To the next!

The cryptic CAPTCHAs that Google provides for Blogger frustrate a good number of readers who would like to leave comments on posts. CAPTCHAs sometimes frustrate me too when I want to leave a comment on someone else’s Blogger blog. I’ve gone back and forth about CAPTCHAs here at Orange Crate Art, turning them off and getting inundated with junk (despite comment-moderation, which prevents that junk from getting online), then giving up and turning them back on. CAPTCHAs are off now, and I’m deleting dozens of junk comments a day. I can deal.

The only pleasant thing about wading through the junk is noticing the great variety of aberrant efforts to feign cheery gratitude for the content of posts. A recent favorite, from an alleged person who liked How to e-mail a professor and thinks that I “need to write more about this subject”:

To the next! Many thanks!!

I guess this post is “the next.” You’re welcome.

*

November 11, 2012: Deleting spam comments has become not impossible but deeply dispiriting — dozens and dozens and dozens of comments a day. So I’ve made a compromise: the CAPTCHAs are still off, but I’ve removed the option for anonymous comments. If you would like to comment and lack an account (Google or another) with which to do so, feel free to e-mail me.

I am happy to see that StatCounter registers no visits from spammers, who mask their IP addresses. I would hate to think that spammers were being counted as genuine readers.

Related reading
All “canned precooked meat product” posts (Pinboard)

Note-taking at Harvard

From Harvard University’s museums and libraries, a virtual exhibition about note-taking. My favorites: pages from George Lyman Kittredge’s commonplace book (such handwriting) and two readers’ annotations of a page from Rollo May.

Seeing the name Harvard and the word note-taking reminds me that my professor Jim Doyle once told a story of discovering in Widener Library a volume of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough with handwritten notes by T. S. Eliot. Ever dutiful, Jim sought out a librarian, who took the book away at once. End of story.

A related post
From the Doyle edition (a page of T. S. Eliot, with notes)

[Found via Notebook Stories.]

About those canned goods

They’re not helpful.

Brach’s Halloween Candies

[Life, October 17, 1960.]

In the 2012 edition of David Ng and Ben Cohen’s Candy Hierarchy, the bottom tier includes “anything from Brach’s,” right between black licorice and hard candy.

The American Red Cross

From the American Red Cross website:

The American Red Cross is continuing a major relief operation throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast to shelter and assist people affected by Superstorm Sandy. Millions awoke this morning to power outages, fallen trees, scattered debris, and flooded neighborhoods and the Red Cross is working hard to get help where it is needed.

You can click on the image to make a donation.

To vote, or not to vote

After watching Errol Morris’s short film 11 Excellent Reasons Not to Vote? , take a few more minutes to read Robert Reich: If You Succumb to Cynicism, the Regressives Win It All. I found Reich’s post via the always excellent Daughter Number Three.

A related post
David Foster Wallace on voting

Change we cannot ignore

“Coming as it is just a week before Election Day, Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque”: Elizabeth Kolbert, Watching Sandy, Ignoring Climate Change (New Yorker).

Movies, free, good ones

From the Pratt Chat Blog at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library: thirty-two films to watch online for free. If you’ve never seen it, I’d suggest starting with Carnival of Souls (dir. Herk Harvey, 1962). It’s unforgettable. Trust me, if you can.

A happy little Google doodle

From today’s Google homepage. Pocket squirrel: +1.

Pocket notebook sighting

[Dana Andrews and notebook.]

State Fair (dir. Walter Lang, 1945) is corny, goofy, and — I cannot tell a lie — delightful. With six Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, three love stories (two human, one porcine), and two judgings (mincemeat and pickles), there’s something for each member of the family to enjoy.

Another delight: seeing Dana Andrews in the role of the Iowa newspaperman Pat Gilbert. For me, Andrews will always be Mark McPherson, the detective who falls in love with a painting in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), and Fred Derry, the bombardier haunted by the horrors of war in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Pat Gilbert is no McPherson or Derry: he seems to be a regular guy who rides the rides and joins in on “It’s a Grand Night for Singing.” But since he’s played by Dana Andrews, I can’t help thinking that Gilbert is in truth a tormented soul working hard to pass for well-adjusted. Thus a value-added viewing experience. Intertextuality FTW.

The little six-ring notebook seen above used to be everywhere. I can’t remember the last time I saw one being used in real life.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : T-Men : Union Station