What the Hell? This Blog is "Rated R"?

With a hat tip to Lance over at A Second Hand Conjecture, it turns out that my little blog thingie here is "Rated R" according to a clever marketing ploy by an online dating site. The site explains, in my case:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* hell (6x)
* crack (4x)
* cocaine (3x)
* suicide (2x)
* shoot (1x)

So, what they're doing is crawling or spidering or whatever the hip web term is for it over a site, finding instances of certain words and cranking out a rating.

That is, I am sure, a small part of how the MPAA goes about its film rating business, but knowing the film industry (even now that Jack Valenti is dead), I'm betting the MPAA comes after the site for trademark infringement. Why? Here's a picture of a "widget" they offered me:



Them movie industry boys are serious about intellectual property rights, and this dating service site didn't even have the sense to remove the MPAA logo from the picture?

Two other points. First, if Live Free or Die Hard is any indication at all, these guys have set the bar way too low for an R rating and I deserve no worse than a PG-13.

Second, as porn sites found it useful to "voluntarily" use or cooperate with filter services like Net Nanny and so forth, I sadly predict it's only a matter of time before all internet web sites do have some sort of rating category assigned to them. (I say this, by the way, as a father of primary school children who have access to the internet.) Slowly, perhaps, but surely nonetheless, the wild, wild west days of the internet are coming to a close. God forbid, after all, that some sixteen year old should land at this site and read words like "hell" and "shoot."