Further experience revealed a very irritating bug in MT -- once comments have started appearing on an entry, apparently unchecking the "allow comments" box on the edit-entry screen doesn't really work. It LOOKS like it works. But the comment URL which had become the destination-of-choice for many a comment-spambot was still available, even after a rebuild. And so the links piled up again.

So now the entry -- which was made nearly a year ago, after a freak early-Spring storm had left the tree behind our old apartment both blooming and snowbound -- is gone. But -- if for no other reason than I can't stand to throw away nearly anything -- here's the text of the entry:

The magnolia outside the window is blossoming into the cotton-wool of snow, the coral-tipped branches all swaying punchdrunkenly in the breeze, their ends superclogged with ice, as the fingerlike buds cradle snow-lumps.

It's a mournful pose and I can't look away, but the world's indifferent. Low post-dawn clouds, busy grey ghosts, are rush-houring it southward, reverse-commuters with skirts passing just above the housetops, but quiet and efficient in their passage against a dirty white sky, like a stream of Wall Street assistants in their charcoal skirts and pale Nikes (pumps in the bottom right-hand desk drawer). And the birds, they're on the job hitting the headwind, muscling north, black, slick-speedy and crows-eye straightlining it somewhere past windowsville, not interested at all in one more dumbass flowering tree, rope-a-doped by a winter’s last savage trick.

Yeah, I know, it's not exactly Robert Frost. Or even Bob Hope.

Note -- I haven't updated my version of MT in a while, partly because of time and partly because I'm scared I'll break something in the process. I'm sure the bug I mentioned above is probably long since fixed. I wouldn't want to be construed as complaining unduly.