Just as I’m wondering who in their right mind would buy a 31-tonne mechanical dinosaur whose crowd-pleasing days are numbered in this broadband age – even if you can ride in his head – I get my answer: the bloke sitting next to me. Ernie Moody is an unassuming, moustachioed guy in his late fifties who wandered into the auction after spending the day on the golf course with his buddies. You’d never guess that he’s the only man to enter a team in the Indy 500 and a horse in the Kentucky Derby in the same year, funded by his reported earnings of up to $15 million each month from the video poker machine he invented. All this I discover later; all I know is that at four hundred large, my neighbour in the golf shirt has put his hand up. The bidding assistant sprints over, waving his flag into a blur and nearly blowing his tonsils out through his whistle. We all jump up, the camera crew muscles in past us, and Ernie keeps his hand up until he buys the tin beast for $575,000. Jostled by a mob of cheering, half-cut well-wishers, I ask Ernie the half-million dollar question; did he mean to do that? “No.” Where was he going to keep it? “I don’t know.” So why did he buy it? “I dunno. It just seemed kind of cool.”