You may have noticed earlier episodes of Murphy's Saloon reappearing as new in your RSS feed - possibly in a jumbled order. If that's the case, I'd like to apologize.

I'm in the process of doing something I never expected to do: I'm turning off your ability to make comments here about individual episodes.

Doing this has been forced by spammers, who come to this blog page each time I publish a new episode and post at least one spam message with every single episode. That's 200+ spam messages I have to go through and delete. Fortunately, I have the settings such that I have the option of deleting them before they are visible to anyone else.

This has happened three time now, and I'm tired of it. So I'm turning off the comments. You are still always welcome to email comments to murphyssaloon(at)gmail(dot)com.

What makes this particularly irritating is the fact this isn't being done by a 'bot - these posts are made by a real person (or persons) who have to type in a name and a CAPTCHA code before they can attempt to post their spew.

Yeah, there are real people who are paid to do such things, and as far as I'm concerned they are scum.

My personal iTunes Music Store Bargain of the Week: T-Bone Walker - Complete Imperial Recordings, 1950-1954 (it's an iTunes link).

For $9.99, you get 54 tracks.

This is an open invitation for show IDs - y'know, the audio clips I play between songs that start, "Hi, this is ... "

A number of musicians and a few of my close friends have been kind enough to record and submit IDs over the years, but I'd now like to open this up to anyone, new and longtime listeners alike.

So here's the basic script:

"Hi, this is (insert your name here), and whenever I'm in the neighborhood, I always stop by Murphy's Saloon for a (insert your beverage of choice here), and to hear the best blues around."

You're more than welcome to ad lib a little at the end, if you like.

There are two ways you can create and submit your ID: you can call in to 1-530-28BLUES, or send an mp3 file to murphyssaloon(at)gmail(dot)com.

If you call in, take a deep breath and speak directly into your phone. Don't rush, and re-dos are allowed. If you have the ability to record mp3s on your computer, I'd prefer files recorded at 160 kbps.

Have fun, and I look forward to hearing from you!