Must be a man thang

Yeah, if you’ve been following events in Manassas, Va., you’ll know that it is one strange place.

You may recall that Manassas was the setting of the bizarre 1993, uh, affair of John and Lorena Bobbitt. In which, following an alleged rape of Lorena by John, she fetched a kitchen knife and cut off her sleeping husband’s penis. Then she drove out into Prince William County, tossed the member out of the moving car and then called 911. There was a huge manhood hunt (oh, come on—like I wasn’t going to take the opportunity?), the penis was recovered and surgically reattached.

Eventually Lorena was tried for malicious wounding, and you would not believe the attention that the trial got from the international press. The city of Manassas must have increased its population by 40% during the trial, and every hotel room between the courthouse and Fairfax County was probably occupied.

The jokes alone kept fax machines whirring for weeks. And this was in the days before Twitter.

Look—1) I am not making this up; 2) if you want details go Google for yourself; 3) this is just context for what I’m actually posting about.

Because, twenty years on from the Bobbitt trial, the Manassas police and prosecutors are up to their asses in male genitalia. Again.

This time the technology has moved on and the case involves an attempt to prosecute a 17-year-old boy for sexting his 15-year-old girlfriend a video of his willy. The truncated version is that the cops and DA wanted to, ah, chemically induce an erection in the kid for evidentiary purposes. And that’s all I’m going to say about that, primarily because I just don’t get it.

But when I was reading the Washington Post’s story on this, trying unsuccessfully to make sense of it, here’s what struck me: right in the middle of the text was this astonishingly inappropriate (or possibly massively appropriate; I dunno) ad. (I notice that the story no longer has in-text advertisements; in fact at time of writing the page has no ads at all. That will probably change.)

I mean—what the hell kind of algorithm do they have for ad serving on their site?

Actually, I suspect it’s the same algo that the LA Times used to display multiple ads for coffins, funeral flowers and bereavement services within its story on the death of Farrah Fawcett.

You’d have thought that these publications would have refined their context-based ad systems in the five years since that incident. But if so, you’d be wrong.