Blogging will be extremely light. The site is going to get a make-over in the near future. And it's springtime in Alaska, so I've got better things to do than mess around on the computer.

In the meantime, here's a bird that was checking out my brother's backyard last year.

Air Force Tech. Sgt. J.P. Dawson, now stationed in Anchorage, Alaska, targeted the Tightwad Bank during a road trip out of Maryland five years ago. But Dawson never got the Tightwad Bank account he wanted.

A couple of armed robberies had left the bank lobby shuttered, and the clerk at the drive-through couldn’t open new accounts.

“We were like, ‘What a bummer. We drove all the way out here,’ ” Dawson said.

Still, he carried a Tightwad Bank key chain until it broke recently.

Yeah... I'm gonna open an account.

Background on the closing and on the big road trip in '03.

11 Apr '08: Bryant Gumbel says, ...we’ve agreed that we’d all be better served going in different directions."

I must use this power wisely.

No, I don't have a clue who won.

At least I'll be wearing green for St. Patrick's Day.

It's either Catoptrophorus semipalmatus or Tringa semipalmata. Not that it matters to anyone but the bird nerds.

The curious thing -- and I'm clueless on how these spammers and spambots operate -- 122 of the 135 bogus comments were posted (in vain) to four entries. All four of those entries had a title with a number spelled out. Entries titled Hundred-yard Stare or Thirty-four get spammed disproportionately.

When I post photos of birds, I put the species name (in Latin) as the title, and I've never been spammed in those entries. Everything else gets a random spam comment here and there.

I guess I could stop spelling out numbers. Then again, all comments are subject to approval, and when 90% of all the garbage comments are in a few posts, it's easier to delete them en masse.

Any web geeks have any idea why that happens? It's not like their comments are getting through on those posts. Perhaps some automated program just locks on to them.

One of these days I'll figure out some software solution to spam. For now, there's always the anti-spam hardware.