As it turns out I already had “allow pings” turned off everywhere, and I don’t see any option to “allow trackbacks” (or not allow), yet I was still gettting this spam. So “if you don’t want trackbacks or pingbacks, turn them off.” does not appear to have addressed the situation (nor is it entirely clear)
I’ve now tried blacklisting the common part of these comments to see if that helps, and will try the spam combatting plugins, but by verify I meant “verify that this is the correct course of action” because, hey, I really don’t have a clue about all this and I’m looking for help- as opposed to having to figure out what works on my own by trial and error.
lastly — the spam is an artifact of WordPress. To “stop” the spam I only have to uninstall WordPress and I won’t be suceptible to the automated processes generating this garbage.