Here’s how weirdly tuned-in to each other YouTube and I are. Yesterday I posted a short musical variety film featuring a young Jack Benny as the emcee. It got me to thinking about how different Benny’sl later persona was from the brash, unfunny young man in the film. That lead me to ruminate on the great radio show that made him famous and the series of sponsors who made a mint being advertised on Jack’s airwaves. One of them was Grape Nuts Cereal. I didn’t pursue this thinking much. It just lingered for a few minutes in my consciousness, then disappeared. I didn’t even search on-line for any info on the (disgusting) cereal. So how, then, did YouTube decide this morning to greet me with a slew of Grape Nuts commercials? Has my frequent use of the site enabled it to somehow effect a transference between my mind and its algorithm? The answer is: sort of. After puzzling over this for most of today (I’m suffering from a major case of work avoidance) I came up with this for an answer: Raymond posts Jack Benny movie. Jack Benny was sponsored by Grape Nuts. Hence, here are a pile of commercials for Grape Nuts. Sounds logical except that Benny had other sponsors–Lucky Strike cigarettes most famously–and their ads didn’t come up. Nor did I think about them. Only Great Nuts were on my mind and hence only Grape Nuts were on YT’s mind.  Above are two of the commercials I was gifted with this AM. One features the 1960s/70s health food fanatic Euell Gibbons. Despite his self-confessed habit of eating pine trees, he sure loved Grape Nuts–they paid him better, I’m sure, than an ancient tree could. Gibbons is 63 years old here and Mr. Eat-Healthy looks at least twenty years older than that. His hands shake. He seems out of breath as he lopes through the countryside, attempting to walk and talk at the same time. It turns out he was a year away from his early passing–soon the pine trees could rest easily knowing that Gibbons wasn’t stalking them. The second commercial is a bit of a puzzler. The YouTuber who posted it sees it as a ‘coded’ gay message, featuring an unusual type of man who has a bit of Charles Nelson Reilly in him, searching for a word that will describe Grape Nuts unusual taste. In the comments section below the video you’ll see that many are puzzled by the inference of homosexuality in the cereal ad and don’t buy it. I see it quite clearly, as did the person who posted it. Anyway, see for yourself. By the way, have you ever eaten Grape Nuts? Tastes like your chewing concrete…