BeigeJournal

Part of the joy of Amazon.com is the recommendations the computer comes up with. They do make sense, in a way, and could potentially be of use, but since I only go to Amazon to buy what the library doesn’t have and which isn’t readily available from a local book store, the Amazon Recommendation Computer’s database of what interests me is strongly skewed both toward the bizarre and toward the technical, which makes for a fascinating set of recommended books. Among those currently on the list are Home Machinist’s Handbook; Recreational Sex; Creepy Crawly Cuisine, which is described as “an introduction to the world of edible insects, complete with recipes and color photographs”; The Root of All Evil, which is a collection of User Friendly cartoons; and, of course, Jet Engines. If you ever buy Tabletop Machining and the computer tells you that people who bought that book also bought the Eat-A-Bug Cookbook, you’ll know who to blame.

I bought the Eat-A-Bug Cookbook in 1999 to give to my brother (as part of our continuing tradition of bizarre gifts), and insect cookbooks continue to make a strong showing in my Amazon.com recommendations to this day. Somewhere there is a computer that apparently still thinks of me primarily as the Eat-A-Bug guy. Sure, I’ve bought books about jet engines and machine tools and sex, but it will never forget the Eat-A-Bug Cookbook.