Okay, so now you can comment, yay!

You do have to be TypeKey-registered, though. I realize this is a small hassle, but seriously, the hassle is small, compared to my having to sort through all the comments to take out the porn and the Viagra.

Now, for those of you concerned about giving up your email address. You have the option, when you use TypeKey, of not sending your email address to the site operator (that would be me). I have not set the preferences to require that you give out your email. So you do have to give it to TypeKey to set up your account, but if you un-check the box for sending your email to the site author along with your post, your email won't display, and nobody will see it. (At least, that's the way it's working right now.) So your email address should remain private, if you un-check that box.

I wish we still lived under a freewheeling comment system, but Bob and his friend MelindaCohan were basically unrelenting, and clearly had set things up so that they could automatically post a comment to every . . . entry . . . on . . . this . . . site every time they got a new campaign going to advertise Viagra or whatever. So that just couldn't continue. I didn't have the ability to ban them, so now, they can't post at all.

You should only have to register for TypeKey once, and that registration will hold you for lots of other sites, including the new Hissyfit, just to name one.

My prediction is that commenting is actually going to become available on some sites that haven't allowed it in the past, as registration becomes possible and relatively unburdensome.

Many of you, I'm sure, don't follow this kind of thing, but this here site runs on Movable Type, a piece of software that was free when I picked it up and has just started charging for its most recent bleeding-edge version -- which I have no need for, but upgraded to anyway, primarily because they were selling it and I was happy to give them money.

The only catch was that there were some limits, even on the paid license I bought, including a limitation to five weblogs. Now you wouldn't think that would be a particularly big deal, except that if you look around this place, you'll see that I actually have several, and I'm working on a couple more, potentially. So the limits were kind of a drag.

Furthermore, people were up in arms about them, because apparently, once you start giving your work away for free, you have to continue giving it away for free in unlimited quantities, or people get angry at you. Well, the folks at Six Apart (the company that makes MT) sent me an email last night to inform me that as an "early adopter" of the new version, I was getting an upgrade to their improved license, which has unlimited weblogs and unlimited authors (I don't have other authors, of course). Essentially, the version I have now would cost an extra thirty bucks if I bought it new, but because I had already bought the old one, they gave me a free bump to the new one.

It's a long way of saying that when you're a business, it makes a lot of sense to listen to the people who use your product, because if you're willing to do that, they're going to be a lot happier in the long run. Yay, Trotts!

Spanking new Mortal Enemy of the Week, yours for the enjoying. Simers had more than a week, so Dr. Chris may have to live with more than a week as well.

I want to make it clear that it's not my great love for plaintiffs' attorneys or medical malpractice cases (I do nothing remotely like that for a living, and I'm not remotely the kind of lawyer people are talking about when they get after this stuff) that offends me about what Dr. Chris proposed. And it's not that I don't agree that access to health care is being affected by the size of malpractice premiums and so forth.

It's that there's a line you don't cross. Attorneys have the same right as doctors to decide, within reason, whom they will and won't work for. But I would never advise attorneys to refuse representation to, for instance, a legislator who got himself arrested and who had, at some point, voted in favor of so-called "tort reform." It's a direction you just don't go. And what's with not treating spouses? What on earth would motivate you to deny treatment to someone simply because he was married to a trial lawyer? What is just about that?

And I suppose that, more generally, I just despair at the way discussion of public policy issues seems to have gone rapidly south -- a development for which I blame both political parties, practically every major political figure of any significance, and the reluctance of everyone involved to recognize that most policy issues that have been kicking around for a long time are still kicking around precisely because they are difficult. If it were as easy as the good people having the will to implement the obvious solution, we'd have most of our thorniest crap solved already.

This is no answer, intensifying the atmosphere of combat, and Dr. Chris is coming as close as I've seen in a while to threatening physical harm as a way of trying to force his position on what's ultimately a policy issue.

It depresses me.