Uh oh. I think I’ve just made a huge mistake. I was reading an article, likely by Dave Barry, given the content, and he was talking about sports. In the article, apropos of what I can’t imagine now, he mentioned “penisgate at the Winter Olympics,” and if we didn’t know what it was, we could look it up. How I missed this story the first time around beats me, but now I definitely wanted to get educated on the subject. To save you from the same predicament I’m in, let me tell you that penisgate is the investigation into some Winter Olympic athletes — the ones where the commentators toss the word “aerodynamic” around a lot during the events — who allegedly injected hyaluronic acid into their penises to enlarge them, thus stretching their suits to accommodate their largesse. Apparently this gives the athlete an aerodynamic edge. Who knew? More to the point, who cares?
The important thing to remember is don’t fall into the same trap I did.
You know how, say, you’re talking on the phone with your friend about the football team from Cape Verde, and then, done with the conversation, you, having no idea where Cape Verde is, open up Google Maps and finds out. The next day you start seeing ads for vacation rentals in Cape Verde and the top 10 sights to see while you’re there.
I cringe to think of the ads I am going to start seeing now that I’ve looked up penisgate.
I hope they’re more tasteful than the ones that are now showing up in my feed after I looked up regenerative meat farms last week: ads for slabs of raw meat and bones, the sight of which leaves me squeamish. Please, stop! Heaven help me if I ever have to search for vicious predators and their prey in the Serengeti.
It’s pretty useless for me to get all upset about how “they” know before I do that a vacation in Cape Verde might be just what I need. Still, it bugs me that they’re tracking me. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg of the uglies that exist because of my life on the internet. This, according to Cory Doctorow in his book “Enshittification.” He has found plenty to complain about as far as what the tech behemoths are doing to us, the shat upon.
There’s nothing better than reading a book about how we’re getting screwed over. Not. Unless of course there’s a chapter about how to get rid of raw meat ads from my feed. That would cheer me up.
On a more pleasant note, this week’s musical interlude is brought to us by Edith Piaf …
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