Just Let Me Check One Last Thing . . .

I have the unsettling thought that search referrals are what keep Firefox alive, its nonprofit parent corporation subsisting almost entirely on revenue from the Dread Teat of Mountain View. So this feels a bit like severing an umbilical. Somewhere, black ichor spills from a writhing stump, and Google screams blindly in pain. It's on.

Google helps people, is the rub. It makes finding everything from directions to a business model as effortless as typing what you want and trusting the results -- which, of course, we all now do, usually without thinking. When I am at work, trying to find the Inuit word for "hat," and Google tells me the answer is "Nasak," I accept this as "likely true" and move on with my life; ten years ago, I don't know what I would have done. Probably married an Inuit.

So why question a good deal? My liver does a nice job making bile, and I rarely feel the need to avoid it on a lark. Oh, that's right -- I was born with a liver. It didn't slide into my ear canal one night while I was sleeping so it could eat my thoughts and digest them into advertisements.

That last part has always made me uncomfortable. Google converts what is essentially a waste product -- the discarded spoor of browsing -- into something we are literally fed. Ninety-nine percent of the time it doesn't register, because algorithms are mediocre cooks. The "targeted" ads next to the e-mail I received about writing this article included three plugs for "the next Google" and a killer deal on a Total Body Shaver. Thanks but no thanks -- I already have a Total Body Shaver.

It's the remaining 1 percent that's trouble, the just-for-you links that smell like tasty roast chicken and look so irresistibly delicious that they distract you from the suckered appendage holding the serving dish and the Uncanny Kitchen from whence it came.

Sat., Aug. 30, 1:07 p.m. I log in to Gmail before I realize what I'm doing. It is not the last time this will happen.

Any good servant will tell you that the key to staying employed is cultivating a benign but deeply rooted dependence on the part of your master. No matter how many times George Jetson gets fired, that automatic shower machine is a constant in his life -- in this future, unemployment is nothing compared to the implied terror of washing yourself.

But somewhere in that shower machine's data banks are massive logs of everywhere George Jetson has ever been dirty, dynamic maps showing hair growth and loss over time, and detailed 3-D models of his business parts. Not that he volunteered the information -- it's just the kind of thing a robot notices when it bathes you.

Sun., Aug. 31, 12:23 p.m. Having successfully reserved a Zipcar to help a friend move some things into storage, I am presented with a confirmation page featuring the location of my vehicle and a handy map of . . . oh my God.