David Rose
By David Rose
Lately it’s become virtually impossible for me to get into any site on my computer that has one of those I Am Not a Robot tests guarding its portal. You know the ones I’m talking about. They show a grid of a dozen or so images and ask you to click on the ones that have a picture of something or other.
Last week I tried to do one that asked for pictures that contained dogs. The first few, Lassie and Toto, were easy enough, but after that, things got complicated. Are Pluto and Scooby-Doo dogs or cartoon characters?
Is that photo in the third line, far left, a pug, or is it Frank from Men in Black? As all you MIB fans know, Frank is an extraterrestrial in the guise of a dog. Do I include Frank in or include him out?
That photo, top-middle, shows a stretch of interstate. There is a bus in the photo; that much is obvious, but I can’t tell if it’s a Greyhound or not. Greyhounds are dogs, right? When I try to blow the image up, it gets grainy.
I punched in all the dogs, Frank and the bus included. No dice. It occurred to me that I might be overthinking the problem. I tried several more combinations. Bus, no bus; Scooby Doo, no Scooby Doo, Frank, no Frank.
After a while, the portal sensed my frustration and gave me a simpler test: read a word and write it in the box. It wasn’t that simple. The word was rnaisab, written out in wavy, compact text. Does rnaisab start with ‘rn’ or is that an ‘m’? Does it end with ‘b’ or ‘lo’?
This much I know; I’m not a robot. I’ve seen Terminator 6 times, and I can’t do any of those robot things.
David Rose, of Hot Springs, is an author and artist.
{More of David’s musings can be found at thespringsmagazine.com/category/arts/david-rose.}
