I've been off-blog for a few days, and haven't had a chance to deal with this yet. I received a couple of email from folks saying they were having difficulty commenting on my blog. I thought maybe Akismet might be blocking them, so I've just switched back to a Drupal 5 development snapshot of Spam.module. Yes, it's a continuing ongoing saga of switching back and forth between Akismet and Spam.module. Hopefully this solves the comment problem without subjecting this blog to a torrential spamstorm.
Akismet is nice, with its distributed spam blocking algorithm (hey! I sound like the schlub on Numb3rs!) but it's essentially a black box - if something goes south, there's no way to fix it from my side of the fence. Spam.module lets me tweak as needed.
Update: It took 7 hours for the first spam to sneak through. Frakking spammers. Time to re-tweak the Spam.module custom rules...