The gods must be crazy

It's not often that comment spam makes me laugh out loud (nor do I usually read it) but in skimming my most recent (now deleted) spam, I uncovered the following gems:

Your infertility was favor, for the gods were granting you more time in hope you could get out "before" this obligation forced you to stay. The Italians bred like rabbits:::That they got "pregnant immediately" illustrated their undesirability.

And this:

If you lived in a communisitic state your 10 year old son wouldn't be able to see pornographic images on the internet. The government would have filters in place to protect the people from this damaging behavior.

And of course, this:

The gods are asexual. They have no sex organs nor rectums.

There was also a whole section about how McCain would have had an easier time winning against Hillary than "Osama" (yes, Osama).

Usually, my comment spam tries to function as advertising or linkbacks of some kind, but this? This seems like the stream of consciousness ravings of someone in an altered mental state. And what I really want to know is, how did they end up on my blog? Was it my fervently stated belief that I want my 10 year old son to be able to see pornography? It is a free country, after all.

Comments and community

Thalia's recent post about keeping up with blogs has me thinking, so rather than hijack her comments, I thought I'd move this here.

I've been reading without commenting for months now, because it's all I can do to keep up through Bloglines (and even then, I have over 500 unread posts in my queue right now - though some are from review sites and the like), but it takes more time and energy and focus than I usually feel I can muster to actually click through and come up with something useful to say in response. And then I think how that makes blogs one directional, and how one of the things I value about the blogworld is the conversation and support and communication... which is to say I think I need to break out of my bubble and get back to commenting rather than lurking. By the same token, I've slowly been unsubbing from some of the (bigger) blogs where I never really felt like part of a community so much as a flock - where I never really commented much anyway. (And by *some* blogs I mean one or two so far - it's hard to stop following someone's story.)

I haven't been posting either, obviously. We've had a whole confluence of circumstances combined with what is probably a bit of low-level depression and a ton of projects and huge life changes and I've barely managed to keep my head above water. But I'm hoping the tide is changing, and one of the things I really WANT to do is get back to blogging and participating in a bit of a blogging community - for fun and for sanity. I make no sweeping claims, since I hate setting myself up like that (see how well I did with the Moxie challenge?) but for myself, I think I'm going to try. It might mean reinventing my blog identity, or changing how I think about blogging, or commenting, or something. It's a process, and I'm only beginning.