"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

Scott and Dad are watching it right now. I love all of the actors... Whether it's Mandy Patinkin, or Andre the Giant, who said before he died that he was never happier than when he was doing that movie.

Let me tell you a story. There is this site online which has targetted advertising based on your profile. (Oh, you can probably already tell it's Facebook.) When it sees in Leslie's profile that she is engaged, it targets her relentlessly with wedding ads, some innocuous, and some horrendously prejudiced.

When it sees that I'm engaged, it only offers up one wedding advertisement, for men's wedding bands. What other advertisements does it offer? View my odyssey between two instances of an advertisement:

Wedding band
Baseball
Healthcare
Arrested Development Tees
Indiana Jones T-shirts
Free Online Game (based on the "true story of Alice in Wonderland")
Make money for surveys
Big Beautiful Women
Beer
Political thing
College loans
T-shirts
Baseball
Shoes
Firefighters
Wedding band

So you see a few trends. First, most of them have nothing to do with weddings at all. And at least one of them has something that would to all perceptions be contrary to my being engaged, would it not?

Hmmm, I say, hmm. Because a woman is supposedly wedding-crazy, or because I have no concern whatsoever for wedding planning, such a discrepancy in advertising is generated. Are they reacting somewhat to some statistical tendency? Perhaps. Are they also perpetuating it and aggravating people in the process? Probably also true.

Do I ultimately think it a bad thing? Somewhat. In what way? Well... I've been leery of socialization through advertising for a while now. It's fine when parents do it, when school does it, when other kids do it, even when they aren't the desired influences, because they're local, and can be accounted for. How can one account for advertising, whose prime motive is not to make you function in society, or to make you happy, but to make money. That motive isn't evil in itself, but it can be blind. If negative gender oppositions are harmful, then how is playing with them to make a sale good? (I look in your direction, "Bridezilla"... yes, it's a show.) In this case, where Facebook's advertising is creating a standard whereby engaged women are constantly reminded of what their duty is (to the wedding), and engaged men are free to peruse big beautiful women while playing MMORPGs and wearing t-shirts and shoes for their favorite baseball team ... no wonder I'm a little leery.