Minor Clergy talked about his spam attack, and I knocked wood that my blog hadn’t been hit that hard. Then on Monday it happened. When I opened my e-mail, there were 206 comments pending to the blog — all spam. It goes something like this:

nifty site. i cant believe how lucky we are to have someone like you. keep up the goood work ;-)
joe smith
http://unbelievable-things-to-do-with-a-mongoose/pervs4peace.com”

You gotta love the generic flattery, meant to lull me into such a state of blissful semi-consciousness that I don’t notice the less-than-mannerly URL. Or that joe smith or patti brown or jeff anderson posts this same comment to EVERY SINGLE ENTRY in my blog. Obviously a very discerning reader without a vocabulary (or a shift key).

In fact, there’s not much of it that would be that hard to take, if it weren’t for the sheer tonnage of it. I’m now getting hundreds of comments every day that are the same dreck and keeping them out of my life is a matter of going in every couple hours and moderating them all out to the furthest regions of the galaxy. I could take some grim pleasure in doing that, but in the time it would take me to smirk, I’d get 403 more spam-comments to deal with.

As Seraphim noted in the aforementioned post, bloggers are all secret narcissists. I’m no exception (though it’s not a secret in my case. Greg tells everyone he meets). And so I would love to think that there’s any compliment to be had from the fact that I’m suddenly of note to spam-senders. But I think it’s more a matter of them being that aggressive and my wee little blog seeming that unprotected.

I can’t quite get around to considering it a sign of the end times (though the URL of things to do with a mongoose might be), but it does seem like one of the many, many things we’re all in the habit of dealing with every day now that etch away at our humanity.

(And by the way, bear with me for a while if you’re commenting for the first time. I may delete some normal ones by mistake, so e-mail me if it doesn’t show up in a day or so.)