All of this hooplah was precipitated when I attempted to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.  WordPress told me, as it did to many, many others, that my version of MySQL was outdated and that I had to update.  When I contacted my host about this, they basically told me that my only hope was to update to a new hosting package that supported a later version of MySQL.  Fortunately, I was able to do this without incurring any additional hosting costs (and actually the package I switched to is rather feature rich).  In any event, I exported my MySQL 4 database into a newly-created MySQL 5 database, made some configuration changes, and was able to successfully update WordPress.  However, upon viewing my newly-updated WordPress blog, I discovered the odd “junk” that you now see.

I’m sure a person more skilled in the ways of MySQL could fix this problem in their sleep, but unfortunately I am not that person.  So, if you have any thoughts on how to fix this problem, feel free to let me know in a comment.