I've managed to clean up the filthy spam comments that were posted in the past two weeks, and I've re-enabled comment posting again but with some more restrictive regular expressions (although not as restrictive as the .* that's been in the block list for the past 10 days :-). Hopefully valid comments won't get blocked now, but please let me know if you do get stopped so I can relax the posting conditions slightly!
Pictures from Japan to follow.