That's the question that attaches to the following passage:

Here are some things you can do at the Maryland Renaissance Festival: You can drench a wench. You can hurl hatchets at tree stumps with red targets painted on them. You can ride elephants. You can participate in a game called rat-pucking, punting stuffed-rat toys across a lawn toward the gathered apron skirts of a matron assigned as the target. You can buy little puffy-tipped horns and walk around for the rest of the day with them attached to either side of your head, and no one will look at you funny. You can coast down a long wooden slide. You can't carry a sword, or even a realistic-looking fake, but you can buy a dull-edged wooden one to go with your knight's hood. You can attend lectures about Tudor-era crime and punishment, or medieval fashion. You (meaning you, legal adult) can walk around drinking a beer in what feels like a small town.

Well, the answer may not surprise those who've been following the new Washington Post Magazine.

The late-September re-launch of this not-that-storied publication was supposed to make it more friendly to both readers and advertisers. Shorter and lighter pieces, it was thought, would lead to a more profitable magazine, putting the Post a touch closer to viability in these terrible times for newspapers.

OK, fine. But do you really have to put the advertisement right in the article?

Photograph by PhotographLayne, Creative Commons Attribution License.

Take Slate. This a.m., I stole three minutes from actual work to read up on the essentials—you know, my daily dose of counterintuitive rhetorical questions and columns on the best way to break one's leg. Before I could click through to a piece on "why you should let your kid suck his thumb" or a Jack Shafer column asking, "prithee, does we need newspapers?" a ginormous Volkswagen ad swooped in, flashing sleek images of a black sedan and dropping catchphrases like "ART GALLERY QUALITY INTERIOR" and "POSITIVELY OOZES CLASS." Yum! Before I knew it, I had accidentally clicked on an article asking whether socialized medicine had killed Natasha Richardson. I did not read this article.

Lil' disclosure: A number of similar ads are circulating on our own site—some kind of shoot-'em-up film trailer and a massive White Castle flash animation that swiftly takes over your whole screen. Don't bother trying to mute, pause, or stop the animation—those buttons won't work. Nor will the [close this] button. Your only option? Close the browser, or navigate away from our site.

So please, keep reading. And don't scroll over. Here's Chuck Berry: