Ticketmaster, what are you trying to tell me?

Philosophy -- the chance to press your nose against the side of the fishbowl and take a look outside -- seems to come at me when I'm least expecting it these days. I don't know -- maybe I'm just getting to be that age.

Take yesterday, for instance. I was on the Ticketmaster web site looking for tickets to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. The VSO is having a Beethoven festival, and though it's been a long time since I went through that particular phase in my life -- always making sure I had at least one Beethoven piece to play on when I was taking piano lessons, wearing down my tape of the Fifth Piano Concerto, dressing up as Beethoven for Halloween -- I still retain a soft spot for Old Deafy. I'd gotten to the page where you're asked to enter letters you see on-screen to keep bots out (and to keep blind people from going to concerts, I'm convinced). But instead of getting random letters like I used to, I now was presented with two random words.

Here's the part that actually made me stop: they're real words. And as with any two randomly selected words, putting them together makes a kind of poetry (or at least a halfway decent name for a garage band album). I stopped, thought about the words I was seeing, then went back and reloaded the page a couple times to see what I would get. I started looking for sense and reason in the words I was getting. At one point I started wondering, like early Christians thumbing the Bible for inspiration, whether the Internet -- the deus ex machina -- was trying to tell me something.

I didn't write down the words I got at the time, but here are ten more pairs of authentication words I pulled up, just for you:

disagreements nine
Arab center
collect smashes
huddled submitted
Jeffrey already
Bellevue was
from destitute
street, slowing
find Lissner
stamp Gannen

Who's Lissner, and how do I find him? What about the odd and slightly conspiratorial "Arab center"? And if "Jeffrey already," does he still?

I encourage you to replicate this experiment. Go here and you too can be exploring the mysteries (while also looking for Jack Johnson tickets).