Time to comment about comments, two things, comment stats and spam. WordPress.com has added a new pane to this site’s stats page. You as the reader never get to see this stats page, but I do. I check it regularly, some would say obsessively. Now, in addition to hits, I can count comments. I always have counted on comments, but now, with this new feature, I can aggregate them. Simply, I now know quantitatively who are my top commenters. I’ve always known, at least qualitatively, but now I have the data and can count on it. So the winners are? Win, place and show go to Kayak Woman, Jay and Jane. You go girls!

Another workday, tempo rising, pulse racing, maybe less Starbucks?

My website is currently undergoing a spam attack. Three examples are shown below. You the reader don’t see this either, because Akismet, the spam filter for WordPress has flawlessly caught them all. I’m pretty sure that they are all machine generated, because they all share certain characteristics. They are all flattering comments, they all end in an exclamation point and they all have a single misspelling in them. The misspelling is always just a jumbling of the correct letters. Finally, they all have an IP address for the supplied website. All addresses that I dare not click. If you see a hundred of these the patterns are easy to detect. It’s a pity that they are not human generated spam, because the American names in far-flung locals would have made them otherwise even more intriguing.

• I found just what I was needed, and it was entertaninig! – Butterfly, China
• I feel so much happier now I undesrtnad this. Thanks! – Donny, Austria
• Hey, subtle must be your mddile name. Great post! – Candy, Peru

Finally, to the subject of this post’s title. We are turning away from a week or two of parental life and pivoting to a weekend of bike life. This year’s MS-150 bike ride is this weekend. Thanks to a dear and very, very, very generous friend, both Anne and I have met our fundraising goal for this event. Since I don’t know if this benefactor wants to remain anonymous or not, I’ll simply refer to this honored donor as the Master Bladder, who along with a faithful sidekick, Doctor Bozo Bean Breath, fights injustice and stands up for the American way. Cue America the Beautiful, please … Thank You!