Dear CBC News Now with Heather Hiscox

Updated: In August of 2014 I happily dumped cable in its entirety. Too bad. So sad. I could care less how those flapping arms behave.

I miss nothing about television. In fact, with internet radio and the abundance of ’40s and ’50s noir radio detective shows and other programming, I’m quite enjoying being back in the mid-20th century.

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Will someone puh-leese tie down and secure the hands of that person reading your news in the a.m.? It has really become quite comical to watch Ms Hiscox as she constantly waves her hands and arms wildly in a meaningless attempt at emphasizing every mundane sentence that she pronounces. Gravitas be damned! Jabbing. Pointing. Waving. Circling. Gesturing wildly. Does she really think that it adds anything relevant to what she says, does, or reads?

As a joke, someone must have given her a pair of leather mittens to wear while she is in Yellowknife attending a winter carnival, knowing what she would do. The black thumb remains extended in perpetuity, erect like a middle finger demonstrating fickle fate. She waves this hellhole of darkness at all and sundry, while her hand within is clenched fervently against the cold. Opposite, a clenched and gloved fist complete with terrifying, empty cloth fingers flop wildly with every motion.

In the studio, it is no better – minus the black hands, of course. The woman cannot be restrained.

Please, for the love of God and the Dominion, can someone, anyone, anywhere, tie that woman’s hands behind her back whenever she is on-screen?

Thank you.

Massive botnet attack

Update March 6 2319 local: It’s finally over at just a few minutes before midnight. I tried tallying the number of login attempts, but they were too numerous and too fast to total. There were thousands.

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There’s a massive botnet attack going on right now that is targeted at WordPress blogs. How do I know? This blog is one of the targets for the botnet attack. So far, thanks to the free plugin Wordfence, I’ve been unaffected, and I’m getting many hundreds – if not a thousand – hits an hour.

If you’ve got a WP blog as an independent web site, I strongly recommend that you log in, select Plugins / Add new and type in Wordfence to get a plugin that will negate the targeted attack.

Once you’ve done that and activated Wordfence in your sidebar Plugins, locate Wordfence in the sidebar menu and select Options:

We recommend ensuring that all your WordPress admin accounts are using strong passwords, that you have Wordfence installed and the number of login failures set to 20 or less on the Wordfence options page. [ mine is set to 5 ]

You should have “Count login failures over what time period” set to 5 minutes and “Amount of time a user is locked out” set to 1 hour. An hour may not seem like much, but it will effectively defeat a password guessing attack. [ I’ve set mine for one day until this silliness is over ]

We also recommend you enable “Participate in the Real-Time WordPress Security Network” because this will immediately lock out any attacks from the Botnet that is responsible for the current attack. [ this may be already selected ]

You’re welcome and good luck.

Send in the clowns*, or, America: Too stupid to STFU

“You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests… This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext. It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century.” –some American clown

Rah! Rah! Rah!

Jesus, America. Really? Obviously, The Clown The Pustule on the crack of the ass known as America had his fingers crossed behind his back or he would have choked to death on his own bile.

Thanks to salon.com, that traitorous blog, for stating the obvious.

* with apologies to Stephen Sondheim