LOS ANGELES (AP) ¿ From Cher's used Hummer to Wayne Gretzky's old hockey sticks to Ozzy Osbourne's guitar, anybody can have a piece of celebrity ¿ for a price.

If you were flush with cash and wanted to sit on a throne fit for a rock star, for example, you could have bought the late Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia's toilet for $2,500, the price it fetched at auction last year.

But don't fret about lost opportunity. Not when you could spend time bidding on any of the hundreds of items belonging to Osbourne, the heavy metal rocker and former star of "The Osbournes" hit TV series.

For the right price, you could be driving to work in the Oz Man's 2006 Bentley, a car that always put him in heaven, he says, when he would "crank up the sound system as loud as it would go''.

If that's too pricey (the auction catalogue lists its value at $160,000 to $180,000), there's Osbourne's guitar-shaped table lamp ($20-$30), his Los Angeles Angels baseball rally monkey ($25-$50) or his daughter Kelly's personally autographed picture of actor David Hasselhoff (priceless?).

Which raises the question: Who buys this stuff, anyway?

"Believe it or not, a lot of people buy these things as investments. It diversifies their stock portfolio," Julien's Auctions President and CEO Darren Julien says of big-ticket items like the car, the Zakk Wylde autographed guitar and the expensive art and jewellery that Osbourne and his wife, Sharon, are parting with to raise money for the Sharon Osbourne Colon Cancer Foundation.

"It's something they can put in the office and talk about and people will recognise it when they walk in," Julien said. "But when you go to sell it down the road, if you hold onto it long enough, or that person becomes even more famous, it increases in value."

Julien organised a similar auction last year when Cher decided to clean house. A percentage of the profits from the sale, which included her Bob Mackie-designed gowns, benefitted her Cher Charitable Foundation. Another Julien auction fetched a half-million dollars for guitars that had belonged to Bono and The Edge of U2. It benefited the charity Music Rising.

As for the more pedestrian tchotchkes being sold last weekend, like Ozzy's toy slot machine or Kelly Osbourne's Hello Kitty telephone, they are likely to be snapped up by fans of Osbourne's music or reality show.

"It's something akin, on a lower level, to the idea of a saint's relics, to the objects that were touched by glory in some way," says pop culture historian Leo Braudy of the University of Southern California.

Collecting star memorabilia is nothing new. When Napoleon III became emperor of France in the 1800s, he was said to have sat on a throne that once contained the bones of 9th century French hero Charlemagne ¿ just so he could park himself next to greatness.

For many years, says UCLA sociologist David Halle, people took pride in collecting things like books previously owned by scholars and intellectuals. But in what Halle calls today's "visual culture'', they prefer stuff touched by people they see on TV. "Of course it becomes almost ludicrous after a while to have something like a pair of gym socks framed and say these were Ozzy Osbourne's," said Braudy.

(For the record, no Ozzy Osbourne hosiery is up for sale. But you could pick up a pair of his boxing trunks. Sharon's too.)

"I'm more interested in the art, but I'm sure a lot of people will be here for the celebrity items," said Barbara Lazaroff as she checked out the offerings at a pre-auction screening in Beverly Hills while waiters served hors d'oeuvres and Osbourne's music blared so loudly it almost felt like you were riding in the aforementioned Bentley.

Lazaroff, the ex-wife of celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, was considering adding some of the Osbournes' ceramic art pieces to her own collection.

Earlier this year, hockey great Wayne Gretzky held a less formal "garage sale" that raised more than $200,000 for two local schools. Like the Osbournes, whose sale is expected to raise about $1 million, he was moving to new digs and decided to unload his castoffs.

"People started lining up at 5.30 a.m. and when the doors opened at 7 there were hundreds of people waiting to get in," said Tom Konjoyan, vice president of development at Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, where the Gretzky sale was held.