Copy these characters.

I'm pretty sure I'm not a bot. For one, as the title of this blog asserts, my pants are more important than you might suspect. For bots, pants are all the way at the bottom of the list of important issues - right next to, say, Kerry Katona.

But god damn it, I've just created a Googlemail account AND a blogger account and both times I had to try seven or eight times before I could make out the letters well enough to copy them accurately and prove that I am not a bot.

Maybe this technique has now been caught up by its nemeses (the thinking man's bot, if you will) and needs to change, so the letters can actually remain in a shape vaguely resembling their original form. Then I don't have to sit here squinting hopelessly at my screen (my eyes are pretty sad all by themselves, so they refuse to help; my glasses are chronically obsolete because my prescription costs a bomb).

Maybe the new method of telling whether or not someone is a bot should be by asking them to answer a simple question in 400 words or more.

"How important are your pants?" would be number one on my list - you get them on two counts. "Not very important at all" doesn't satisfy the word count AND proves the person is either a bot, or a nudist. And do we really need more nudism on the internet?

I suppose they could be semi-nudists (naked only from the bottom down; their top half, one assumes, permanently encased in most of a three-piece suit), but at the end of the day I'm happy with anything that lowers the number of naked-people-gone-wrong photos on this here internet.