Feel free to check out the product listing yourself, but basically this is specialized equipment which you might find in a home bar. It's Heineken-emblazoned, and while I am fond of many different types and styles of beer, I don't particularly care for that brand. Which got me to wondering how exactly Amazon concluded it needed to get this in front of my eyeballs. Fortunately, Amazon is at least semi-transparent (translucent?) about these things, and when something is recommended you also get a link to information about the whys and wherefores, as well as the option to "Fix" the recommendation. (E.g. if Amazon keeps recommending Blake Shelton albums because you bought your aunt a Miranda Lambert album once, in spite of your personal distaste for "country" music, you can indicate that the purchase was a gift for someone else and not indicative of your own personal tastes. You probably already knew that, I just never fail to find that pretty nifty.)
So, curiosity piqued, I clicked on the Why? link and was informed that Amazon had based its recommendation off the fact that I had recently viewed a certain style of baby gate with built-in pet door. I hadn't even bought that gate (I think I got as far as adding it to my shopping cart, but later deleted it.) So, a reaction in three parts:
1. There is seemingly no more connection between a pet-doored baby gate and a set of beertender tubes than the connection between any two given products located by opening a catalog twice at random.
2. However, in my case, there's a fairly straight-line connection. We recently relocated the little guy's train table to the basement, which is also where my bar is set up. This has led directly to me working on organizing the bar a bit better, if only to make it easier to secure the whole thing against inquisitive little fingers. It has also led to some brainstorming about how to (a) let the little guy play by himself in the basement while (b) keeping his little sister (and soon enough his baby brother) from tumbling down the basement stairs after him while also (c) leaving the door open so that whichever grown-up is home/upstairs can hear if the little guy needs something while also (d) preventing the dogs from wandering downstairs and helping themselves to the litter boxes' contents while also (e) permitting the cats continuous access to said litter boxes. So, bar supplies and barriers which are sound/cat-permeable yet crawler/toddler/dog-proof? Yes, those thoughts have crossed my mind in close proximity to one another.
3. But how in the deepest data-mining hells did Amazon know that???
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I hate to put up a beer-labeled post where all I do is badmouth a certain variety, so I would also like to add that on Wednesday night this week, I had some friends over for gaming, and one of my buddies (who, full disclosure, has a professional association with the brewery in question) brought me some Starr Hill The Gift because he figured it was up my alley. Indeed it is! So, The Gift gets my Undiscerning-and-Cretinous-Palate Stamp of Approval.
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Speaking of gifts, on Tuesday night, in the absence of anything else remotely watchable on tv, my wife and I returned yet again to our Buffy the Vampire Slayer re-watch project. This may very qualify as egregious misuse of mental resources, but I do keep a bookmark in the back of my mind re: which episode we need to pick up with, and I was legitimately looking forward to our next spin of the dvd's because we were up to the episode The Wish, which not only introduces Anya the Vengeance Demon (one of my favorite characters) but also invokes an alternate reality (one of my favorite tropes). It occurred to me on the second watching that The Wish is really a dark and twisted version of It's a Wonderful Life (actually It's a Wonderful Life gets pretty dark, too, Christmas standard status notwithstanding), since the alternate reality hinges on the idea that Buffy never came to Sunnydale and thus the Master vampire began a reign of terror and indiscriminate feeding. Kinda like George never being born and Mr. Potter's subsequent reign of terror. Have I mentioned I love It's a Wonderful Life, too? The interesting wrinkle in The Wish is that it's not Buffy at the end of her rope who wishes herself out of the picture, it's Cordelia in a fit of pique. Perhaps in a separate post I can unpack the significance of that.
At any rate, my wife and I pressed on to the following episode, Amends, which actually is the Christmas episode from Season 3! I had no idea, and yet there we were watching the story of regrets and redemption and miraculous Christmas snowfall (which prevents Angel from being immolated at dawn since the sunrise is obscured), well within the comfort zone of appropriate Yuletide merriment. Maybe not a full-on Christmas miracle, but certainly a happy accident.
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And just as a follow-up, I can happily report that the little guy stayed up and watched the Grinch last night AND cajoled us into letting him watch it again this afternoon, on the logic that last night he had simply sat on the edge of the couch in rapt attention, and thus he needed a second viewing in which he could run around and act along with the story, exactly as Mickey's Clubhouse has taught him is de rigeur.
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