Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Pass the matzah

Facebook ads have me pegged for Jewish! I'm flattered but a little confused. What's happened - what have I done - to get rid of that scarily dim looking coed in the "Meet Christian Singles" ad that used to pop up? Now I get recipes for matzah and an ad for a Passover Seder karaoke app. (That last one is so intriguingly awful I'm tempted to check it out - but who knows what other things that would bring on?)

I remember that one of the characters in M. T. Anderson's fantastic young adult sci-fi novel Feed made an art of messing up the programs trying to typecast her buyer profile by deliberately going to the most random shops and feigning interest in products of radically contrasting lifestyles. In the end, she's hunted down as an anarchist threat, but Facebook's just for fun, right?