Ordering Pizza In 2021 – Google Style

(sharing humor and a warning about ordering Google Pizza – from Joke Of the Day)

CALLER: Is this Gordon’s Pizza?

GOOGLE:   No sir, it’s Google Pizza.

CALLER: I must have dialed a wrong number.  Sorry.

GOOGLE:  No sir, Google bought Gordon’s Pizza last month.

CALLER: OK.  I would like to order a pizza.

GOOGLE:    Do you want your usual, sir?

CALLER: My usual? You know me?

GOOGLE:  According to our caller ID data sheet, the last 12 times you called you ordered an extra-large pizza with three cheeses, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and meatballs on a thick crust.

CALLER: OK! That’s what I want …

GOOGLE:   May I suggest that this time you order a pizza with ricotta, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes, and olives on a whole wheat gluten-free thin crust?

CALLER: What? I detest vegetables!

GOOGLE:   Your cholesterol is not good, sir.

CALLER: How the hell do you know!

GOOGLE:   Well, we cross-referenced your home phone number with your medical records.  We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years.

CALLER: Okay, but I do not want your rotten vegetable pizza!  I already take medication for my cholesterol.

GOOGLE:  Excuse me sir, but you have not taken your medication regularly.  According to our database, you only purchased a box of   30 cholesterol tablets once, at Drug RX Network, 4 months ago.

CALLER: I bought more from another drugstore.

GOOGLE:   That doesn’t show on your credit card statement.  

CALLER:     I paid in cash…. I have other sources of cash.

GOOGLE: That doesn’t show on your last tax return unless you bought them using an undeclared income source, which is against the law. But you did not withdraw enough cash according to your bank statement.

CALLER: WHAT THE HELL!

GOOGLE:  I’m sorry, sir, we use such information only with the sole intention of helping you.

CALLER: Enough already!  I’m sick to death of Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and all the others.  I’m going to an island without internet, cable TV, where there is no cell phone service and no one to watch me or spy on me.

GOOGLE:      I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport first.  It expired 6   weeks ago.     

Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Web Entrepreneurs

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be web geeks,
Don’t let ’em write Java or HTML.
Let ’em be doctors and lawyers and such.
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be web geeks,
‘Cuz they’ll work all night long and they’ll never get rich.
While Google makes all the cash.
(With apologies to Ed Bruce and Willie Nelson)

Most web entrepreneurs need OTHER day jobs. Millions of them make little or no money, despite delivering informative and/or entertaining content. And they may well spend more on SEO than they make. An expensive hobby …

The Free Version of Yoast is Worth Less Than it Costs …

… because you have to waste so much time trying to make sense of it. And maybe it is a scam to force users to buy the paid version. We haven’t tried its competitors—All in One SEO Pack, SeoPressor, SEO Ultimate, and Squirrly SEO—but perhaps they are no better. One reviewer compared Yoast and the rest.

What are the downsides of Yoast? Here are some:
1. We frequently get notices that we need to update it, but when we update it WordPress doesn’t show it to be updated. Huh? Seems to us that any SEO package that is in the form of a plugin to WordPress should behave properly when using WordPress. Not a deal-breaker, but not a favorable sign either.
2. Every time we trigger Yoast we get a message urging us to upgrade to the paid version. Does the “bait-and-switch” scam ring a bell?
3. Using keywords seems to be going out of favor lately, but historically was recommended, both in raw HTML sites and in WordPress. Yoast tries to grab a whole phrase and make it into a keyword, then complains that this “keyword” is not used often enough in the body of the post. How COULD it be, as the grammar would become jibberish?
4. Yoast’s simultaneous use of colored bullets and their defining text is redundant. It should choose one or the other.
5. Has the classic guidance “brevity is the soul of wit” recently been repealed? A minimum of 300 words seems excessive.

Why Isn’t WordPress Fixed Yet?

WordPress is one of the most popular tools in the Internet world, with one source estimating in January 2017 that it accounts for 50-60% of the Content Management Systems and that it runs 27% of the entire Internet. It also has made its creator, Matt Mullenweg, a multi-millionaire. Unfortunately it seems to be at least as popular among malicious hackers as it is among the rest of its users, and it apparently is constantly under attack by a large bunch of them, including a major one in mid-January.

We at Technology Bloopers would agree that, when not beset by these attacks, WordPress.org has provided us a simple way of publishing our content. Of course this came at the expense of having to work around the ambiguity of whether to install it at the root or elsewhere, the wretched (and sometimes downright wrong) advice of the “WordPress for Dummies” book, and the virtually unusable user forum. But we overcame these challenges and sailed along for three years … until now. Apparently we were lucky, as over one million sites were defaced. This and its two sister sites appears to be unaffected, although whenever we add a new post or update the versions of plugins, themes, or other features we have to take a detour from our usual path (apparently because our ISP has not repaired their own damage).