There are a lot of golddiggers over here who waited for the Namecoin difficulty to go down.
Then they started mining as a large group of grasshoppers until difficulty reached for the sky, blocks and transactions take ages to verify.
I'm one of them, so you can blame me too.
As you can see, it will take almost untill halloween to get it back to normal.
If every miner would point 1 GPU to Namecoin mining, we would soon reach block 24.000 and start Merged Mining.
If you don't want a whole GPU pointed at Namecoin, just start a second task on one GPU and share some GPU time to Namecoin mining.
Another way to boost Namecoin is buying Namecoins. This will force the price up and attract people to start mining again.
Maybe a nice investment?
Who's in?