I've seen this create some confusion among our commenters and just wanted to clarify: When you see a comment that begins: "The Plank says..." That's not a commenter but an item over at The Plank, our sister blog, linking back to the item whose comment thread you're in. If you click on the hypertext, you should be able to pull up the Plank item in question. (And it's not just Plank items. A lot of blogs show up in in our comment threads when they link to our items. You should be able to click over to them, too.)
--Noam Scheiber