I have had to shut off comments temporarily, due to a shower of filthy Gay P--n comment spam. The first words of the first one were "Gay Rights", which suggests the sender doesn't have a clue as to any other kind of right, like mine not to have him squat on my property as an unusually filthy (and versatile) exhibitionist. I will post a notice when comments are turned on again. In the mean time, my e-mail is open for urgent suggestions -- preferably not from the spammers.

I still don't understand how this sort of advertising is supposed to work. Hardly anyone ever sees any of this spam, because it's always on long-ago posts where the average-time-to-deletion is almost certainly far shorter than the average-time-to-next-visitor. I've been told many times that the point of comment spam is not to be seen by human eyes but to be spidered by Google and earn the poster a temporary high place in the results of Google searches for internet gambling, bootleg viagra, or whatever, but I don't see how that can work. Google does not track the contents of my comments, or those of most other blogs. I know because I've tried to use it to track down something I or someone else had said in a comment. It rarely works, and never finds anything on my comments. I may be wrong, but I think the only way Google tracks comments is if they are in-line, as on Daily Pundit. I tested this hypothesis a few weeks ago, when someone was posting comment spam for an on-line gambling site whose name I wouldn't tell you if I remembered it. The dozens of comments I received all had the same misspelling: "the best plae to play" whatever game it was. I searched "plae to play" on Google and got zero hits. So are comment spammers polluting the Blogosphere with their verbal filth without even getting any money or hits out of it?

I suppose I should just be thankful that I logged on in the middle of the current flood of spam and was able to cut it off after only 41 entries. God knows how many I would have had to deal with if I'd stayed in bed.