Sometimes It Strikes You When You Least Expect It!

I have been looking at Televisions. The reason for this is that at some point our main front room tele, all 14" of it and I have no idea how old it is, possibly older than me, perhaps, seems so my wife tells me, to have become a little temperamental and may well be due an respectful early grave. Probably where the telebugs went too.

For those of an age who can remember! I can.

This invariably led to the Amazon website. a Website I have used quite a lot, a fair few years ago now, for buying slightly obscure books, if needed for the masters course I began in 2003. Amazon, was, is a good book site, but it now does almost everything except high end military weapons and that is only because the postage costs may prove a little exorbitant from ex-soviet republics.

But back to my point. I was buying some fairly esoteric works around 2003-2006, when I was a fairly heavy user of the website for this purpose of building a useful bibliography. Amazon, back then had a fairly nifty trick which many more websites have built on, expanded and improved. The trick enabled the website to analyse your purchases and then correlate them to other items that, it could be argued, be of interest to you from the purchase you made. The recommendation was very clever. Cleverer than me really, and quite fun as it did recommend some items I did purchase because of this. One of the items I was often recommended but never quite had the finance to purchase, though I would have loved to have bought it at any time and one day may still buy it, was a book written by Professor Edith Hall, 'Inventing the Barbarian: Greek self definiton through tragedy.' It stands out as one of the seminal works in it's field. It is therefore, not cheap. At least, not then. I think about £80.

Today. 5 years after I finished my masters degree. (had I gone straight into a Part Time, PhD. I would now only be two years from finishing the 7 year course!). 

While looking at a TV i thought I would click recommendations, just to see what pops up. It, to a certain extent displayed how my life in this time period has moved from one place to a wildly different one. The recommendation? Well, it was this!

A slightly different genre to the one I am usually associated with and unless this is a novel way of defining the 'other', by using a cartoon polar bear, cat and a penguin. WHatever the 'other' to that is...I have no idea. Amaing how priorities can change, whereby more members of my family would prefer the octonauts annual to a copy of Edith Hall's monograph, at christmas!