USA: forfeiture auctions and their strange cargo

Yes, it looks like the contents of an ash-tray and if you think "fire" you will be kind of on the right track. It's a bowl of spent ammunition. And it's not just a little bit: it's 637kg of the stuff. If you want to buy it, you have to agree to put it into a "popping furnace" before recovering the brass. It's in several metal drums - and a plastic bucket.

You could set up your own medical supplies company - or clinic - with large quantities of catheters, a pneumatic automatic tourniquet, special chairs for use when drawing blood, cardiac stress test kit including treadmills and other items, X ray equipment and surgical lights, numerous stretchers, beds, vital signs monitoring equipment and our special favourites automatic pill counters and suction apparatus. OK, so perhaps we are a little to influenced by some other current news stories in finding those interesting.

Here's another quiz question: what is this?

It's a petrol powered generator that doesn't work and a boat with a hole in it. Incredibly at the time of writing, someone has bid USD425 for it.

But the range of stuff is huge. It is no exaggeration to say that it would be possible to fully equip an extensive office premises from the furniture and other equipment which is marketed for a fraction of its original price - even though sometimes, as in the case of the boat, it might have an important defect.

The next quiz item fits that category. A hint - it's not a pile of telephone directories with the pages glued together - although it might as well be. Yup, it's a pile of 14 laptops. All with the hard drives missing.

The current bid is just USD25 for this two-person private-eye kit

But here's something really funny:

someone has bid more than USD1500 dollars for this wreck. Still, there may be some useful spare parts, we suppose.

In fact, not all of the items for sale are confiscated. But even so, it's a long way from the stuff Crocket and Tubbs used to take off the criminals they chased.