View From the Bushes

Yesterday night my dad got the Teacher of the Year award from the high school where he teaches. The school wanted the family to show up and surprise him, so they called my mom. She promptly sent the info out to the family mailing list, of which my dad is a member. In the e-mail she wondered if he would figure it out; I replied "you mean through some means other than you e-mailing him all the details?"

At that point it became my job to figure out some way of preventing him from getting the e-mail. Of course, as you know, once something is out there it's pretty difficult to retrieve. Fortunately since he was our dad, we had an inside track. After proposing and rejecting several ideas, we finally decided to try changing his password. I sent my trust side-kick in (my brother-in-law) to reconnoiter and he returned with the information that all the ISP needed to change the password was the account holder's birthday, so I called them up, pretended to be my father and changed the password. Then I logged into their webmail interface and deleted the offending message. My mother still had to figure out someway to keep him from realizing that we'd changed his password, but that was her problem -- I figured I'd done enough.

In other news, as I'm sure you all know the identity of "Deep Throat" was finally revealed. Most people are treating him like a hero, and certainly that was my first reaction. Ben Stein, a speechwriter for Nixon (but probably better known for "Win Ben Stein's Money") has a different take: not necessarily one I agree with, but it's always fun to read the radical viewpoint.

Thrashing around in the starting gate (I may be reading too much Seabiscuit)
Ross