Someone told him it's not a real phaser, right?

Um...no. No. Two-hundred and thirty one thousand dollars for Captain Kirk's phaser is just too damn much money. And no, this isn't because I'm a Picard fan. For $231,000 that phaser better goddamn work.

Picard doesn't need phasers. He's classy.

Here's a kid pretending to be an astronaut
using a hamster ball and the hose
off of a dryer. Cost: $11.50 

I mean, who the smeg has that kind of money to spend on crap like this? And since this was an auction, I think a reasonable follow up question is who the smeg else also had the kind of money to drive the bid up that high? Were any of them aware that for the same money they could have bought a ride on the space plane? Instead of buying a prop someone once used while pretending to be in space, they could have actually gone to space. Could this guy seriously not come up with a better use for this money? You know, like college or curing some disease or, I don't know, converting it into gold coins and swimming around in them?

Or hey, did you hear about these elementary school kids in Massachusetts who were forced to go hungry when they couldn't pay for lunch? Yup, children were actually made to march over to the trash bin and throw away their food for lack of funds and this guy spent a quarter of a million dollars on a 40-year old plastic ray-gun. Capitalism: broken.

$231 grand? William Shatner should come to your house and
make you waffles...would that be weird? That'd be weird wouldn't it...