Skip to main content

Google ads fruit loopy

The other day I was checking my murder mystery party site www.organizingamurder.com when I noticed with a bit of a shock that the Google adverts at the top of the page had come over all literal on me. Usually they're for murder mystery parties, which makes sense. But this time they were for real detective agencies. Clearly the AI at Google reckoned there was the material of real murders on my site.

Sadly I can't prove this, as when I just looked they were back to murder mystery ads. But I have had an equally strange set of ads running on this blog. If you look at the ads for any particular post, they tend to fit reasonably well. My recent post about nettles, for instance, brought a whole rash (geddit?!) of gardening adverts.

But on a scan of the adverts for the blog as a whole, the ads alongside came up? Why? Is it the name, Now Appearing? Do they think I'm talking about the appearance of spirits? Or maybe it's my book about infinity... whatever, I can't seem to escape the psychic connection. Spooky.

(Just to be confusing, when I looked a moment ago, the ads were on blogging, but my psychic side has been coming up for several days. Maybe I should consult my horoscope.)

P.S. I've had a sudden thought. Perhaps Google can't spell physics?

Comments

  1. A whole rash ... nettles. Sorry, Brian, I don't get it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You've clearly not met my nettles, or you would get it. All down your arm.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Best writing advice

I saw on Twitter the other day (via someone I know answering it), the question 'What's the best writing advice you would give to someone who wants to become a writer?' My knee-jerk response was 'Don't do it, because you aren't one.' What I mean by this is that - at least in my personal experience - you don't become a writer. Either you are one, or you aren't. There's plenty of advice to be had on how to become a better writer, or how to become a published writer... but certainly my case I always was one - certainly as soon as I started reading books.  While I was at school, I made comics. I wrote stories.  My first novel was written in my teens (thankfully now lost). I had a first career that wasn't about being a writer, but I still wrote in my spare time, sending articles off to magazines and writing a handful of novels. And eventually writing took over entirely. If you are a writer, you can't help yourself. You just do it. I'm writ