Saturday, January 08, 2005

At Least It Wasn't an Anne Coulter Book

I've occasionally posted about the weirdnesses of having robots and agents watching one's buying and borrowing habits and so forth, usually to marvel at how Amazon or somesuch recommended something totally out of the blue, and it turned out I was quite happy and interested in whatever it was they recommended.

So I thought perhaps that when a "recommendation" came up for a manual on how to dissect a cat that this was perhaps a new novel by Mark Weingardner or Connie Willis or Michael Chabon. I clicked on it, and nope, it turns out it's just a manual about how to dissect a cat.

I don't want to dissect a cat.

However, one of our cats died recently (of advanced kidney failure), and I did find myself wondering a few weeks afterwards how long it would take her buried body to decompose in our climate. Did Amazon's ESP detect this and get a slightly off recommendation? Is the chip inside my brain that communicates with Amazon headquarters slightly defective?

I am left a little perplexed and slightly discombobulated, wondering vaguely if I should be more interested in cat dissection and if perhaps we had made the best decision about the disposal of our cat's body.

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