Chicago Boyz

The Journal’s editorial page today has several good letters responding to Karinna Gore Schiff’s diatribe on the candidacy of Ralph Nader. Unfortunately, I can’t link to them, you’ll have to pick up a paper copy, but it’s worth the buck.
Jesse Jackson once again has made himself prosecutor, judge, and jury. In less than one week, he has apparently been able to ascertain all the facts concerning Haiti and Aristide’s flight, and the Chicago Sun Times has deemed to print them.
Finally, my friend Andy continues his running summary of the state of the world (as seen through his eyes).

Having comments is great. However, old posts tend to attract annoying spam messages, so once posts are more than about a month old, and no longer appear on the blog’s main page, I usually close them to new comments.

But a problem with doing this is that once in a while somebody leaves an extraordinary comment on an old post. Some of these comments come months after the original post and are from people who have some connection to the subject of the post.

See, for example, here, and the last comment here. And check out the last comment on this old post about the Mongolian army, which was made just last night by a Mongolian army reservist who lives in the U.S. These comments got through only because in the first two cases I was not yet in the habit of closing comments on old posts, and in the case of the Mongolian post I hadn’t yet gotten around to closing them for the latest batch. (I have left the Mongolian post open to comments in case anyone wants to respond to Amar.)

So does anyone know of a better way to handle comments? I hesitate to use the “copy this number” anti-spambot system that other blogs, e.g., Samizdata, use (for an example, see here and scroll down to the “Post a comment” section), because it’s burdensome for users. I thought of closing comments, but also posting a conspicuous message suggesting that commenters email us if a thread is closed, but that’s burdensome too. Another alternative is to leave comments open longer, but also to hack Movable Type so that the editing window displays more than the five most recent comments (Steve does something like this). In that case we would still get spam but it would be easier to find and remove.

Any other ideas?

A Chicago Boy has passed. Author of The Americans (The Colonial Experience; The National Experience; The Democratic Experience), The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers, among others; Professor in History, 1944-64, and Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor, 1964-69; and Librarian of Congress from 1975-1987. WaPo obit here; USAToday obit here. Requiescat in pace.

Mrs. Nito and I will be having our first baby soon. In anticipation, I’m in the market for a camcorder and a DVD recorder to record everything.

I found this little wonder via Gotapex.com: Tivo and DVD recorder mixed into one. If I’m not mistaken, this pretty much makes you the coolest kid on the block. Anyone with opinions one way or other on DVD recorders and/or PVR-DVDR combos?