Writing exercise, short version: Write a story (or poem or essay or what-have-you) (blog entries don’t count, ahem) whose title is “The Touraine Passenger.” The “the” is optional, but the other two words must be used in that order in the title; one or both may, at the author’s discretion, be italicized.
(If you’ve no other ideas for how, even generally, to use the word “Touraine,” er, well, you do know by now that Google can be your friend, right?)
Need more details? Read on.
Background: At the bottom of the comments form on Running After My Hat pages, there’s one of those little word-verification thingies which helps to control “junk mail” comments. The specific word-verification thingy which I use is called reCaptcha.
Frequent RAMH commenter Marta and I kid every now and then about how the pair of words presented by reCaptcha can be spooky: prescient or apropos for the comment’s context, say, but in any case meaningful.
While replying to a comment this morning, guess what two words reCaptcha challenged me with? Right: Touraine and passenger, in that order.
I had no idea what “Touraine” might mean, so I did as suggested above and Googled the thing. I also found a wonderful relevant Flickr “pool” slideshow, which is where I got the image at the left. Suddenly all kinds of vague plot ideas started to suggest themselves and, well, I thought: Why keep this to myself?
No particular deadline on this. (And of course I say fie on word-count restrictions. Write the damn thing completely, and no more.) But, in general, I think you — yes, you — should be able to finish at least the first draft of a story within a month’s time.
Whenever you’re done, I’d be delighted to hear from you. (Yes, even you, O visitor from the Aldebaran system in the year 2189. And by the way, I greet thee! May your years be long and your visit here brief!)
Long background, about reCaptcha itself: Why that name?
First, start with the word “Captcha.” It’s actually an acronym — and as such, is usually capitalized — for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” (You can see why they needed an acronym.) If you want more information about this, by all means visit the Wikipedia entry on CAPTCHA technology. But really, all you need to understand for using CAPTCHAs which you come across is that they’re expecting you to make sense out of some distorted letters or whole words, and to type the “sensible” version into a blank field. This helps the site’s software screen out automated form-filling programs, which can quickly overwhelm a blog or other site with s,p,a,m — because such programs can’t easily “read” such distorted text.
Enough about technology for now. Let me dwell for a moment on the “re” part of reCaptcha’s name.
reCaptcha asks you not to type in a nonsense word or phrase, but a pair of real words. In doing so, you are helping to improve the conversion of text from real books into digital form. (Typically, real books are scanned in order to be digitized. But this scanning — called optical character recognition, or OCR — isn’t 100% accurate. A computer just can’t recognize some text, especially if the pages have been damaged, for example.) Here’s what the Wikipedia reCaptcha article says:
reCAPTCHA supplies subscribing websites with images of words that optical character recognition (OCR) software has been unable to read. The subscribing websites… present these images for humans to decipher as CAPTCHA words, as part of their normal validation procedures. They then return the results to the reCAPTCHA service, thereby contributing to the digitization project. The result is that the university receives approximately 3,000 man hours per day of free labor to help in the preservation of books.
…The system is reported to deliver 30 million images every day (as of December 2007), and counts such popular sites as Facebook, TicketMaster, Twitter and StumbleUpon amongst subscribers. Craigslist began using reCAPTCHA in June 2008.
So the “re” in reCaptcha, I guess, refers to the fact that the text is being recycled (from real to digital form), or that it’s being used twice (both to fight junk mail and to help preserve books).
marta says
I’m glad to know where these mysterious words come from. As to the writing challenge, I may have too much on plate, but if any space appears, I’d be happy to give it a shot.
I might use the characters mentioned in today’s reCaptcha–Alhambra four. Sounds like a good group of trouble, doesn’t it?
Henning says
Obsessively checking my blog stats led me here, where I see my site linked to in your blogroll. I don’t know what I’ve written to deserve this, but many thanks! I’m still trying to navigate the endless categories you’ve compiled, but as someone whose own blog is about “nothing in particular,” I can appreciate the expansive approach. Look forward to reading more!
CAPTCHA has always kind of fascinated me, too, and I think you’ve stumbled on an exciting new genre of fiction with your writing assignment up top. I’ve today seen “recrossed just” (too obscure) and “wonderful ceremony” (too banal) – nothing inspiring just yet, but I’m sure that spark of a combination is just around the bend.
John says
@marta – Ooooh: Allhambra Four. The Allhambra Four… or… “The Allhambra Four and the Touraine Passenger.”
You do have better first-hand credentials than I do to write a story with any such titles — a story which obviously has something, however remote, to do with Europe. But I know what you mean about having too much on your plate. Hence my vagueness as to when/whether I’d tackle the exercise myself!
(And for the politically inclined and easily spooked, I offer the reCaptcha of the moment: “prove W.”)
John says
@Henning – Ha! I never thought to inform YOU about the link, but I did mention it to your “Gossip Girl” reviewer. He might have done the new Weezer piece, too. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, in the lead photo that might be him from about 6 or 8 years ago in the foreground.
Don’t worry about the “nothing in particular” approach, which — at least for my own preference — is much much easier to sustain over time.
(It IS harder to find an audience for, though. Kind of like being a covers-only band; you may never be out of work, but you’ll never play to crowds of more than a couple hundred at a time, and you’ll never play at a venue more than 20 miles away from your day job.)