With help from our newly upgraded Movable Type program, we've now identified and deleted thousands of spam TrackBack pings that had been accumulating on our archived posts since Feb. 1, when this new spam method began hitting us. We've tried to be careful to save all the legitimate pings while getting rid of those promoting online poker, phentermine, mortgage refinancing and so forth. It was quite a job, but we feel cleaner already.

We did, however, leave up a couple of spam pings that seemed kind of poignantly topical: they're here.