Know those semi-cryptic wavy characters that you need to type back in when trying to link to a web site on Facebook or sign up for some web services? They are known as captchas and, in case you are wondering, they are there to try to keep spammers at bay (though spammers are never shy of exploiting good people around the world and pay them to sit at terminals typing these in for pennies an hour…)

This morning (probably the result of not enough sleep or coffee… or both), I was wondering what my favorite kind of captcha was. There are, of course, the ones so cryptic that it takes a true calligrapher to tell what the heck they say! I am sure those keep spammers at bay, but they probably also keep REAL people at bay, because they are so hard to read!

So, I guess my favorite kind of captcha is the one I encounter in Facebook:

I can not only read the words, but it also provides a certain level of entertainment, because they are real words (“wagons” and “unfair” in this case) that leave me wondering sometimes what the connection may be between them… Are wagons unfair? Is it unfair to ride a wagon? What’s a wagon? What’s fair…?

See? Next time, I will get more sleep or get more coffee into my system before I blog!