I’m back in CA. We didn’t make as much progress unpacking as I’d hoped, and Patricia’s computer didn’t survive the trip to Florida. It arrived sufficiently addled that, upon boot, it shows a crazed scattering of phosphor trails across the screen, though which one can barely make out the Award logo of the BIOS, after which it attempts to load Windows, and then bluescreens with obscure messages in various dialects of Greek and hex. My machine came up OK, but we don’t yet have an internet connection there, or even phone service, so I’ve been cut off from civilization (or, at least, the blogosphere) all weekend. Thanks to Andrew for keeping the ball rolling with some interesting posts.

Because I was away, some of the lowest forms of life imaginable managed to attack my comments section with spam of the most vile nature on Sunday, most of which involved websites hawking variants on b3stiality, r@pe and inc3st, sometimes in varying combinations. Normally, I catch these after the first two or three, after which they’re banned, but my absence gave them free rein for hours and days, and for some reason, MT Blacklist doesn’t seem to remove all comments with banned URLs (at least for me)–it only deletes them one at a time, so I spent the first hour back on line cleaning up the mess. (By the way, Andrew, I don’t get emails of comments to your posts, so you should keep an eye out as well, as they age like fine wine and thus become more attractive to the scumbuckets. If you get one, let me know, and I’ll show you the drill.)

If anyone has any suggestions as to what may have gone astray with the computer, let me know. I’m guessing it’s a MB problem. I’ve had problems in the past while moving equipment in which cables came loose, but it’s hard to imagine how that would cause a weird screen display even before POST.