Hi, Mongo

Oh the things you can find online.

Or, in other words, here's a bit of what I learned in my Masters classes coming back to me. Prof. Haley reminded us often that as far as the web goes, what our users do with the sites we create may not necessarily be what our users use them for. Witness this odd review of an Android game, as posted on Amazon.com, as an example:

greetings fellow amazonians well today was a true adventure with mongo. we went out on our date with this girl (Victoria) that we met at the park yesterday. it was nothing to exciting at first we went to go and get coffee at the local coffee shop, but mongo couldn't have any caffeine so I got him an italian soda instead because they said it was caffeine free.

so Victoria and I started to get to know each other she was from califonia and was really nice. I told her I was mongo's dad and that his mother had been in a terrible combine accident shortly after he was born so after that we were just alone together. she ate that up like it was honey I couldn't believe it. so everything else was going well until mongo started getting antsy in his rascal so I downloaded gem boy jump to let him play while Victoria and I continued to talk.

should have known better than let mongo have anything to drink at a coffee shop because there must have been caffeine in his drink or he just breathed it in from the air because he started going crazy slamming is spiderman helmeted head into the table and yelling "it's not fair that I can't jump like gem boy! I want to go home and see my mommy and your not my dad so stop lying to this pretty lady!". well that pretty much blew up my spot. Victoria threw her scalding hot cup of coffee on me and mongo persisted to slam his head into my phone until it was nothing but a bunch of pieces.

finally I told mongo to go home and I went to the bathroom to clean up. now I am sitting on my kindle fire ordering another phone (third one in 10 days). thanks amazon for making me look like a lying chump.

This reviewer has a series of such reviews up, most of them about the free app of the day offered on Android devices (I have a Kindle Fire, and thus also regularly peruse the free apps, though this is the first time I've encountered this particular reviewer).

Certainly Amazon never intended such reviews when they established their review system, but there you go -- reviews as storyline. A vapid storyline, yes, but a storyline nonetheless.