Targeted Marketing... Nice Try, But No Cigar

These days, no matter what site you go to on the internet more often than not there are advertisements. Those pop-up ads are irritating as hell, though most annoying are those ads that are small and unassuming and generally off to one side that automatically expand and play some mini-commercial complete with sound whenever you accidentally mouse over them. Every time you mouse over them. Sometimes their placement is pretty much in the way, and to avoid seeing the damn thing for the fifth time you have to navigate your cursor across the page much like the little steel ball in one of those infuriating labyrinth games. The people who create these things can go to hell. So can that stupid labyrinth game with its too-many holes and impossible control knobs and too-tilty playing surface. Anyway... I digress...

Then there are the ads of the New Age Big Brother type. The kind that are able to pick up on certain phrases or words that you use often. These ads are considered to be more smartly targeted to you, the consumer, since they are supposedly showing you things and services you obviously can not live without since It (the all-knowing advertising deity) knows for a fact that you once did a Google image search for "cat butt photos", read a humor article that contained a link to an entire blog centered around photos of 'cyclist bulge', and bought a pair of shoes off eBay. It knows all sorts of stuff about all of us. Or so It thinks It does... These targeted ads show up in all sorts of applications- Gmail, Facebook, MySpace (does that still exist?); pretty much anything you sign into. I viewed my own Facebook profile today, and this is what It thinks of me:

Hmmm.

Let's see how close they are... 

I have no desire to be a social worker. Never mentioned such a thing. I know a couple people that are/were one, though. Plus WTF is up with that baby?? Is it stuffed? Being goosed? Or just shocked that It would ever offer a social work program to a vulgar mess like me? 

I'm not looking for an apartment. But I do live in one on TV.

Yes, I'm single. Jesus. Quit reminding me, ass. But I'm not sure this website would give me much luck finding a compatible partner. I'm not Catholic. I live in Georgia. Unless this is It's way of telling me that my possible dating-pool has shrunk from 'above-ground 3-foot-deep inflatable quick-set model from Walmart' size to 'cereal bowl I left outside that got rained in yesterday' size, and that I better just auction myself off to the handful of desperate Catholic men living in a sparsely populated state 3500 miles from here. Like a mail-order bride without the customs problems.

Game over, try again.