Thursday 7 May 2020

Incomprehensible Recommendations.

I’m curious to know why my YouTube recommendations continue to offer me videos which appear to have no relevance to my watch history. These include:

1. Advice on how to get the upper hand over narcissists. Narcissists? Why would I want to?

2. Self-styled gurus telling me what life is all about and what I’m doing wrong. I would have thought that any algorithms engaged in tracking me should have the nous to have noticed by now that I regard self-styled gurus as supremely ignorable.

3. So-called reports from Sky News, Australia which are usually highly right-biased, predominantly engaged in anti-Chinese propaganda, and certainly promoting the dubious value system of the sordid little cesspit known as Murdoch. This is the one which comes closest to insulting me, but I’m generally pretty adept at letting insults run off me and disappear down the nearest grid. I take the view that if they’re right, they’re not insults; and if they’re wrong, they’re just wrong and why should I worry?

What I would like to see is a video explaining to me why the three stands of bluebells in the wild patch at the bottom of my garden have become multi-coloured this year. They all used to be the standard blue, but this year one of them is nearer purple, another is lilac, and the third is pink. And something similar has happened to the three stands of antirrhinum up by the house. That’s the sort of thing which interests me.

And aren’t the ads supposed to be tailored to my interests? So why do I keep on getting ads for some kind of computer game in which the tank commander is called Frank – and narrated in one of those deep, masculine American accents which I thought only existed in the sickliest type of nightmare? I really am baffled.

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So now you can have a picture of my Grandma. She was one of the Turner girls, and the Turner girls were a lot tougher than tank commanders called Frank. One of them even scared her husband so much that he quietly and secretively emigrated to America. Whether he had a deep voice or not, I've no idea.

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