Does everybody know what a capcha is? It’s one of those things you run into online pretty often these days, usually when you’re trying to register for a site or post a comment on a blog, in which you must correctly retype a random and strangely displayed word or two. It’s to prove you’re a human being and not a “robot,” a computer designed to zip around the Web in search of places to infect with spam.
Well today I got an email from a wildlife group, asking me to sign a petition to save wolves. I like wolves. Bears and buffalo and all types of wildlife really. I just can’t fathom that after 400 years, give or take, of manifest destiny on this continent, the occupying European settlers can’t stop obsessively savaging the animals. I swear it’s like some bloodthirsty communal OCD, manifesting in asshats who have no other way to justify their employment at our expense. But I digress.
I tried to register to sign this petition, which was a lot like trying to hack into the mainframe that houses the CIA’s cafeteria cookbook, and I encountered a capcha. Without further ado, behold:
Can you believe it? You might as well, because I’m not making it up. It said auger asseat.
What language is that? I suspect it’s Middle School Study Hall. … Wow. … Is it me, or is that really sick?
Metaphor 
Holy crap, that was close. When you revealed that captcha, the entire universe instantly disappeared and was replaced by an exact duplicate. I guess it could be worse. Just conseadh the ways.
These observations (among others):1. Wikipedia-ing "capcha" is a hoot. Check out the acronym source of the word. It must be a blast to create an acronym that ends up in the lexicon.2. Until I read that entry, I thought capchas were generated by spiking the coffee machine in the employees' lunchroom with LSD and then tape recording their conversations. 3. I'm surprised that more capchas aren't "problematical." Is there some group, like the one that assigns ratings to movies, that monitors their content? I gotta say, what a miserable job that would be. On the other hand, my experience with capchas is that they seem to mimic real words, and hence that there may exist a program that ensures that they contain a sequence of consonants and vowels not unlike those in standard English.4. I've now given more thought to this subject than it deserves. Thanks, Kyle. (BTW, the capcha that I'm being told to use in order to post this comment is "conseadh." By disclosing this, I hope I haven't compromised your blog in some arcane way. I might even have wrecked the entire peace movement, the freedom demonstrations in Egypt and the public employees' gatherings in Wisconsin. Sorry.)