CNN definitely needs to pull Ed Henry off the White House beat as he has completely lost the thread of what he is supposed to be doing as a reporter.

Atrios notes that Ed Henry Can’t Stop Fluffing with a link to Ed’s CNN Political Ticker report on the vital question of the Bush family Christmas presents with this absurd sentence: “It’s hard to imagine a tough guy from Texas shopping for a pocketbook, but President Bush gave his wife a new purse and a silver tray for Christmas, according to an aide to First Lady Laura Bush.”

Why wouldn’t the Connecticut-born scion of a wealthy New England family who was educated at prep schools and universities in Massachusetts and Connecticut buy a purse. A hint, Ed: tough guys don’t wear spandex, and they aren’t afraid of horses.

[Read more →]

CNet reports the the anti-virus company, Kaspersky inadvertently quarantines Windows Explorer

The security company’s systems had decided that a virus called Huhk-C was present in the explorer.exe file, leading to its confinement or, in some cases, deletion. As Windows Explorer is the graphical user interface (GUI) for Windows’ file system, this made it difficult to perform many common tasks within the operating system, such as finding files.
…

In March of this year, Kaspersky criticized Microsoft’s consumer antivirus product, OneCare, for incorrectly quarantining and, in some cases, deleting Microsoft Outlook files.

Given that I have deleted Outlook from my system for its many failures in the security area, and have noted a lot of flakiness in the current version of Windows Explorer, both anti-virus company may have been correct – if it quacks like a duck…

While December 26th is celebrated by a lot of people in the US in shopping malls returning gifts or taking advantage of inventory clearance sales, there are other celebrations.

It is the first day of the Kwanzaa celebration, which is explained at the link.

It is Boxing Day, a celebration of noblesse oblige when the upper classes bestow gifts on the lower and the contents of the poor boxes are distributed. Under the feudal system this was part of the “contract,” the mutual system of obligations that tied the system together.

As the feast of St. Stephen it honors the first Christian martyr, but Ireland’s Saint Stephen’s Day celebration is a bit different and is the reason for the wren on this post.

However, this post is really my complaint about “Good King Whatshisface.”

I have always found Good King Wenceslas really annoying.

[Read more →]