ‘Ajira Airways’ Flight 316 Ticket” serves as a reminder that for every object you see on TV, half a dozen people were probably professionally employed to craft that item, keep track of where it was before and during shooting, make sure it looked the same from shot to shot, and carefully file it away after each shot in case it was ever needed again.

The auction itself is intended to sell more than a thousand items over two days, August 21-22, 2010, and will take place in a hangar at California’s Santa Monica Airport, but Losties can participate “in person, via mail, phone, fax or live on the Internet.” That sounds like some kind of serious chaos, but it’s nice that the sellers are keeping things open to people still living in the 19th century. (Bids delivered via pigeon apparently aren’t going to be accepted this time around.) Interested parties will need to register online beforehand at some nebulous point in the future, and will also be able to buy a 300-page color catalog of items, which may serve as a proxy souvenir for those who wind up not being able to afford, say, “Crate of Approximately Two Dozen Crystallized Dynamite Sticks from the Black Rock,” or “Set Of Approximately 30 Dharma Fish Biscuits,” but not willing to settle for just buying a couple of Sun’s business cards. Full details at the Profiles In History site, which is coordinating the auction. And sorry, no, the smoke monster isn't for sale.