Midnight Mutterings | GrabAGun (and a brief cat update)

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

So here’s what showed up in my e-mail this morning:

Then I was offered a free t-shirt—not shown—with my purchase in case I was ‘still thinking it over.’ (I’m not.) While I’m definitely looking forward to warmer weather, I’m planning to wear my old clothes this spring and am not about to have GrabAGun dress me. Not yet anyway.

As you likely know, this is the week the Supreme Court began hearing a case that could change the the law about how the internet works. That is, whether Google, for example, is responsible for results of the messages chosen by the algorithms used by social media to select material offered to users. And whether, in this case, YouTube is responsible for or contributed to recruitment of terrorists by ISIS’ attack in Paris in 2015. You can read about it here:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/supreme-court-to-hear-google-case-that-could-impact-free-speech-online.html

I won’t attempt to explain what I understand so superficially about the workings of the internet or the Supreme Court of the United States. But I do understand that what offerings show up when I open YouTube, for example, are chosen in part based on what sorts of videos I have opened in the past. That’s why I get offered lot of gardening and health/medical suggestions to click on, and not so many ideas on makeup for teens or gun buying suggestions.

I assume the offer above was chosen for my e-mail by such an algorithm, but I’m not so sure why. I have mentioned guns in one or two Midnight Mutterings, but don’t recall searching for anything gun related on Google or YouTube. Except some statistics on shooting deaths when I wrote about Shinzo Abe’s assassination. No doubt, because I opened my e-mail about GrabAGun today before I had my eyes sufficiently focused, I have, no doubt opened myself to other such offerings, even though I have never owned a gun or a t-shirt depicting a weapon. In fact, I am so old and out of date, my clothes don’t have much to say at all, in words or pictures at least. And if the Justices received the same e-mail I did, I assume they, too, will forgo the free t-shirt and wear last century’s fashion in black robes. I’ve been a bit depressed about the Supreme Court of late, and knowing what they likely will be wearing is a small comfort in trying times.

And now to cats:

If you made it through my last column, you already know that Rose and Molly are given to chewing paper without regard to its necessity for the future. (I returned to Orcas, leaving R and M in the custody of my son in Bellingham.)

Shortly thereafter, my son reported to me that Molly, age six months, has apparently gone into ‘heat.’ As cats do.

Rose, however, is not so precocious, though they were born on the same day. Still, in spite of their differing interests, they joined efforts in chewing and destroying an important paper left on the desk. There wasn’t much left of it. Just enough to show that it was a copy of the application for Molly’s spay appointment. (And we thought they were too young to read.)