Monday, January 30, 2006

My hatred for The Darwin Awards - and how Google punished me for talking about it

I really hate The Darwin Awards. As I said on one Amazon review: "The Darwin Awards are a pseudo-scientific excuse for the callous to profit from the tragedies of the unfortunate by marketing to the smug and self-satisfied."

If you aren't familiar with them, the Darwin Awards are given to people who have died in "funny" ways. Although it is claimed that recipients deserve their Award because they are morons who did us all a favor by removing themselves from the gene pool, in fact the Darwin Awards aren't very strict about who qualifies.

For one thing, the Awards are given to older people who either have already reproduced or are unlikely to reproduce in the future. So the Awards don't actually have anything to do with cleansing the gene pool.

But you say, it isn't supposed to be scientific - it's just good fun.

Although it claims to exclude children, children have been nominated for Darwin Awards because they did something dumb (as kids will do) and died as a result. Think of the chuckles parents get reading about their kid's death in the Darwin Awards. Hardee har har.

Finally, plenty of the deaths nominated for the Darwin Awards are simply someone's extreme bad luck. But if the death is unusual or colorful enough, the cretinous ghouls who participate in The Darwin Awards nominations will go for it.

Now it's one thing to chuckle guiltily over a wacky death. But The Darwin Awards is way beyond that - it is a money-making endeavor that profits from tragedy. But not just profits - exacerbates the tragedy by literally making a public proclamation that the world is better off without the person.

In my opinion, there is no nominee, be they ever so stupid who deserves death or digraces humanity more than the callous, sadistic vultures who participate in the Darwin Awards.

In summation - people involved in the Darwin Awards are the scum of the earth.

So I wrote several negative reviews of the Darwin Awards on Amazon.

So what happens? Google punishes me for it. When I Google my own name, an ad appears for The Darwin Awards III, edited by scum of the earth Wendy Northcutt.

I just emailed Google asking them to ensure that this doesn't happen again. They better get on it damn soon too. I don't want my name to be associated in any non-criticism way with those freaks.


UPDATE: I got a response from AdSense - they're going to see if this situation violates their policy.