After all this wailing and gnashing of teeth over the axing of Mary Lou Supple and the proposed appointment of former mayor Byron Matthews for the NRA, I thought it might be time for a tiny bit of levity.

I put Google ads on the Newburyport Political Blog in hopes of making some money. What happens is that the Google robot or “Google-bot” crawls the blog every day looking for words that match its advertisers. There is a bit of a lag time between when the Google-ad-bot crawls the blog and when the ads actually show up.

At first the ads were about Newburyport, as I expected. Then all of a sudden there were all kinds of ads about fuel. And I realized that the Google-bot had picked up on the word “energy.” Ok, no problem.

Then on St. Patrick’s Day there were little shamrocks all over the Google ads. It took me about 45 minutes to figure out that this was a nifty Google surprise. On special holidays it is going to decorate the ads. I’ll be interested to see which holidays they pick and what the decorations look like. I can opt out of this new special treat if I want to apparently, but I thought I’d wait and see what Google comes up with next for nifty holiday decorations.

And then recently I noticed that there were ads for “militias” and “infantry.” I couldn’t imagine how in the world Google came up with that one. Well apparently it’s all this chit-chat on the Newburyport Political Blog about the NRA. The Google-ad-bot thinks that the Newburyport Political Blog is talking about the National Riffle Association, which as far as I know we are not. I’m not sure I can straighten this one out with Google. So if you are a peace advocate, it’s just that Google apparently doesn’t read things in context and must not have a lot of advertisers for the word “waterfront,” but does have a whole lot of advertisers for “militias” and “infantry.”

Mary Eaton, Newburyport