Type The Characters That You See In The Picture

.

What is going on with the Blogger verification words, lately - you know, the little supposedly 'nonsense' words you have to read and then type in when you post a comment on someone's blog?

Everyone is noticing they're starting to get really weird. Yesterday, Tillerman left a comment on my pottery post (yeah, sailing blogs are getting pretty weird, too), and his verification word was urnal, as in referring to an urn.

Coincidence? I think not. I'm starting to get really pissed at the guys who make up these verification words.

What? You still think they're generated automatically by some computer program? Well, I thought so, too, at first, but I'm now convinced that can't be so.

First of all, these are obviously not just random strings of letters, or you'd end up with totally unpronounceable things like xrfjzmx or kqrlmn or, even worse, actual Welsh words.

What we get instead are 'words' that are friendly to English speaking mouths but still have no meaning - groups of letters like wanam or moopy. It would take some serious programming time to write a program to do that. Today, it's much cheaper to hire a roomful of people in India and have them just punch up some letters on the screen whenever you open a comments page in Blogger.

I was skeptical at first, too. Nah, can't be, I thought, - I'm just being paranoid. No wise guy in India is watching what I type and then making up some curveball of a verification word.

Until a few months ago, that is. I'd read a post on JP's blog about a program that lets you do full marine GPS navigation on an iPhone. This was pretty cool. I made some sort of reply about the software and then, there it was, the verification word:


iMatey

iMatey, fer Chrissakes!!! I swear to Tillerman, I'm not making that up. I'm not clever enough to make that up.

But my point is that no Blogger software program is clever enough, either. Here, finally, was proof positive that some drones in India actually are reading our comments and making up verification words on the fly.

Besides the requisite lower case 'i' that's de rigeur for an iPhone app, 'matey' is a word that's both nautical and cutesy in a marketing kind of way. iMatey would be the perfect product name for the GPS iPhone program in JP's post. There's even the play on words of 'aye, Matey'. It's just too damned perfect. There is a human mind at work here - I'm convinced of it. Some guy in India is bored out of his tree and is messing with me.

After that, I started doing screen grabs of this guy's witticisms.

Here he is having some fun with the old Dan Quayle potato misspelling:

Sometimes, he lowers himself to adolescent bathroom humor:

I make the mistake of revealing in a comment that I work for a newspaper, and he throws this at me:

And just a little too much flip alliteration in a comment on Tillerman's blog and he starts getting critical:

One of my brilliant remarks goes completely over his head, and he tells me this:

But about two weeks ago, he must have had a really bad day. When I left a comment on JP's blog, my jaw dropped at the verification word. This guy is very good. He knows there's no way I can track him down and he knows that Blogger would deny, deny, deny that there is any such room full of Indian word verification typers.

So, he's gotten really brazen. He wasn't cute or witty anymore. He was just crude. There it was, in red and white, sticking it to me in no uncertain terms, the verification word of ultimate defiance:

If this continues, I'm switching to Wordpress!

.