I'm Starting a Collection

No, no. Put your wallets away...

It's not that kind of collection. I'm talking about these little gems:

Captured at Hog Day Afternoon

Captured at Susan Katz Keating

I've decided to start collecting these. Very esoteric hobby, I know. But what the heck, it's cheaper than collecting stamps. And some of these have an odd beauty all their own.

If you've ever commented on a blog, you've probably seen one of these. Some refer to these things as eye charts. Probably due to the near impossibility sometimes of making out what all those scrunched up letters say.

They're kind of an unfortunate thing when having one's own blog. Eventually you may need to institute these in order to cut down on the number of "spam hits" you take. These things are used to screen out the bots who lurk in the forests of the world wide web, just waiting to pounce and leave silly-ass comments like this:

Thanks in support of showing such a fastidious thinking, piece of writing is fastidious, thats why i have read it fully Here is my weblog www.h-vene.fi on I Had A Gut Feeling About This..

I mean sure, I'm as fastidious as the next guy but this is going overboard. "Fastidious thinking". "Writing is fastidious". There's a bot who apparently learned a new word on that particular day.

And yes, these weird comments are always accompanied by a link to a website. Said website is normally used to: (A) try to sell you something, (B) offer free sex with nubile Russian goats girls or (C) infect your computer with some weird virus which will then infect any computer it comes in contact with. Sometimes it's (D) All of the Above.

So there's a couple of things a blogger can do to cut down on the spam. One is to bar all comments by anyone who wishes to remain "Anonymous" and the other is to institute the "eye chart" noted above. Or you could do both. I don't know anyone that cruel.

For a while Chant du Départ had the eye chart screen. I didn't know it had that until one of my faithful readers bitched about it pointed it out. So I disabled that feature.

Next thing I know I'm getting the fractured comments noted above, all from some person in Eastern Europe with multiple websites but with the same name, Anonymous. Well, not really. But I was getting a lot of spam.

So I decided to bar "Anonymous" commenters. Not that I had a lot of those, but now I get none. In some ways I miss that, but if you go play with Google Translate enough you can get similar results. Start with a simple phrase in English, then run it through multiple languages and finally translate back to English. That can be amusing.

Oh and did you know that Google Translate will actually pronounce the phrases for you? You can have a lot of fun with that particular feature. Especially as some of the languages use a computer generated voice. It's kind of like hearing Stephen Hawking speak Vietnamese.

Not that I've ever done this, but you can also make Google Translate "talk dirty". This is also a hoot. Imagine your computer telling you "I am desperate to make love to your goat."

Not that I've ever done that, we're talking theory here. In theory you could do this.

Hhhmm, just had a thought. What would happen if one was to feed the eye chart text to Google Translate? I have so got to try THAT!