Jon Carroll<\/a> of San Francisco just wrote about modern funerals comprising mostly upbeat eulogies. His take was he wants people to miss him, not celebrate his memory when he goes — wailing would be nice, to him, in this soft but effective satire. One ad on this column is a shopping spot for condolence gifts, and the other offers lessons in dealing with grief.<\/p>\nI haven’t researched this thoroughly, but when you click onto a plane crash story, do Orbitz and Travelocity pop up?<\/p>\n
OK. No plane crash stories on the S.F. Chron’s<\/em> sfgate.com. But the slaying of a 90-year-old monk in Europe brought an ad on how to buy a list of area sex offenders. (This had nothing to do with that.)<\/p>\nAn article about joint Russian-Chinese military exercises brought up an ad on dating Russian women and another on where to buy Chinese military equipment (!?).<\/p>\n
Back to Lileks’ Star-Tribune<\/em>: Its Northwest-union negotiations did bring up an Expedia ad on good fares from that airline. Its article on Israel closing Gaza settlements brings an ad that says “Order Israeli food online.”<\/p>\nYou can’t make this stuff up. Maybe humor columnists can’t improve on it. -30-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Friday, Aug. 19, 2005: The latest innovation in Internet advertising is a boon to humor columnists. Maybe it’s not the absolute newest improvement but now widespread is a customization factor: You open a newspaper Web site’s article on, for example, gardening, and a couple of ads on the same page […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-culture","tag-columnist"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":415,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2008\/03\/famous-columnist-school\/","url_meta":{"origin":121,"position":0},"title":"Famous Columnist School","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"March 14, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Book report: The Art of Column Writing: Insider Secrets from Art Buchwald, Dave Barry Arianna Huffington, Pete Hamill and Other Great Columnists, by Suzette Martinez Standring The reviewing trade has a law that a critic doesn't write up works created by friends. It's a group of laws, actually. When a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mr. Boo Klist"","block_context":{"text":"Mr. Boo Klist","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/mr-boo-klist\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":366,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/10\/alas-richard\/","url_meta":{"origin":121,"position":1},"title":"Alas, Richard","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"October 19, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Humorist Richard Allin died Thursday in Little Rock. He was 77. The following is why he's important. It's from the acknowledgments page of my journalism master's thesis, spring 2003. At the family breakfast table in Fort Smith, 30 to 35 years ago, Dad laughing would\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":258,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/01\/carve-buchwald-on-rushmore\/","url_meta":{"origin":121,"position":2},"title":"Carve Buchwald on Rushmore","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"January 21, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"A great columnist passes. It's Art Buchwald, about whom I wrote nearly a year ago, when he'd been in hospice just a few weeks and well before he recovered enough to get thrown out. Actually he was a part of my master's thesis of spring 2003, which researched the apparent\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News, Spin"","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":52,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/01\/last-of-the-inbreed-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":121,"position":3},"title":"Last of the inbreed","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"January 2, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Jan. 2, 2005: In the paper and online today is Dave Barry's final column as a regularly run syndicated humor columnist. He announced this a few months ago, calling it a sabbatical of indefinite length while acknowledging writing projects in other media, maybe including papers.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":120,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/08\/short-term-newspaper-memory\/","url_meta":{"origin":121,"position":4},"title":"Short-term (newspaper) memory","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"August 21, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Sunday, Aug. 21, 2005. Saturday, in The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas the local column of my old Little Rock colleague Doug Thompson (an earnest journalist, sardonic in conversation) wrote glibly and at times carelessly of Wehco Media purchasing from Community Publishers the assets of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":154,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/02\/wascally-wascals\/","url_meta":{"origin":121,"position":5},"title":"Wascally wascals","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"February 17, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Thursday, Feb. 17, 2005: From Wednesday's Wall Street Journal (while these quotes are complete, they are excerpts): \"Hoping to breathe new life into its animated Looney Tunes franchise and prop up the WB television network's slumping Kids' WB line-up, Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "American Culture"","block_context":{"text":"American Culture","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/american-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1508,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/1508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}