Avoiding CAPTCHA

Blogger’s updated, more difficult word-verification gizmos (aka CAPTCHAs) are tedious at best. At worst, they’re unreadable. As The Real Blogger Status points out, enlarging with Command-+ or Control-+ can make the CAPTCHAs more readable. But a Blogger user might do the reader a greater courtesy by turning off word-verification. That’s now possible only from the old Blogger interface: go to Dashboard, Settings, Comments, and scroll down to “Show word verification for comments?”

Just saying no might lead to an influx of automated spam comments. I turned off word-verification yesterday and have seen more spam comments in a day than in the past two or three years. But I moderate comments, so the spam never makes it to my posts. If deleting the junk saves a reader from having to work out something like the enigma below, I’m happy to do it. If the spam becomes unmanageable, I’ll no longer be able to avoid CAPTCHA.

[Say what‽]

‽

The interrobang turns fifty.

A Kerouac notebook page

[Click for a larger view.]

I was startled yesterday to see the name of our friend Seymour Barab in a post at Ordinary Finds for Jack Kerouac’s ninetieth birthday. My transcription of this 1953 (?) Kerouac notebook page, which analyzes Allen Ginsberg:

Ginsberg — intelligent enuf, interested in the outward appearance & pose of great things, intelligent enuf to know where to find them, but once there he acts like Jerry Newman, the photographer anxious to be photographed photographing —— Ginsberg wants to run his hand up the backs of people, for this he gives and seldom takes — He is also a mental screwball

*(Tape recorder anxious to be tape recorded tape recording) (like Seymour Barab anxious to have his name in larger letters than Robert Louis Stevenson, like Steinberg & Verlaine Rimbaud Baudelaire

I think I’ve put together the connections:

1. Jerry Newman was a friend of Kerouac’s, a Columbia University student and recording engineer. (“The photographer anxious to be photographed” seems to be a metaphor, followed by the more appropriate metonymy, “tape recorder anxious to be tape recorded.”) I recognized Newman’s name because of his recordings of jazz in Harlem clubs: Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Art Tatum, among other musicians. Newman recorded Kerouac too.

2. Newman founded two record labels, Esoteric and Counterpoint. Russell Oberlin’s recording of Seymour Barab’s settings of poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses was released on Counterpoint in 1953. (It’s still available from Essential Media Group.)

3. Kerouac seems not to have understood that a composer often gets the more prominent credit when setting texts to music.

4. I can make nothing of “Steinberg & Verlaine Rimbaud Baudelaire.” Did Saul Steinberg do a cover for a collection of their work? If so, I haven’t found it. [6:39 p.m.: Bent from Ordinary Finds offers the likely explanation in the comments: Steinberg’s drawings of pages from Rimbaud’s lost diary.]

5. Speaking of artists: the cover for A Child’s Garden of Verses is the work of William Steig. He and Seymour were friends and neighbors.

Elaine and I have learned so much from Seymour Barab and Margie King Barab. As Elaine puts it, Seymour and Margie are our “favorite inhabitants of the Upper East Side.” How fortunate we are to have their friendship. Seymour by the way never met Kerouac or Ginsberg, and he recalls no discussion of the billing on the album cover.

A related post
Jack Kerouac’s last typewriter

[I mark very few birthdays on Orange Crate Art: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King Jr., Van Dyke Parks, Marcel Proust — that’s all. Elaine took note of Seymour’s ninety-first birthday earlier this year.]

Re: Curator’s Code

Marco Arment’s “I’m not a ‘curator’” offers an excellent analysis of Maria Popova’s Curator’s Code, a project that I learned about from a New York Times article yesterday. Curator’s Code proposes that those who write online use two symbols to acknowledge online sources: ᔥ for via, “a link of direct discovery,” and ↬ for hat tip, “a link of indirect discovery, story lead, or inspiration.” Arment suggests that the ethics of attribution online are not best addressed by using symbols to acknowledge sources:

The proper place for ethics and codes is in ensuring that a reasonable number of people go to the source instead of just reading your rehash.

That’s exactly right.

One point to add: The Curator’s Code project seems to me to misunderstand the meaning of via. Here is the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate on via:

1 : by way of
2 : through the medium or agency of; also : by means of

One quotes from, not via: “To be or not to be” is from Hamlet, not via Hamlet. What I think of as via is what Curator’s Code calls hat tip: an acknowledgement that one has found something by means of someone else’s work. The confusion of via and hat tip seems to me a problem with Curator’s Code that can be solved only with new terms. How about from and via?

[I disagree with Marco Arment about hat tips (or what he also thinks of as via): I think it’s appropriate, whenever possible, to acknowledge how one has come across an item of interest. Many an OCA post contains a via. Everything in this post though I found on my own.]

Toddler recites Shakespeare

A two-year-old recites William Shakespeare’s sonnet 18. Even if he drops lines, he deserves at least as many views as a three-year-old reciting a Billy Collins poem.

Update, March 13: Summer’s lease hath all too short a date. The video has been removed from YouTube.

A related post
xkcd: “Compare and Contrast”

[Thanks, Stefan.]

kennethkoch.org

A new website devoted to the work of the poet Kenneth Koch: kennethkoch.org.

If you think Billy Collins is a good poet, read Kenneth Koch. Koch is the real thing. There, I said it.

A “spect-op” in Los Angeles

From a New York Times article on Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass, a 340-ton boulder delivered to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

The scene on Miracle Mile was reminiscent of the excited and diverse crowd that has come out at night to watch the convoy as it zigged and zagged through the region. There were cameras, baby strollers, folding chairs, politicians and other people of every race and economic class. The was also a surfeit of rock puns: Someone was even playing “We Will Rock You” as the truck passed the La Brea Tar Pits.

In Long Beach the other night, people lined the streets and waited for hours to be rewarded by what Alexis Dragony praised as the “extraordinary and flawless maneuver of the rock” making a turn. “We cheered as it negotiated the corner — just flawless,” she said. “It was truly performance art.”

It was also a “spect-op.”

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

Word of the day: wirra

It’s the Oxford English Dictionary ’s word of the day:

Irish English. Expressing sorrow, distress, or regret: “alas!” “woe!” Cf. wirrasthru int. Freq. reduplicated. Chiefly preceded by “Oh”; cf. the etymology. Chiefly in representations of Irish English speech.

The word derives from the Irish Mhuire: “in a Mhuire (broadly) /ə wɪrə/ < a , vocative particle +Muire, the name of the Virgin Mary.” My favorite of the OED ’s six citations, from S.J. Weyman’s Wild Geese (1908): “‘Oh, whirra, whirra, what’ll I do?’ the Irishman exclaimed, helplessly wringing his hands.”

Why is wirra my word of the day? Because after lo these many years, I remember it from a Little Rascals short that I saw in childhood (again and again) on television. Oh, wirra, wirra, wirra, someone said. I think it was Alfalfa in drag.

Separated at birth?

Conductor, organist, and harpsichordist Ton Koopman and neurologist and psychologist Oliver Sacks.

Related posts
Amsterdam Baroque
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Elaine Hansen and Blanche Lincoln

[Photograph of Ton Koopman by Marco Borggreve, found here. The Oliver Sacks photo seems ubiquitous online.]

Stripes

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

This sign (on the side of a tractor-trailer) reminds me of the Italian cookies I have known from childhood as stripes.

Do these stripes map out what’s packed in the trailer? Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine, can someone explain these stripes?