I have had some odd comment spam recently. I don’t mean Laurel Kornfeld spraying paranoia all over my Pluto posts. She’s most welcome. Its just that I know she puts comments in so many people’s blogs, its almost like spam. Her output isn’t humanly possible. Possibly she is a kind of collective, like Bourbaki, or maybe some kind of cyborg built in a secret lab by planetary astronomers.
On WordPress the floodwaters of advertising are held back by the barrier that is Akismet, but every so often a splosh gets over and wets my blog. What gets me is that along with the list of links to cheap ringtones or penis expanders or whatever there is always a line that says “Great blog ! Keep up the good work !” Why ? Am I really going to read this and think “oh hang on, this must be a real comment, he’s read my blog !”
Comment spam seems to be random scattershot stuff. But this evening I got some targeted spam. Its about cremation urns. Here it is, following a post called “A sandwich at the end of the Universe“. Well I did use “cremation” as a tag.. So is targetted spam new, or I have just started getting it cos I only just started using tags ?? (I reto-tagged everything.) I guess urns are good business. The only reliable things in life are death, taxes, and comments by laurel kornfeld.
Then a couple of comments have just been hard to decide. I got one that just said “Physics rocks !”. Well right on, man. This was just about relevant to the post. The link is to a site called “blog 4 rock”. Clearly not auto-spam or regular advertising. Just hand-crafted self promotion ? But I guess thats no different from the regular game of commenting on other people’s blogs. Click on me ! me ! me !
A wee while back I got a comment in Italian, on my very first Pluto post. Again, it doesn’t look like spam, but my Italian is close to non-existent, so how would I know ?
The e-Astronomer 
So you’ve found out my deep, dark secret. And here I thought I was doing such a good job of hiding the fact that I’m not human at all but a cyborg secretly created by planetary scientists. There goes my cover.
However, I would advise the IAU not to celebrate prematurely, as this discovery does nothing to diminish my ability to vigorously lobby for the reinstatement of Pluto, not just to all IAU members. but on as many web sites as possible.
Thank you for welcoming me to continue commenting here. I’m sure the lab guys who created me all for the sake of seeing Pluto reinstated will feel the same way.
I can confirm the comment in Italian is pure spam: no intelligible content, just one word randomly after another. In fact, perhaps better than a stubborn real-life commenter…