Imagine my joy when I opened up my paper over the weekend and read an op-ed by Joanne Jacobs about blogging. Finally, something written on blogging by somebody who knows what they are talking about. But I immediately noticed that they had the URL for Powerline instead of Free Republic. I checked Joanne’s blog, and it turns out she sold it to the SF Chronicle as well, where they have the correct URL. There’s an embarrassing comparison – the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, worse than the Chron.

This morning my wife had a concerned look on her face. “Should I be concerned?”

“About what?” I replied.

“That list of websites by the computer.”

I thought a moment. Lightbulb goes off over my head. “Those are sites I had to blacklist from the blog. I get an email for each comment, I write down the URLs I need to ban, and then I use Blacklist to do it.”

“Debt consolidation, online gambling, something about flirting – you can see why I was curious.”

“Yep.” I’m just glad I didn’t have any nekkid wimen or male potency comment spammers recently.

I’m amazed how much comment spam I get here at a small potatoes site. I didn’t get any when I was running Greymatter, but after my switch to Moveable Type it started. At first I used to ban IP addresses, but I noticed pretty quickly that spammers were changing their addresses the way a secure radio frequency hops. Thankfully Jay Allen wrote Blacklist for MT. While I still get comment spam, I don’t get it from the same place twice. Of course, the real solution is the death penalty for spam – email or comment, but I don’t think that will ever pass.

I got a chuckle today at Crooked Timber, a blog I don’t usually associate with humor. 

First I read this post by Ted Barlow taking Christopher Hitchens to task for misdirecting his readers about the substance of Seymour Hersh’s allegations. Now my opinion of Hitchens is that he’s a gifted jerk who’s occasionally right — but pretty much always a jerk Hmm, I think the same thing about Hersh, except for the gifted part. 

Then I scrolled down to the prior post by Kieran Healy that misdirects his readers about the substance of Glenn Reynolds remarks about The Day After Tomorrow. Glenn doesn’t lampoon movie accuracy, he lampoons people who think movie science is accurate. Think Ted will write a post about Kieran?

I’ve done a little spring cleaning around here. I’ve had to remove some dead links, update some that moved, and add some new ones. I hate dead link removal – it means that someone I once enjoyed reading doesn’t write for me anymore. That’s the only reason I de-link: the blog is inactive. Some give you warning – Jurjen wrote so infrequently it was hard to say exactly when he stopped. Others just blink out of existance – the sophorist just stopped being resolvable by the DNS servers one day, but whois says the domain isn’t available. If there was a warning, I sure missed it.

But I did add a new St. Louis blog – Life in St. Louis plus four other blogs: Craig Henry’s Lead and Gold, Brian Tiemann’s Peeve Farm, a fine group of writers at Crooked Timber, and Brad Rolf’s Into the Sunset.

I also tried to fix the problem with the left border being a bottom border on Explorer. I remember years ago when the whole Navigator/Explorer fight was going on, and people were telling me they didn’t see a problem with getting Explorer for free. I hope you people see the problem now – complete stagnation. Hey, but it’s free stagnation. Let me just say that this site looks better in Firefox and Safari.

Does James Taranto read Sine Qua Non Pundit? Well, Charles has been running contests where he provides a snippet of the lyrics from a 70’s song and you have to name the song and artist. So yesterday, Taranto had an item about John Kerry he titled “Sad Preacher Nailed Upon the Colored Door of Time” which comes from that quintessential 70s progressive rock group Yes from their song And You And I. Coincidence? You make the call. 

Today is the last day to donate to the Spirit of America Challenge. You can of course donate to the Spirt of America afterwards, but it wouldn’t be as much fun. And yes, I did donate under the Victory Coalition banner.