Spam

I just have to tell someone.

It's driving me crazy. The spam is driving me crazy. I screen my comments, meaning they come to me from Blogger as email. It gives me the chance to read comments before posting them.

This used to be a simple thing to do, took very little time. But now it seems that for every genuine comment, there are five that qualify as pure comment spam.

Comment spam is generally machine generated from an Anonymous individual. This entrepreneur wants me to direct you to links, places you probably don't want to go. They're not the kind of places you would find on my sidebar. Do you really want to visit websites for shady pharmaceuticals, diet drugs, and porn? Doubt it.

The content of the comment can be so disgusting it literally makes me sick just scanning it to screen it.

My experience is probably akin to what one of my kids experienced at the tender age of nine. He opened an email with a naked little girl captioned, Got milk? Disturbing to some of us.

So I'm becoming loathe to open comments from people who go by the name, Anonymous. Especially since they're anything but anonymous.

Thus:

If you can. Try to work with the other options for signing comments so they're less likely to be deleted due to my not irrational aversion, my allergy to comment spam.

Instead of choosing Anonymous, pick the option: Name/URL. Choose a name for yourself, and and fill in the box with your new moniker. We all need to reinvent ourselves once in awhile, and everyone needs an alias. This is your chance.

You don't have to put down a URL. There are too many in the universe already.

Then tell me everything. Or whatever it was you wanted to say.

Much obliged,

therapydoc

New Years Greetings, Jewish Style

Just a quick post before the holiday. I left another over at the The Second Road , if you're interested, where I'll be guest posting once a week.

Here's how I ended my first entry (Commitment)

Hey, I could have gone anywhere with this post, and probably did. I wrote it on a plane, going over it in my head in hypnogogic sleep, eyes closed.

Thanks for having me, Second Road.

May your site become the GPS of recovery programs.

Sounded right at the time. But here's what I really wanted to tell you before I forgot, before taking off for the holiday.

Jewish or not, in the next couple of days, you might be hearing people around you saying,

Have a happy, healthy New Year.

Or,

Have a happy, healthy, sweet New Year.

This is because Jews like sugar. We really do. We'll dip an apple in honey on the holiday this week just to make the coming year sweet. If we eat sweet things, the year will be sweet. Like on Star Trek, Captain Kirk says, "Make it so, Suloo." We try to make it so.

It's a belief that by saying it, doing it, putting ourselves through the motions, we can make things happen. Change things. This is one of the secrets of behavioristic religions like mine (we're all about doing). And social scientists generally also subscribe to cognitive-behavioral interventions, and surely, hypnotism. Making it so is a little of both.

So...

Have a happy, healthy, sweet new year. May there be no more suffering in this world, and if there is, we should have enough honey to go around.

therapydoc

P.S. For those of you who want to know what the Jewish people are praying for in the next couple of days, the reason your Jewish friends won't be at work, won't be taking calls, won't be publishing comments, etc., take a look at this.