Stop spamming me!

Stop it!

I know it isn't just me, and there's literally hundreds of thousands of zombie machines pouring out spam, but it's specifically ME that it affects since I have to spend at least 30 seconds every day clearing it out of the filters. And those 30 seconds add up, baby.

They are almost always strings of nonsense text with few recognizable words in them and then up to ten URLs, most of them malformed.  One incredibly annoying thing about them is every one of them - every last one, 100%, all of them - is caught by Blogger's spam filtering software and not one of them - none at all, not any, zero - ever end up on a page where the URL might be seen by a bot or a human. Every single one of them is always caught and deleted.

Mind you, there's been two or three that start with the common formula of the type, "What an excellent blog post, you wonderful person! You are so clever! See also my blog on the same subject...." that I've sprung out of the filter and allowed to post because there's some tiny chance that the writer is actually a clueless human rather than a botnet, and it would be rude to delete his or her comment just because it's ditzy and weird.

Which brings me to the other annoying thing about spam. Because I have the filters on full-blast they occasionally - like once a month - catch a genuine comment and hold it. That means if you write a comment, it may not post immediately. Apologies and please blame the spammers.

PS talking of weird, that first presidential debate was weird. Romney stood and smirked like a Persian with a  bowl of cream all evening and Obama stood still and un-animated, looking like he had somewhere else he'd rather be. I actually wondered if he had sickle cell trait and the altitude was getting to him. That'd be an interesting corollary for the First Black President, and I'm quite sure no one would ever admit it if it was true.  Sickle cell trait doesn't have many symptoms, but being under extreme stress at altitude is something that might have an effect. Whatever, let's hope he tears into Romney when they're at sea level.