Interesting clothes
Yesterday the Ranter made me get rid of loads of clothes. This was quite difficult for me to do, even though some of them are 10 years old and I never wear them. We drove around where we live now to find a charity shop to give them to, but The Methodist Centre was closed and we couldn’t find anywhere else. We ended up driving to Clifton to find Charity shops (for people who don’t know Bristol, Clifton is the poshist part of the city and where we live isn’t). We came to the conclusion that for charity shops to work well they need to be in an area where people are rich enough to be frivilous in throwing out clothes which can still be worn, but where there are people poor enough to buy second hand clothes (and not proud). Clifton is perfect for this as it’s a mixture of very well off people and students.
The good news is I bought a couple of items of ‘interesting clothes’ today, because the reason I found getting rid of clothes difficult was that all the clothes I wear currently are boring (interesting clothes sit in the cupboard because they no longer fit me!).
Challenge: can people who know me guess when I’m wearing my new ‘interesting clothes’?
Comment: for those of you who have come to this blog via The Ranter, this is probably a bit of a culture shock and the words I use a probably a bit too easy to understand!
Does someone at Googlemail know me?
March 31, 2007 at 3:18 pm (alt_worship, cultural comment)
I have just set up a new Googlemail email account (people who know me please ask for this). I was intrigued the other day when I noticed that all the sidebar adverts were relevant to me! This spooked me out a bit – did Googlemail actually know me? Was someone sitting in the Google office reading my emails so that they could target me specifically?! The sidebar read: ‘Metaphor therapy…’; ‘cultural software: a new theory of cultural evolution explains ideology in terms of memes’; ‘ Forgiveness and acceptance: roles of forgiveness and acceptance in dissolving resentment…’; ‘Emotional literacy thesaurus and vocabulary’.
I was sufficiently freaked out to look this up on the internet. It turns out to be ‘Contextual advertising’:
Contextual advertising is the term applied to advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile phones, where the advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user.
I decided to test it further by faking an email (to myself) using alt_worship terms. Unfortunately contextual advertising isn’t quite up to this yet, all it gave me was: ‘Quality Celtic shop’, ‘Train wicca – enroll free’; ‘Kit Heath Jewellery’. I was slightly surprised by this because I thought that Christian subculture would have latched onto taking advantage of this device. Of course the other alternative interpretation is that alt_worship has more in common with Wicca than with mainstream Christianity!
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