A few things:

1. I have, yet again, revised my postings on “Project 810” and “On Relationships”  — this time, in light of some superlative IM conversations I’ve had this week.  The discussions prompted me to revisit some things I haven’t thought about recently, a process that proved quite helpful.
2. I’ve added a few more photos to the gallery, with images taken at Tracy’s birthday party a few weeks ago.  Good times!
3. My plan to run after karate yesterday was thwarted by my own error — hard to run when you failed to pack the right apparel in the gym bag in the morning.  That said, I’m pleasantly surprised with how much of my karate stuff I retained despite my summer-long absence; I’ve done better this week with kyu kumite than I did in mid-May!
4. Had a pleasant evening yesterday.  I had planned to meet my friend Charlie for a nightcap at The Apartment, but the venue was chock-full of people, so we bounced to Diversions.  Little did we know that there was a major gay porn star (Roman Heart of Falcon Studios, apparently) signing autographs at Diversions that night, so the place was surprisingly hopping.  We had a good time, and I ran into a fairly intoxicated Edmund, which was interesting.

This blog has been in existence for about 11 months.  In that time, I have had a grand total of 15 legitimate comments to my posts.  As of this morning, my spam filter has cleverly intercepted 1,629 spam comments — almost all of which are for Viagra, Cialis, or some other pharmaceutical product.

This means, using a little trick I call “math,” that 99.1 percent of all comments submitted to A Mild Voice of Reason are spam.

[rant] For this reason, I advocate the death penalty for spammers.  Perhaps rendering them to Singapore for a good, old-fashioned caning prior to a relaxing salt-water bath, followed by an excruciatingly slow descent into a vat of boiling vegetable oil.  Or something like that; I can be flexible. [/rant]

Aaah, spam.

It wouldn’t bother me so much if spam were actually pitching a product or service.  Or even if they appeared to pitch a product or service.  What grates on my one remaining nerve are those spam messages that are nothing but random words.  Seriously.  I’ve been peeking at the plain-text versions of some of these spams — full headers, full-text bodies.  No embedded images, no Web bugs, no hidden hyperlinks.  Just garbage.  If there is a logic to this, I cannot fathom it.