fatdavid8

Targeted advertising on the Web appears to have reached the point of insanity.

I recently looked up the word "wreak" on dictionary.com because Attila, my college's dean, constantly pronounces it just like "wreck", and I was pretty certain that it was pronounced like "reek".

It turned out that I was correct and that Attila was wrong, but that wasn't the interesting thing: oddly enough, the adverts down the right-hand side of the page and directly across from the definition of wreak were all for natural-disaster relief funds (the adverts change a bit each search, so they might be a bit different when you click the link. The last time I checked, they were all for tsunami-related funds).

I found this mildly amusing, so I punched in reek again just to see what sort of adverts would attach themselves to a word that means, among other things, "To give off or become permeated with a strong unpleasant odor".

Much to my surprise, most of the adverts down the right-hand column were devoted to soaps and creams that ameliorate bad vaginal odors. In fact, on the day I checked, the first advert's tag line read: "Embarrassed by Fishy Vaginal Odor?"

Of course, after I finished laughing hysterically, I was mortally offended by these adverts, but I can't help but wonder: what in the hell are they thinking with some of these targeted ads?