I have no clue why these random symbols are showing up, but I am aware of them, and I am trying to discover the problem. I upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 today and all of a sudden hundreds of posts have this weirdness in the posts. I am currently correcting some posts by hand, but I am working on a fix that will hopefully fix all of them at once. Everyone cross your fingers I can get this sorted out, this really is annoying the heck out of me.

UPDATE, 4:30 PM CST: I seem to have killed off the majority of the  symbols around the site, still working on some other issues that may take a day or two.  Such a good time I’m having.