You can pick your nose, but you can't always pick your adverts

Logging on to my blog this morning I was surprised (and not entirely disappointed) to find a prominent picture of a large-busted blond woman gracing the left-hand side, just below the somewhat less alluring picture of myself.

It turns out this is an advert for a game called Evony (beware more of the same), which seems to be a kind of medieval online adventure. Feel free to sign up, if your off-line life is insufficiently appealing.

Like many bloggers, I use Google Adsense to generate a bit of interest and (very modest) income. (You click, I earn. Terms and conditions prohibit "I click, I earn.") Technically, Adsense is supposed to match the adverts to the subject-matter of the blog, but sometimes (like some comments) it goes a bit 'off topic' - hence I am occasionally flooded with adverts for debt counselling, investment, and so on. Today seems to have been just one of those days.

The technology does allow you to exclude 'competitors' ads from your site, so there are some organizations and topics that I've been able gradually to eliminate, but it requires a bit of fiddling around with URLs, etc.

Quite why a sword-and-sorcery adventure should turn up on the Ugley Vicar blog, I can't really fathom. In the interests of good taste, however, I will have to make sure it doesn't happen again. (Sigh!)

Revd John Richardson
2 October 2009

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Don't worry, be happy - for a while, anyway

I do not know whether Felix Dennis is an atheist or not, but I couldn't help thinking of these words about happiness from one of the world's richest men, when I considered the atheist's slogan, "stop worrying and enjoy your life":

Am I happy? No. Or, at least, only occasionally, when I am walking in the woods alone, or deeply ensconced in composing a difficult piece of verse, or sitting quietly with old friends over a bottle of wine. Or feeding a stray cat.

I could do all those things without wealth. So why do I not give it all away?

Because I worked too hard for it. Because I am tainted by it. Because I am afraid to. All those reasons and more. Perhaps if I am lucky enough to become old, I will accumulate something else: the courage to give it all away before I die. That would be a good thing, I think. (Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich, Ebury Press, 2007, 284-285)

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Probably the craziest advert in the world

Why did Ariane Sherine, who came up with the idea for a campaign to put ‘atheist advertisements’ on the sides of London buses suggest as a slogan, "There’s probably no God"? Surely an atheist convinced enough to pay to advertise her beliefs would want to write, "There’s no God", period?

According to one of her earlier Comment is Free columns, it may be because the manufacturers of Carling lager can advertise their product as "Probably the best lager in the world", without incurring the disapproval of the Advertising Standards Authority.

Or is there another reason? Back in February, Ms Sherine described her desperate struggle with depression and the side-effects of anti-depressants. So awful was this, she wrote, "anti- depressants depressed me till I prayed to God to make the pain stop."

But doesn’t that rather undermine the whole campaign? Shouldn’t the slogan read, "There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life - unless life is really unbearable, in which case although atheism certainly won’t help you, God just might"?

Or is that just too long for the side of a bus?

Revd John Richardson

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A not-so-sure atheist?

Guess who said ...

"anti-depressants depressed me till I prayed to God to make the pain stop."

Answer here, and see here.

(And by the way, as someone who has known depression and anti-depressants, I have every sympathy, despite the contradiction.)

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