Category: Advertisements

You don’t really have to know much about anything when writing on the Internet, do you? Please, do not immediately hold your humble blogger out even though the case might be true.

At any rate, apparently Cracked.com, a site I have not visited in many years, tried to dunk on the screenwriters of a film I’d never seen.

They compare the speed of a (albeit short) distance runner, 15 miles an hour, to someone who presumably was sprinting.

Why not compare the woman in the movie with a sprinter, say Usain Bolt, whose top sprinting speed was just under 24 miles per hour, not far under the 25 miles per hour. An unproven figure, by the way, but something the “scientists” probably used computer models to generate.

Ah, well. I am not really an expert at anything, certainly not running–where my distance speed is closer to 6 miles per hour, but my sprint is significantly faster that in very short bursts.

So in my Facebook ads feed, which is 30% Sponsored posts (ads), 50% Suggested for You (ads, but not ads ads), and 20% random people I’ve known, I often get a lot of ads for hims ED-treatment-by-mail, and now this:

Easy fitness over 30? C’mon, man, I still haven’t given up on the dream of one day doing a tornado push-up:

I am not beholden to wall exercises. Although I have not been to the YMCA in a month. Maybe that’s what The Algorithms are working from. Or reminding me.

And, as a reminder: No necesito huevos de tortuga!

Thank you, that is all.

Saturday, 7:30pm: I’m sitting in a restaurant, eating dinner beneath a television that is showing the PBR Minneapolis Invitational rodeo bull-riding event, and I’m learning about the sport and commenting on it.

Saturday, 8:15pm: Facebook shows me my first suggested post for a site streaming rodeo stuff online:

As I’ve said before in my conspiracy theory voice, it’s not just your phone that’s listening to you. All the phones are listening to you, and they all know your voice.

Now, I just have to wonder what I’ve said that has Facebook showing me random car posts in Spanish:

Tomorrow’s headline, today: Someone is arrested and prosecuted for a precrime because The Algorithms mistook someone else’s voice recorded on someone else’s phone.

C’mon, man, I’m not a country boy–I am a city boy in the country–bur even I know that deer shed their antlers.

I suppose it’s possible that the overconfident replier is the one who gets called out, but I’m not going to click through to find out. Being that it’s 2022, I’m just going to assume ignorance.

The Crepe Corrector Lotion?

Uh, ya know, I saw Silence of the Lambs in the theatre, right?

Perhaps clicking the play button would have…. something else on the Internet, but I have not seen those films or streams, so….

Facebook presented me with this:

Ya know, I read that book this summer.

Facebook knows all.

You know if I get a marketing email entitled Proof It! How To Be a Better Proofreader, you’d better believe I’m proofreading it.

Oh, yes, there’s the typo. No, wait, it has two:

Also, bullet point items should consistently end with punctuation or not. Generally, you don’t want to mix and match–even if the outlier is an exclamation point!

On the other hand, it did make me read the email more closely than I would have otherwise. My engagement is up, but my conversion from prospect to sale remains false.

Facebook suggested this post from an outfit called “American Council on Science and Health”

It’s a quote from a film I enjoyed, Secondhand Lions.

The quote starts:

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in most.

I mean, much of it is about honor, courage, Wuv, True Wuv, and stuff.

But one cannot help wonder how much a non-profit science group that lobbies politicians would prefer we believe things are true even if they’re not. Especially when we’re told them by people with credentials after their name in their email signatures (originally, I was going to say “stationery,” but, c’mon, man, the only stationery with my name on it I have is notepads sent to me as parts of fundraising pitches from organizations much like this).

I support a lot of things, but very few of them have “American” in the name. Not because I’m unpatriotic, but because national organizations too often are grifts.

I might not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know who Janet Yellen is.

And that’s not her.

So Microsoft is throwing up random ads in the home page of the Microsoft Edge Web browser these days, and one of them is clickbait enough to combine a powerful financial figure, a buzzword, and a stock photo of a woman.

But not enough to make me click. Only enough to make me mock.

Facebook sometimes shows me posts from an assortment of old movies and dead celebrities pages such as this one:

I know, I know, and Mary Livingstone was a shop girl and not actually in the show business, so she felt a little insecure about it.

It’s one of those things that my beautiful wife might ask me, “How do you know that?”

In this case, I know how I know. But I won’t tell you… just yet.

So I mentioned to my beautiful wife that I’m working my way, slowly, through Tea in the Time of COVID which I bought in June and which disappeared into the back of the truck, a boy’s room, or both for a while.

I mentioned the author has 100 blog posts, essentially, about the tea mug she’s drinking from (she has a vast collection of hand-crafted tea mugs), the philosophical tweet on her teabag, and a little of what’s going on.

So suddenly, I’m seeing ads for artisanal tea cups on Facebook.

Yeah, that’s a coincidence. Yeah, I’m seeing a pattern where there is none. But given how often I see ads for things I don’t buy online but have talked about, I’d say there is a pattern.

Clearly, I am not the target audience for this ad.

I mean, what would be worse than Hillary Clinton trying to teach me anything? Hillary Clinton trying to teach me two things. And I would have to pay for it.

I’ll stick to secondhand Great Courses and American Scholar material, thanks.