Sorry for the inconvenience

I apologize for the fact that (hopefully) for the short term you will have to fill in one of those 'CAPTCHA' fields with nonsense collections of letters and numbers in order to submit a comment.  This is the only way to make sure I don't have to delete dozens of spam messages a day... something I've started having to do again recently.

I wrote to the folks at Typepad to complain about the small flood of spam comments I've been getting, and this was their unhelpful [canned] response:

Thanks for the note.   As you noticed, we changed the spam filtering
recently.  While this means a bit more spam is getting through right
now, over the long term, this will help to better train our filters to
identify spam from legitimate comments.   We do apologize for the
inconvenience.

Lets parse that, shall we?

"Thanks for the note." 

Translation: This is an automated response.  No actual human being will ever see your request for help. 

"As you noticed, we changed the spam filtering recently." 

Translation:  We lowered the shields on 'Starship Typepad' for reasons that only make sense to us. So now that we are getting flooded with complaints like yours, we've written this handy automatic response so we don't have to talk to you. 

"While this means a bit more spam is getting through right now, over the long term, this will help to better train our filters to identify spam from legitimate comments."  

Translation:  While this means you will be totally exposed to every spambot on the planet for the next few months, it is a lot cheaper to let you train our spam filters with your all-night comment deleting sessions than for us to go out and buy any of the perfectly good anti-spam algorithms currently available on the market. Suck it up and stop your whining.

So again, I apologize for the inconvenience that you will have to take an extra few seconds to fill in the CAPTCHA field in order to leave a comment.  I'm hoping that this is a temporary measure, and that my blog host will eventually get its head out of its nether regions and actually discover the meaning of customer service.

[Needless to say, if you are able to leave a comment without filling in a CAPTCHA field, let me know.  thanks]