Day 33 - Conspiracy Anyone?

Charger for HP Photosmart R727 camera

It's spooky how well Amazon knows me. Recently, I found my digital camera. It had been packed away since long before we moved to California, and I was sure there are some photos on it that I haven't downloaded yet. So yesterday evening which was "clear the surface of the desk" night, I pulled it out of its case and opened the battery compartment to see what I needed to do to get the camera working.

The camera is powered by a rechargeable battery, not a couple of AA's, so I went looking for the charger. After checking the most likely places, I failed to find it, so I got online and checked out where I could find a charger. I tried Best Buy first because that's where I got the camera. But their search engine sucks - the more precise I made the search criteria, the more irrelevant results I got. After scaling back the search criteria to the bare minimum, camera chargers, I concluded that Best Buy no longer carried anything having to do with my several year old camera.

I used Google's search instead and found lots of sources for appropriate chargers. Since the prices were all around the same amount, I chose Amazon since I have lots of experience with them. After adding the charger to my shopping cart, Amazon suggested that I might want a spare battery, too. And I agreed that was a good suggestion, so I added the battery to the shopping cart. And then, Amazon suggested a few videos I might want to consider.

Paper Clips, the
video, image from
Amazon.com

The first video in that list was "Paper Clips," the 2-disc special edition. And this is why I think Amazon is just spooky. I already own that video, but how my decision to purchase a Lithium Ion rechargeable battery and a charger could connect with videos (yes, plural; there was another one about the making of the film "Paper Clips" in the list of recommended items) about a Middle School project in Whitwell, TN, is beyond my comprehension. I didn't get my copy from Amazon. I didn't even go out in search of it as I had never heard of it. Several years ago I was in f.y.e. in Ballston Mall in Arlington, Virginia, just looking around when I saw the video in a rack of discounted items. The cover of the video announces, "It began as a lesson about prejudice. . .What happened next was a MIRACLE" which was enough to grab my attention. I flipped it over and read the back and made the decision to buy the video.

But that's not the really spooky part. The really spooky part is that on Monday this week, I gave a speech at my Toastmasters club, the title of which was "Paper Clips." I chose my speech topic because the day before, Sunday, January 27, was Holocaust Remembrance Day which is what inspired me to give that speech on Monday.

Sandvika Norway paper clip via

Wikipedia

For those who don't know (and who obviously haven't read Day 14), the movie is about a Middle School class project to collect six million objects as part of their unit on the Holocaust in order to understand how big that number is. They chose paper clips because of a story one of the students had read about the Norwegians during World War II wearing paper clips on their lapels as a sign of opposition to the Nazis after the Nazis banned the wearing of any flag or lapel pins.  The Norwegians had erected a sculpture of a giant paper clip at the end of World War II as a commemoration.

I admit that I buy a pretty wide range of things through Amazon, sometimes they are for my dad, sometimes for a niece or nephew, sometimes for a friend, and even occasionally for myself. So I can't figure out what kind of algorithm Amazon uses that would take all those very different book and video titles and mash them up to present the top suggested items yesterday. If the Paper Clips video had been at the bottom of the list of suggestions, I wouldn't have been surprised. But it was the first one in the list.

Does anyone out there believe in conspiracies? Is Amazon stalking my Project 365 blog?