Spam.

Every few hours during the day, I go clean out the blog's spam trap of the fifteen or twenty comments that will be lodged in it. The big spam storms come at night; first thing in the morning these days I'm scraping 150 to 300 or more comments out of the filters. It doesn't take that long to scroll through them and check for comments from real people, so I'm not going to turn on the word verification again, at least for now.

They seem to have stopped sending the ones with random chains of text that made such lovely found object art. I accidentally erased the dozen I had saved that I was planning on hammering into a 'James Joyce or HAL9000?' post, and now almost all the spam is simple crass chains of naked links hawking cheap copies of everything from designer handbags to Viagra, while infesting your computer with every sort of malware under the sun. Going to one of those sites would be like tying your yacht up at the docks in Mogadishu with your wallet hanging out of your pocket and a blinfold over your eyes.

The really most despicable spam is the stuff that's written to sound like it's from an actual blog commenter. "Hi! I just wanted to say how much I really love your site! Did you do the theme yourself? Your writing is so good!" This stuff is tailor made to hit Aunt Edna who's been posting recipes and pics of the grandkids into the ether for a while to no feedback, only to get suckered by some spam farm in Shanghai who pretends to be an actual reader... That's just extra scummy.