November 12, 2008
As the keenly observant among you have noticed, we Shark Guys have elected to include Google ads on this site (we recommend clicking on them, repeatedly if you have to, as every 500th clicker wins a trip to Hawaii) and we’ve included this form of free enterprise ‘above the fold’ as it were (a phrase was used back when people were still reading newspapers)
Interesting, online ad competitors like Text Link Ads are completely buried by Google and unsearchable there, with no page ranking. This is understandable, as if we were a railroad we wouldn’t want someone else hauling freight on our rails and it seems T-L-A is that smelly hobo turfed between stops.
Consider our ad placements the cyber-equivalent of that guy at a spoken-word performance who comes around at the end with a hat, forcing you to feign distraction so that you can hold on to your small change and lower-denomination currency and thus be able to tip that attractive bartender consistently throughout the night.
Google AdSense works on some sort of mysterious computer-language-based Voodoo that we don’t have a clue about, however it seems to base what ads are displayed on the text that appears on a given page.
Thus, when we posted a blog in tribute to the drinking prowess of a certain young prince among drinkers, all sorts of advertisements began to pop up that were somehow based on his name and title – gossip sites, genealogy services offering to trace your heritage back to the big Kahunas of various medieval fiefdoms, and travel offers to places with royal sounding names like… [Editor's note: we won’t mention the town's name here, but let’s just say that it is the westernmost point on the TransCanada highway, which makes matters convenient once you’ve soaked up a bit of the sad local life and are ready to jump in the ocean]
However, given the nature of this blog, and The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Debauchery, the drunk compendium from which it sprung, ads more related to drinking, drunkenness, and the various accouterments that can spruce up this lifestyle do thankfully appear (including ones that are a little too appropriate, such as the ads that ask if you drink too much wine or another that wonders if you could stand to lose some beer-fat).
Of these, our absolute favorite thus far is from the Frankfurt-based “Rocket Packs Getränke-Rucksack-Systeme”, a company that sells “Beer rocket-packs”. This is a huge step up from the beer drinking hat popularized by fans of American sporting events who don’t want to get up to get a drink (and who presumably wear diapers to deal with the natural corollary of that kind of beer consumption). 
Getranke’s website itself is not text-heavy, and most of it is in German, however the pictures seem to tell the story: the company sells packs that can keep a two or three liter tower of beer cool so that drinkers can be served on the move. A serving person straps on the jetpack-looking like device (at times while wearing a ball gown, which may or may not be offset by a pair of gigantic, devil-swooping-in-on-a-bad-dream pair of black wings) and offers freshly-tapped beer for thirsty patrons. In terms of venues where this sort of thing might be popular, it seems from their publicity material (see above photo) that no place is too toney to have a lady in high-heels squirt beer into your glass from a hose attached to a backpack.
We here www.thesharkguys.com thank all of our inadvertent advertisers and commend Getranke especially for coming up with a product that makes shameless shilling fun.
Ein prosit!
