1228 Mal Wary

I keep telling myself. It’s like the name Hal. It’s mal-ware.
I persist in my brain in trying to pronounce the word mall-ware. Something about the letters m-a-l- makes my brain want to say mall, like the mall. Like mall-ware is something you get to help you shop on the internet, which is the electronic equivalent of a retail mall.
But no its mal, as in malcontent, and malicious.
Not Mall as in the evil Darth Maul.
Speaking of good and bad, I saw something on the online Letterman recently. In order to watch the content you have to sit through a commercial. But the cool part is they give you a choice. You can select commercial A or commercial B. Good because the advertiser knows you selected their ad, voluntarily. And you feel empowered.
That’s a lot nicer than what Google supplies automatically. Because I gotta say, I’m getting more and more weirded out about Google making my choices for me.
The other day I typed in a simple Google query for the word Repo-men. I had a question about the current movie. The first selection to come up on the Google search results page was show times for my local cinema.
As the international probability of my local cinema coming up as the top search result in terms of overall hits was no doubt very small, it’s obvious something far more maleficent is at work here.
Google nosy-bots knew from which location my query originated. Like knowledge peeping toms.
I know it goes on all the time. I know it’s now the norm.
I still feel it’s a little creepy. And malodorous.
Which is just a nice way of saying “stinky.”
Not the perfume section in the mall.
America, ya gotta love it.