A few minutes ago I checked my Technorati Link Cosmos, and found a new site linking to Byzantium’s Shores that is, shall we say, a tad surprising. (As of this writing, it’s the Number Two site listed there. Not Safe For Work!) Upon further investigation, it appears to be a porn site that’s specifically designed to look like a blog. Scrolling downward, I found a very long list of links which I assume is where the link here is located; I also see that this site has 125 referrals already from Technorati, so I assume I’m far from the only one making this discovery this morning.

I don’t know, maybe this is all harmless and maybe it’s really just someone using blog format for a bit of “High Kinkiness”, but in the wake of last week’s “Comments Spam” attacks that infected many Movable Type blogs out there with porn links in the comment threads, my “suspicion meter” is set on “High”. So, any of my readers with blogs of their own might want to be on the lookout. I’m not sure really what happens next here, but vigilance is always wise.

And this strikes me as a good time to reiterate my own Comments Spam policy: I will ban any IP addresses that attempt to do any such thing on my comments and I will report such behaviors to the appropriate ISPs.

UPDATE: And just like that, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has already found the exact same site. Somehow I suspect that the names “Woody” and “Peaches” are about to become quite infamous in Blogistan….

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Last week, NBC postponed the new episode of The West Wing that was to air Wednesday night, presumably because of the ongoing baseball playoffs (both the NLCS and ALCS had gone to sixth and seventh games, and both series involved a long-suffering franchise). Via The Modulator, I see that another theory for the pre-emption, which involves the episode’s North Korea-related plotline. (The episode is now supposed to air tonight.)

I doubt that’s the case, though, because NBC also put reruns in place of its Thursday night schedule the same week (up against ALCS Game Seven), and CBS likewise postponed a new episode of CSI Thursday night. (I don’t watch anything on ABC, so I have no idea if they had to similarly postpone new episodes that week.)

I was surprised that the networks had anything new scheduled at all last week, but maybe they simply assumed that baseball’s playoff ratings would continue to be less than the bonanza they used to be, only to be caught unawares by the drama of watching the Cubs and Red Sox come oh, so close.

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Darth Swank reports on a Defense Department memo, reported in the USA Today, which doesn’t quite back up the “Everything’s comin’ up roses!” view of the War on Terror. Glenn Reynolds, of course, is incensed at the leak (this from the guy who kept maintaining that the Valerie Plame affair was “too confusing”), which is unfortunate because it’s not clear that this is a leak at all, and anyway, the Department of Defense has put the memo up on their website. Now, I’m far from an expert here, so let me know if I’m wrong. But it doesn’t seem to me that memos intended to be confidential get posted to the Web, even if they get leaked.

I sometimes get the feeling that if Reynolds were the Captain of an English ocean liner on its maiden voyage, his reaction to being handed a note informing him that a very large icefield lies ahead would be to light all the boilers and go full steam ahead.

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Posting here may be a bit more sporadic than usual next week, as the Amazonian Queen Wife will be on vacation, which will mean setting aside my usual routines in favor of day-trips and whatnot. And Halloween is coming up, which means…well, I’m not sure what that means, except that I remember that my daughter is perhaps old enough to discover the joys of Milk Duds.

(I’m being facetious there. I hate Milk Duds, the most godawful candy in existence. Any candy that requires presoaking in lye just to render it chewable is not a candy I want on any kind of regular basis, even if it is only yearly.)

Oh, and check out John Scalzi’s kid’s costume. Apparently she likes to play with things before annihilation. Our kid’s going to be Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz. Except she’s blond. Go figure.

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Mike of Mike’s Baseball Rants, who doesn’t think too highly of Joe Morgan as a baseball pundit, might appreciate this: I was driving last night when the game started, and heard the first two innings on the radio. Very early on, Joe Morgan (the color-commentator on the official radio broadcast) says something like, “The Marlins will benefit defensively as the night goes on and the field dries out.” I thought that odd enough to begin with, since the game was at night and presumably there wouldn’t be a whole lot of evaporation going on.

But then, after I was home for a while and checked in on the game in the sixth inning, it was raining. So much for Joe’s prediction.

(I actually like Joe Morgan a lot, but Mike’s commentaries on him are usually very funny.)

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In an amazing twist of blogging fate, the guys over at Dead Parrots somehow ended up, for a time, with a post of their being Google’s Number One site for “Steve Bartman” — the Cubs fan who went for that infamous foul ball. The resulting traffic to their blog was, shall we say, staggering.

In that single day, they picked up about half as many hits as I’ve had in the entire time I’ve been writing this blog. Wow.

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Earlier this morning I was flipping past channels, heading for PBS so the kid could watch Sesame Street, when I just happened to catch about five seconds of Alan Colmes, the “liberal” who occupies the seat next to Sean Hannity on FOX News’s “fair and balanced” show (in which Colmes always sits meekly by while Hannity foams at the mouth, shouts, interrupts, and generally behaves like Bill O’Reilly). Colmes’s appearance this morning was on (I am not making this up) The 700 Club. I didn’t watch any more than what I happened to see, so for all I know, Colmes got into a flaming debate with Pat Robertson and struck a blow for liberal decency and all that. (I doubt that.)

I did catch Colmes apparently defending himself against accusation that he serves no useful purpose on the show, by saying “I am not a potted plant!” That made me laugh. From what little I’ve seen of the Hannity and Colmes show (not much, admittedly), maybe Colmes is right: he’s not a potted plant. He’s that clump of dead root-bound soil that you discard from an old pot before refilling it for use with a new plant.

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Still stealing stuff from Warren Ellis, a nifty new gizmo might be unveiled in Britain next year:

A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk in real time could make its debut in Britain next year. Tholos, named after a type of circular ancient Greek temple, consists of a large round screen nearly 10ft high and 23ft wide.

I assume this description will put any fan of the original Star Trek in mind of the Guardian of Forever, from “The City on the Edge of Forever” (incidentally, the greatest single episode of Star Trek ever, in any series):

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Literally.

It seems that the Powers-That-Be in Bangkok want to avoid President Bush and other luminaries being exposed to their city’s riverside slums, so their solution is to put up a giant curtain, obscuring the view of the slum.

Talk about “Out of sight, out of mind” as a policy regarding the poor….

(Via Warren Ellis.)

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The UPS man dropped off a package for me, which was sent in my direction at the behest of one of my regular readers. Thank you, Michelle!

(And don’t think for one second that I’ve abandoned my efforts at coercing you into Blogistan on your own….)

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