About once per season, NYC Transit offers up auctions from the extensive inventory of unclaimed Lost and Found items. Their upcoming sale, which ends June 4, features a typically bizarre array of stuff, including a Garmin Handheld GPS Receiver, a hazmat kit, two portable light towers, and a Jukebox Hot Air Popcorn Maker. Members of the public, of course, will presumably have to compete with thousands of other fiends for these hot-ticket items.

What most amuses us about this auction is that the MTA, while finally able to send email and text alerts about service changes and subway delays, apparently still has an Internet tuned to 1993. That's right -- this is an old-fashioned, snail-mail-or-fax-your-bid auction, with no way of knowing if you're remotely close. (Geez, at least silent auctions allow you to cross out all the other bidders.) NYC Transit spokesperson Charles Seaton says the outfit has used eBay for "a number of years," but doesn't explain why they skipped that service this time around.

But what demand could there possibly be for, say, a 5-inch black-and-white TV ... with no HD converter box? Seaton says, well, it's simply the law: "Because the material must, by law, be cataloged and retained for possible return to its rightful owner, and because there are costs associated with the retention and handling of these items by NYC Transit, we first make all lost items available for sale." Of course, once this junk is ignored in a public fashion, it's disposed of "in the most environmentally and cost-effective manner." Bye bye, subway-car spur gears.

Keep reading for our list of what we hope to see auctioned off next time around.

As if the odds of making more than two bits (that's how much the subway used to cost in our day, sonny) on this sale weren't daunting enough, the MTA has also decided to lump together non-like items for the purposes of categorization. For example, if you want to buy a Buzz Lightyear spaceship for your nephew, you'll have to stomach actually paying American money for the "High School Musical" doll, as well.

Here are some items not up for sale this go-around, although we wait, bids in hand:

  • A prosthetic leg. Wait, that actually was one of the auction items, but according to Seaton, they nixed the idea due to the item's "personal nature."
  • A signed photo of Mayor Bloomberg riding the subway, hopefully one featuring him pretending not to be eyeballing some teenage break-dancers.
  • A historic copy of the West Side Railyards backroom deal, which is one of the shadiest deals in New York history and, interestingly, signed with the blood of virgins -- all of which the deal-makers were.
  • The lone operational G train, which is expected to go for $27.50.

If you really just want a piece of the NYC transit system before it's invariably sold to Bruce Ratner and turned into the world's largest roller coaster, we recommend the buy-it-now leftover signage, retailing for a mere $50 -- or the price of two subway rides in 2012.