you can just ignore the ridiculous looking stuff and it will usually let you pass
Someone at Captcha relized they had a captched audience of testers - turns out that captcha is selling space to identify parts of scanned texts that don't make it thru standard optical scanners - smudged copies, older type faces, etc. crowd sourcing the results, they've been quite successful. so they don't use those pieces as part of the check, since they don't know what they are either! [written up in wired or NY times some months ago]