Once you’ve listened enough for YouTube to figure out what you like, it makes music “mixes” for you, and damn if they don’t have me pegged. The problem is the ads between songs. You can skip them after a few seconds, but sometimes you’re not hovering over your device, maybe you’re hovering over a drink instead, and are thus disinclined to rise and take a few steps. So you hear the whole ad. Medical quackery is the recurring theme. I think they might also have figured out that I’m an old man, because coming in first place for product frequency is “natural remedies” for ED. These typically feature testimonials from a woman, buxom and thirtyish, concerning what happened when she hooked up with a 60-something man who is willing to share his “secret” for the endlessly fun rompings that she describes.
Arguably less plausible is an ad claiming that, for Christians, the cure for neuropathy in the feet is hidden in plain sight within the Gospel According to St. John. When it ended, I took two sips and considered that it was probably impossible to imagine a mental world farther from mine than the one inhabited by someone who would credit such a come-on.
On the upside, I discover stuff I love. Didn’t “The Mike Douglas Show” air at around 3 p.m. on weekdays, target audience people like, say, my mom, who had done the laundry, dusted and vacuumed and was now returned home from the grocery store? I doubt that people who watch whatever the present-day equivalent is ever see anything like this—the Patti Smith Group performing “Free Money” for Mike Douglas viewers in 1977:
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