Sometimes, Google ads are amusing. Other times, irritating

So, I've been meaning to write more about Buddhism, attachment, and hedonic engineering, something that my characters have to sadly eschew if they're to be at all readable. I was reading an interview with Sady Hayashida (it's not all that interesting, sadly) at The Buddhist Channel when I noticed the Google Ads on the right-hand side of the page. There were four of them, and they were all for different editions of the Young Believers book series.

For the uninitiated, the YB series is a series about a young group of Christian pop singers, and each goes through some "crisis," that the other five, through their faith, help him or her come to realize that the problem is another "spiritual test" and that prayer and belief (oh, yeah, and commitment to the same mindset as the other five) will help everything be allright. They're one of the most blatant Christianity-as-tribalism memes I've seen in a while, and they're aimed at the eight to thirteen year old crowd.

Okay, that gives me a new story idea. I had, as a complete throwaway, the idea of putting the character Wren into a semi-popular pop group, one of those little ones that haunts the Disney channel but you never see anywhere else. Much later, I have another story set on the planet Warm Havens/Marble (there are two inhabited zones, and the inhabitants of each calls the planet by a different name) where Wren & Katrina run into Random & Christianne, but I couldn't figure out how to get them there. I think the intervening chapters will somehow involve Wren's presence in the pop group cutting a swath through the other members (did I mention that I wrote down all the names?), where the "solution" to each's crisis will involve lots of sex, self-revelation, mindfullness, and an acceptance of both the impermanence of existence and the compromises existence imposes upon us. Oh, and more sex.

Still, I wonder about those Google ads. Did they come up just because Christians have bought more ads under the tag "religion" than any other, or are they deliberately putting keywords like "Buddhism" and such into their adspace?

Oh no! Gay people use teh intarwebs to spread their gayness!

Oh, no! One News Now, formerly Agape Press (I guess they were tired of being confused with the urban dictionary term describing the, uh, anatomy of a recipient of particularly brutal sodomy) has discovered that gay people are skilled Internet users, just like you and me, and have done a "powerful job" of using the Internet for "uses other than the moral good of society."

What will those naughty, deviant perverts come up with next? Two tin cans and a string?

And my favorite quote of the week (It's Nerve: NSFW):

I've always been more of a Playboy kind of guy as opposed to being a Hustler sort of fellow. Unfortunately almost all bushes seem to have disappeared. I don't know if it's Chernobyl or some other ecological disaster, but I haven't seen pubic hair on a woman in years.

That's not true in my case; but it did seem appropriate given the porn out there. There are some other great quotes in that article, too.