burpen

I think I fixed it. I wanted to exclude multiple categories but I was passing the parameter to query_posts like so:
$posts = query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-35-21-73");

This was being discarded as an invalid parameter. I was getting all posts and filtering out the categories later on, so I never caught that my query_posts was failing. I really needed it to look like:
$posts = query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-35,-21,-73");