Our commenting system here at the blog is "going away", we're being told. We've used Haloscan comments for years, and their software/hardware is breaking and will be shut down permanently as of Feb. 26, 2010. Until we find another appropriate commenting system, we will probably use blogger's for the time being. I have exported all our comments over the years and hope to sometime restore them, but I'm not the technical whiz and other life events take precedence right now, so it will have to wait. I'm sorry I can't devote more resources to restoring all our comments and only ask our readers' patience and understanding if they can't read or access our existing comments after 2/26.
For now, too, we will deploy comment moderation on all comments automatically, in order to protect any and all visitors from possible flaming or inappropriate comments that would hurt anyone.
If any friends of the blog have any suggestions or advice, we are all ears! Thanks.