You will notice a new feature on my site: a challenge for every comment.

While doing some research for a friend over at AllSeattleWebDesign on the use of things called CAPTCHA’s (those little text-ish thingies you get on blogs for example where you must type in the goofy looking word) I found that I should be able to install it fairly easily here. So I did.

Now, I don’t have much trouble with comment spammers, it comes and goes. But this particular captcha does/may do a couple of things:

1) It may relieve me of manually approving all comments all the time. I am going to leave the manual option on for now, maybe next year (2009) I will turn it off if things go well.

2) It adds to the library of digitized texts because one of the words you type is actually reported back to an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) effort scanning old texts. Then, we the commenters, actually supply them with [theoretically] a known human who is more likely to accurately report the text for the OCR tools.

3) This reCAPTCHA may impede some of my readers ability to make comments, especially those of you with less than perfect eyesight. If it is hard, easy, doable, or otherwise I would like to hear from you. I can just as easily UN-plug this thing. Please note, it has an audible option button that will say the words and then you type them. Interesting, but in the end only as good as the speakers on your computer or the anvil in your ear. Let me know.

4) This reCAPTCHA is usable by anyone on our zwise domain as the public and private key combination is ‘keyed’ to our domain and any subdomains. Let me know if you are interested and I will pass along the information.
5) It may slow down the site. If you feel that things are tedious, I mean the speed of my blog loading, again let me know. It is hideous right now but I think it may the time of night. I get this a lot and then during the day it is faster. Not sure what gives but tell me if you experience a repeated problem.

6) Did I mention that it is hideously ugly and absolutely destroys my gestalt [or whatever you call it] on my theme. I will work on that one.
I know, I know, you want to see The Mermaids, but it is late and I am tired.
I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait.

Abby, where did you get this rollerskate girl?
McDonalds.
Hm, that is…interesting (raising eyebrows to Mommy).
Yeah, but Mommy said she is TOO saxy.
Oh?
Yeah, she shows too much of her belly.
Saxy?
[askance look] Uhhh…sixy?
Yeah, sixy. I think you are right. She IS too sixy.

I don’t think they could make her much more sixy without being co-sponsored by Hugh himself.
Exactly who are these Happy Meals for anyway?

BopOp showed me many tricks when I was younger.

Two that I remember are word tricks and they go like this.

Say “S-H-O-P” 5 times fast.
S-H-O-P S-H-O-P S-H-O-P S-H-O-P S-H-O-P
Quick! What do you do at a green light?

The answer to this question depends on how closely you are paying attention and also, I think, whether you can spell. 4 year olds (at least in my experience) always say “Go”. They tend not to be tricked in this way.

With no success there, I went to my other standby.

Say ‘joke’ 5 times fast.
joke joke joke joke joke
Quick! What’s the white part of an egg?

I am pretty sure, in fact I KNOW that my 4 year old mermaid isn’t going to answer ‘albumen’ so I figured she would naturally answer ‘yolk’ as any victim might. But she did me one better, without so much as a pause she shouted

SHELL!

…which pretty much means the yolk is on me.