h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I must be , because my reaction to the chocolate Jesus statue was to think of Joanne Harris's book 'Chocolat'.

the heroine, Vianne, makes a chocolate statue of the Celtic goddess Oestre for her chocolaterie in the run-up to Easter. The Catholic priest Is horrified and breaks into the shop with a view to smashing the statue, but ends up eating the chocolate.
The story works because there are lots of connections between food and love, and food and religion.

But when it comes to being prepared to try all sorts of things, the problem is that there just isn't enough time. You can't read all the , watch all the films, look at all the art. You have to pick and choose and the basis on which you choose is an interesting question. The admen have built a whole industry on the basis of answering that question.

Good point.

Perhaps we should make ourselves less predictable to the ad men by trying a new thing every now an again.

I am reminded of the snail mail I used to get that puzzled my mom.

'Dear Concerned Catholic'
'Dear Brother in Christ'
'As a fellow concerned Jew, you...'

I was on interesting mailing lists.

I find it a bit alarming that the computer knows what we're interested in. I get adverts for cycling kit, bird food, organic boxes, and offers to publish books I haven't written.

I suppose I could confuse it by looking for stuff about fast cars or race horses. But what would happen if I started looking up articles about terrorism or politial extremism?

Gosh you might find yourself subject to scrutiny by MI5 or MI6 whichever one of them deals with terrorism. This could not be good, don't go there or they'll come and take your passport away.

Interesting point - they profile you with the ads. Then you get worried and self-censor your searches. Not good.

Everybody does it. Watch what happens if you watch Youtube. The sidebars come up with a mixture of things you've recently looked at. Which in my case gets pretty eclectic.

I've managed to confuse Amazon by buying books for my husband and my son as well as myself.

So they think I'm interested in astronomy, science fiction, bicycle maintenance, France, wild flowers and a range of other fiction.

Just wait until you buy your dotty relative a book on UFOs.

Another place this drives ne nuts is Netflix.They profile what you watch and predict whether you'll like the film.

They are clueless.

No, people: just because I like to watch films in German, Greek, Romanian, Slavic languages, Yiddish, Hebrew and Dutch, doesn't mean I want to watch ones in Korean. I don't think they own a map. It's all 'foreign' to them.