Today's damn new thing

As my grumpiness threatens to become a character trait, like that of Dennis the Menace's neighbor Mr. Wilson, I note with displeasure the advent of a new breed of spam: Comment spam. Comment spam is like email spam, but instead of going into people's email boxes, it goes into the comments areas of people's weblogs. To understand the problem, just look at this thread from the blog Making Light.

By the way, I put in a shift at the l.n.c.b. today, and I had to define the word zeitgeist for someone. Not a twenty-something co-worker, but a woman my age who was purchasing books. She was the third person that day to buy a certain self-help book, I forget what; and I said something about how the topic of the book must be in the zeitgeist. She didn't know what that meant. When I defined it, she said, "Oh, you mean the collective consciousness." Yes, I guess in California we would say that.