No longer avoiding CAPTCHA

I’ve had to turn word-verification for comments again: too many spam comments, and just looking at them reminds me of vast stretches of the Internets I’d rather avoid.

If a CAPTCHA is difficult to work out, enlarging it with Command-+ or Control-+ can make it more readable. I think though that Blogger’s new CAPTCHAs have become more readable than they were at first. (Tell me if I’m right, or wrong.)

A related post
Avoiding CAPTCHA

Welcome to college

Or some people’s idea of college: Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses (Rolling Stone).

[Don’t read it on a full stomach.]

Blackwing Q. and A.

The best friend the Blackwing pencil has ever had considers facts, fiction, and the “Blackwing Experience.”

National Poetry Month

[Poster by Chin-Yee Lai.]

Hey, everybody, it’s April, National Poetry Month. The Academy of American Poets’ FAQ explains that April was chosen because it “seemed the best time within the year to turn attention toward the art of poetry.” I wish there were more to it than that, but the choice of April appears to be unrelated to Geoffrey Chaucer (“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote”) or T.S. Eliot (“the cruellest month”). To choose April without even acknowledging these poets’ contrary representations of the month (which after all might remind us of the great variety of perspectives on reality that poems afford) seems an odd gesture indeed.

I also wish that the representation of Poetry on this poster were less — what? precious? sentimental? greeting-card-like? If you cannot make the words out, they read: “. . . wait on the wind, catch a sense of salt, call it our life.” Okay, I will do that. You can find the words in context here, forming the last line of Philip Levine’s poem “Our Valley.”

This post is for my friend Sara, who too will be exasperated.

[“The best time within the year”: within as opposed to what? Why not “the best time of year”? I saw a signboard outside a thrift store yesterday proclaiming March National Poetry Month, but that must have been an April Fools’ joke.]

Henry, getting things done

[Henry, March 26 and 28, 2012.]

Henry gets things done, and he lets the world know it by means of that ineffable gesture. Swipe swipe, done. Swipe swipe, done.

And he keeps moving forward (as must we all): another panel, or another day.

Swipe swipe, done.

Duke Ellington and erasers

I’m happy to report that Duke Ellington’s name no longer appears on the Blackwing Experience page. Thanks to Gunther and Sean for passing on the news.

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Earl Scruggs (1924–2012)

“Earl was to the five-string banjo what Babe Ruth was to baseball”: Porter Wagoner, quoted in the New York Times obituary for Earl Scruggs, who died yesterday at the age of eighty-eight.

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012)

The New York Times reports that the poet Adrienne Rich died yesterday at the age of eighty-two. From the poem “Seven Skins”:

What a girl I was then what a body
ready for breaking open like a lobster
what a little provincial village
what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells
what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore
    raincloud
what a gone-and-come tidepool

what a look into eternity I took and did not return it

From Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998 (1999).

Regency-era slang

Having just typed eh wot? in a comment, I felt compelled to look and learn a little more, and found Simone Smith’s short guide to Regency-era slang.

Jeffrey Toobin on the ACA

Jeffrey Toobin’s March 26 New Yorker comment offers a clear exposition of the arguments concerning the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.