The Columnist Manifesto

I realize that word verification is a tedious extra step in posting comments, but I've decided to keep with it. When I look back at my old posts, I find them to be barnacled with dozens of spam comments in the last couple of months of 2005; but the spam seems to have stopped since I activated word verification on January 17.

I wish they would make word verification more fun by coming up with letter combinations that sound like words. My last two word verification letter strings did in fact almost sound like words:

fnertz

and

hughoa

What would you guess them to mean?

Speaking of comment spam, can anyone recommend a way to delete them that is faster and more efficient than going to each comment and hitting the delete comments button?