Damn. I'm not THAT old.

About 6 months ago I followed the lead of my fine, Bible-scholar buddy Joshua (and his fine, Bible-centric blog), in experimenting to see if there were any God-given reason that, at this point in time, I could make a few bucks off this blog.

Well, truly, I never expected to actually make money. I think I know my audience, who doesn't come here on their way to somewhere else. The number of daily visitors is not enough to generate any substantial number of clicks. Even the occasional pick-up by match.com or boston.com, causing a massive spike in readership for one day, does not produce necessary traffic.

But I was temporarily seduced. Google makes it sound easy:

"AdSense for feeds places relevant ads into your feed's items. Google automatically chooses which ads to show based on your blog's content, and you earn money when visitors view or click on these ads."

So ... I just checked my "account", and my theory has been borne out. Ads here have generated 3 clicks in 6 months. Three. Earning me $2.77 that I won't see, anyway, anytime soon, since Google won't send the check until the balance exceeds $10....which at this rate, will be when I have grandchildren.

Meanwhile, I came on to post this morning and, paying attention for the first time, noticed the four ads "based on your blog's content" that Google's algorithms chose today (ostensibly based on either this or this entry?):

Meet Older Singles
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Senior dating (2 chances!). And, natch, dateacougar.com. Follwed by instructions on how to create an identity-management software application. So I clicked onto the arrow at the top of the box to see what the second set of ideas might be and was even more impressed:

Find a Date
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You never knew y'all were only being asked to visit here to find your Filipino Dream Woman?Folks. This perhaps is what Google thinks of y'all. Be afraid. Be very afraid. (Or, be very afraid of my writing.)

Hmm. It's a no-brainer. After you've had a chance to browse them today, I'm going to jettison the ad routine ... unless I am one day featured on "Good Morning, America."

At which point I'll add it back and retire to my Florida vacation home.