People Sell Stuff For Money Shock:

“So Rob Geldof has ‘blasted’ ‘sick’ ‘eBay’ ‘sellers’ in a having a go of the people who were charged £1.50 to receive a text which didn’t even contain any pornographical words like ‘cum’, ‘shat’ or ‘dying’.

Their crime? Selling LiveAids tickets because they either can’t attend, or they’d rather have the money than watch Pink Floyd reform – something surely akin to sitting round watching naked pensioners play Twister.

Did this come as no surprise? Had he not heard of the Internet? Evidently not, given the ridiculous, loss-making way he decided we should all apply for tickets.

Apparently two million texts were sent in total, raking in £3 million – which, as it turns out, is not enough to stage the howevermany gigs across the world. There are 140,000 tickets available for the Hyde Park bash alone. If he’d simply sold them at 40 quid each, he’d have raked in £5,760,000 – more than enough to pay for the riggers and riders (excluding Elton’s, of course), with a little bit left over for the little starving baby Jesuses of Africa.

Instead, he attempted to rival Camelot with his naive lottery ambitions, totally missing the point: everyone thought 50 million people would text in. With those odds, why bother texting?

Anyway, the 72 thousands and their friends have confirmation texts. And 100 of those have decided to let the market dictate how much they’d pay to watch a bunch of pompous, preaching, rich rock starts boost their greatest hits CDs.

(Muse are excluded from this, of course, because they genuinely love helping people – and they don’t have a specific ‘Greatest Hits’ as every single song on every single album is brilliantly brilliant, with the exception of Endlessly, which is shit.)

So what’s the problem, exactly? Those people gambled. They won. And by selling the tickets, they’re taking money away from no-one. Those willing to pay £500 wouldn’t donate that to charity, even if it was a worthy, English one.

Internet action groups have been spoiling these auctions, bidding millions of pounds of fictional money at Geldof’s behest. Some auctions are up to £10m. Oh the ironism! At that price, I’d imagine even Rob’s tempted to stick a couple of his on eBay in an attempt to make up the loss.

Of course, the LiveATE lot could have been slightly more sensible about this, and organised the distribution of tickets in the same way our friends at Glastonbury have, where tight security almost broke the determination of the Triforce this year (don’t worry; those of us who want to go are doing just that; and what’s better is that outside of the Triforce that we don’t want to go aren’t – now that’s manipulation, my friends).

eBay is a fact of life for touts, car boot sellers, and pirates - and for the rest of us, it’s an acceptable way of offloading stuff we don’t need to people who don’t want them. That L8 was late realising this indicates how totally out of touch the organisers are with the real life they profess to want to live in the first place.

What’s Geldof going to do next – arrange for the Africans to collect all the money raised at the gigs by leaving it on the side of a road in fucking Brixton, and then ‘blasting’ those who nick it?

We’d like to ‘blast’ him – with a gun, in the whingeing mouth. No wonder Paula killed herself.”

(Via The Triforce.)