OK, I promise this is the last Daily 5 you’ll get for awhile, but this one was too much fun not to share. My answers in italics.

Try concocting euphemisms for the following:

- candy for breakfast
Carb preloading

- a defective tricycle
training jalopy

- a gas guzzler
Carbon surplus

- a ridiculously big bouffant hairdo
luxuriant extra body

- unemployed
dilettante

- painted the wrong color
chromatic liberties were taken

- a stolen election / ballot stuffing
democratic correction

- excessive redtape
bureaucratic aid program

- a cover-up of heinous corruption
minimizing unintended consequences

- the dog peed on the carpet
Pet-initiated carpet upgrade

- civil war
intra-state negotiations

- a failing grade
educational incentive

- tax evasion
federal budget reappropriation

- a size too small
athletic fit

- this building could not withstand a minor tremor
green construction

- the living room is the size of a mop closet
efficient use of square footage

Ford Motor Sells Land Rover, Jaguar to India’s Tata
(from Bloomberg)

An icon of British imperialism, sold by one former British colony to another.

(I’m a former owner of both brands, and the son of a Ford devotee — so this is sad news to me.)

I’ve been keeping up my Daily 5 exercises most days, and enjoying it. The exercises are a mix of all kinds of techniques, from character development to plotting to descriptiveness to simple brainstorming. I had fun with the one I did yesterday. Here it is, just because.

Write a brief scene that includes the following:

• a quilt
• the word “quotient”
• a ball of rubber bands
• a morbidly obese hippopotamus
• the perfume of lilies
• the sound of popcorn underfoot

She threw the quilt off her lap. “I’m tired of lying around all weekend like some fat hippo. I’m going to a movie.”

She primped, put on a sundress and plenty of makeup, and gave herself a good dose of lily-scented perfume. Her husband watched meekly, picking at his prized ball of rubber bands with one hand while scribbling on tax forms with the other. “Divide the value in box 6A by the number of dependents… enter the quotient in box 12C…” he muttered, not entirely to himself.

She rolled her eyes and headed to the door. She could already smell the popcorn and hear it crunching under her pedicured, sandaled feet. She was free.

My old reading list was getting long in the tooth, and it was a pain to update, so yesterday I replaced it with the Shelfari plugin. If you’re on Shelfari, click through and add me as a friend. I know, it’s yet another social network, but they have a Facebook app, so you can keep all of that sort of thing in one place.

Speaking of Facebook apps, Bryan took his Facebook application from zero to live in about five minutes. If you’re interested in liturgical music with a modern edge, please take a look at Sharebit.

I have the day off today, so I’m going to go knock out some chores and then get to all that writing I’ve been putting off. Somehow, it still creeps down the priority list even on free days.

After I switched to reCAPTCHA the other day, it took all of half an hour before I saw my first bit of trackback spam. reCAPTCHA can’t do anything about trackbacks, unfortunately, so I withheld judgment.

The trackback spam was shortly followed by a bunch of comment moderation emails from WordPress. It seemed there were dozens of humans out there carefully pasting spam into my comments form and solving the CAPTCHAs. What a sad thought. So I turned Spam Karma 2 back on. After some help, I understood that reCAPTCHA saves spam that does not pass the CAPTCHA for your perusal. (Does anyone actually go back and peruse spam?) Quoth the FAQ:

reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam, so if you get moderation emails when spam comments are sent, you will get moderation emails for all spam comments with reCAPTCHA. We highly recommend turning off moderation emails with reCAPTCHA.

I read this before installing the plugin, but found it confusing. “reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam”? Which comments? All of them? Why would it do that? So, naturally, I ignored the warning.

It turns out that I wasn’t the only one confused. The ambiguity could have been eliminated by adding one word to that sentence. So an exercise in fighting spam becomes a lesson in copywriting.

I still love the reCAPTCHA concept, but I have to stick with Spam Karma for now — unless someone knows a solution for catching only trackback spam.

If you have a blog of your own, you know what a CAPTCHA is; for the rest of you, you’ve probably cursed at more than one. CAPTCHAs are those garbled images of words that you must decipher on many web sites to prove that you’re a human and not an evil spamming robot. If you’re like me, you find them at least mildly annoying. Until now, anyway.

I stumbled across reCAPTCHA over the weekend. Most CAPTCHAs use random words to prove you’re human, but this one shows you images of actual scanned text. The text comes from books that the Internet Archive has scanned but not digitized. You get to do the digitizing yourself by typing in the word. If enough people complete enough CAPTCHAs on enough sites, pretty soon that adds up to a bunch of books archived for posterity.

I love this idea for several reasons. It’s crowdsourcing at its best. It’s also a perfect example of what 37signals calls judo: break a big task down into many small steps; better yet, take something negative and turn it into a positive. It’s a good cause that happens to be book-related.

When I saw there was a WordPress plugin available, I installed it right here for you all to try out. Now go help save the world.

Plus, I could use more commenters.

The current wave of artists from the U.K., including KT Tunstall, James Blunt, Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, is setting new standards across a multitude of musical genres, that you simply must catch.

(I took a photo for maximum effect, but it was too blurry to use.)

I finally found a daily writing exercise to replace oneword. The Daily Five is a little more involved, but short enough to be doable no matter what else happens around here in the morning. You get five minutes to answer the day’s assignment (unlike oneword, you can go longer if you like). I’m only two days in and I already feel My Powers Getting Stronger. Just for fun, here are today’s results. (I went back and added some details after time expired.)

Assignment: A five dollar bill changes hands five times in one day. Make a list of where, when, who hands it over, and for what.

when: 8a
where: Bojangle’s on Bluff Road
who: a lawyer on the way to work, driving a Lexus SUV (he bought a bacon, egg & cheese biscuit and paid with a $20, of course)

when: 10a
where: corner of Main and Laurel
who: guy on the street asking for change (the lawyer meant to give $1, feeling generous, but realized too late he gave the $5 instead

when: 10:05a
where: Drake’s Duck-In, outside seating area
who: see, there’s this whole gray-market economy on the street. when the previous owner scored the five, he went straight to a fence, who sold him 3 bottles of t-bird.

when: 3:30p
where: bus stop on Assembly
who: 9-year-old boy who picked it up from under the bench. the fence dropped it accidentally while waiting for the bus. on the bus he would meet his supplier to hand over his day’s earnings. the $5 represented most of his cut for the day, before he lost it.

when: 4:30p
where: Dollar store
who: cashier who takes the dollar from the boy to buy a huge stash of candy

I hear a lot of writers talk about how they hate editing and would rather just churn out words. I may be closer to the other end of the spectrum. Most days I feel like a sculptor who finds the right rock and chips away everything that doesn’t look like a statue. I struggle with a blank sheet of paper; if something’s already written on it, I want to make it better. Is that just idea block? Do I not have enough practice at coming up with my own raw material? Or is that just who I am?

(Ed: three question marks and seven “I”s in one paragraph is far too much navelgazing. If you choose to read further, you have been warned.)

There are ways to trick myself into writing more and editing less. Like my typical writing attack, wherein I have no actual plan and just start banging on the keyboard (sometimes literally). Usually enough words end up on the page, and I can turn the shocked and indignant editor loose to find something I can cut out, fluff up and polish into a piece of… well, something. I force myself to program in much the same way, but it happens to require logical thought from the get-go. You don’t get very far just banging on the keyboard (and I have tried).

But maybe I don’t want to write more. Maybe I’d rather be an editor.

Take music. I can listen to a song in progress and figure out what it should sound like, but I can’t write music to save my life. Not that I’ve tried a whole lot.

If you asked me what my musical career of choice would be, I’d say producer. I love playing, but I don’t have enough technical talent to get by playing guitar and I can’t sing much. But I can put a stamp on a piece of music. I have strong opinions about which way the song should sound and I’ll tell you. It’s the same with a piece of writing. I can tell you what sucks about it and give you an idea to make it better. (Whether I’m right or not.)

So how do you try out editing? Do you find someone humble enough to practice on and hope you don’t kill a friendship with your red pen? I did some newsletter editing for AskSpace and really enjoyed it. Who wants to be next?

Now that Facebook is the new gorilla on the block, the inevitable backlash is ramping up. I first saw it on Copyblogger. The question asked by the post is: where are you going to put your content, on your property (where you have complete control over your brand) or someone else’s (whose main interest is making money off of your marketing data)?

This is an interesting question, but a bigger issue comes to mind. Are social networking sites a substitute for real creativity, or a bona fide means of expression?

If everyone has one good story in them, tools like Facebook and Twitter let that story come out — even if you don’t happen to be a writer. They let you publish your life to interested readers, if you care to do so. Of course it’s not a substitute for face-to-face interaction, any more than all your regular blog readers and commenters are. I don’t pretend that all the old college and high school friends I found on Facebook are really a part of my life — but I get to follow their adventures and find out things I never knew. For example, Lynn is a really good writer.

Blogging is so 2005, right? It’s all about the social networks now. The blogfading has begun, and according to this post (via AntSaint), that’s a good thing. No one wants 5 articles about my kids’ eating habits cluttering up an RSS feed that they subscribed to because they found one interesting post about startup culture.

What no one seems to have picked up on is that Twitter, Facebook and the rest are great at separating the noise from the content.

I’ve posted before about the unique writing challenge Twitter offers. You can use it that way, or you can just blast your life to the ether. Or you can do both. Whoever wants to read will read. If it’s too much noise, then they can just follow your blog for the deep stuff.

Facebook is the gossip magazine. Twitter is TV. Blogging is books and magazines. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Unless, of course, you spend so much time poking your friends that you don’t get around to writing that blog post. Guilty.