Retro Yakking

It’s utterly nonsensical and completely inconsequential! It’s the new 24-hour television channel from the same people that brought you the Internet Meme Half Hour starring Mr. T, Chuck Norris and that dramatic chipmunk thingy.

ReCaptcha Gold showcases the best and most irrelevant — and sometimes shockingly relevant — word entry verification codes the program has to offer. Gasp in awe at the unrecognisable gibberish presented before you! Smash your computer screen in frustration as you attempt to figure out what ‘criblastic‘ means! Fall asleep as the show runs into its seventeenth hour, repeating the same three codes over and over again!

So go and grab yourself a packet of crisps and some strong coffee, because it’s ReCaptcha Gold, and it’s coming to the Freeview platform soon, pending permission from the British Broadcasting Corporation. We’ve been trying to contact them for years, but every time we phone they’re either at the dentist or washing their hair, but we’re confident we’ll get the go-ahead in the next three months.

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Do you have any Wispa Gold bars lying around the house that you do not need? Then earn some money and get rid of your old unwanted chocolate in the process by sending them to me!

That’s correct. For every bar of Wispa Gold you submit, Retro Yakking’s Cash For Wispa Gold service will send you up to five pence or the equivalent in plastic buttons. All you have to do is visit the website, enter the number of Wispa Gold bars you would like to sell, hit submit and the troublesome chocolate is out of your hands!

Once you have fulfilled brief fit and proper persons and IQ tests — which will be so short you won’t even know you’re taking them — our bovine gopher, Harry Yack, will collect the bars from your house. Of course, this means you don’t have to move a muscle except to answer the doorbell! And hand him your Wispa Gold bars. And close the door again. Well alright, maybe you do have to move some muscles, but we assure you it’s as easy as being duped by a dishonest street beggar!

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Please forgive me for this post, which is essentially a garbled mass of opinions crudely worked into an article. Normal hilarity will resume tomorrow morning.

When you go on prime time television and promise people a method of winning the lottery after providing ‘proof’ of said technique working, you’d better deliver, or people are going to get mad. And that’s just what people are doing, in their droves.

Derren Brown builds himself up to be a mind-reader, when all he really peddles are illusions. Yeah, like the ones I grew up watching Paul Daniels do. Illusionism has changed dramatically since the mid 1990s, however - people are increasingly sceptic and want bigger and more elaborate tricks. What Brown offers is that extra element - the knowledge of scepticism and basic psychology with which he can ‘manipulate’ (read: predict) our thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong. He does it remarkably well, and I enjoy his shows. But his latest stunt, the National Lottery ‘prediction’, may change the minds of an awful lot of people. It was a massively ambitious trick that could well have blown up in his face, killing his career as a stage performer.

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As regular readers of this website might notice, Harry Yack is a fan of collecting unfathomable and slightly out-of-the-ordinary ReCaptcha entry prompts. You’ll have seen these if ever you’ve tried to leave a comment here or many other weblogs spread across the vast expanse of margarine that is the world wide web.

You might have read a previous post regarding this very subject, in which I complain about how half the time it just makes up words from existing ones, such as ‘criblastic’ or ‘heedless’. Other times, the word is a completely indecipherable mess of vaguely letter-like forms you’re sure you don’t even have a keyboard button for.

Well, maybe the complaints were a bit over the top and largely fabricated for entertainment purposes, it is slightly annoying when you have to reload the page for a new ‘challenge’, as the program itself puts it. That wastes precious time, especially if you’re still on a dialup connection, where time equals money.

But word verification is often more comedic than frustrating. Every so often you get a word wholly appropriate for the individual post, like ‘carless fool’ for a recent article on Jeremy Clarkson, or a simply unpronounceable foreign loan word such as ‘beaudougementing’. Well, I’ll admit that I made that one up just now, but I think it gives a fair representation of the kind of stuff you find from time to time.

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What does NASA stand for? The experts will have you believe it’s short for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but of course that’s rather boring and plain, much like a non-chocolate digestive.

Naturally, the conspiracists have a theory that NASA actually stands for something far more exotic, and there’s a huge cover-up involving aliens and the American government.

I wouldn’t know much about that, but I do know that the guys at the NASA Naming Association missed a trick when it came to adopting a memorable moniker.

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