A few weeks ago, I was in a doctor's office--a doc I had never seen before--and suddenly we were talking about politics and the Iraq war. I did not bring it up. He was strongly of the opinion that Bush and Cheney launched the war for reasons having to do with personal economic benefit. As much as I think the execution of the Iraq war and its aftermath have been one of the epic foreign policy blunders in US history; a monumental mistake that future generations will pay for, I don't think that Bush and Cheney had any personal financial motivations weighing on the decisions to go to war. But I didn't argue too much with the doc...I said something like, "well, I don't know about that..." but it's tougher to argue with a doc at the moment he is treating you, and he has certain tools in his hands that, if used slightly improperly, could cause great harm.

Upon reading a book recently, called The Teapot Dome Scandal, I was reminded that even though we often want to believe that our leaders in the US are fundamentally decent people, it just isn't the case sometimes. The Teapot Dome Scandal is a cautionary tale of big oil influence on government; avarice run amok; and human frailty. I would definitely recommend the book--I had heard of Teapot Dome before, but I knew nothing about it, and it turned out to be a fascinating story.

This entry has been sorely missing a name drop, and I am about to remedy that--with a very minor one. One of the major villans in the story was a big-time oilman named Ed Doheny, and several years ago, we had an intern in our office named Leigh Doheny, who was some relation to Ed; I believe his great-grandson. What I remember about Leigh was that he was a really good guy, outstanding golfer, and had nearly infinite patience with me on the golf course.

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I recently had a remarkable experience with Yahoo--someone hijacked the MyYahoo page that used to be my homepage on the internet at work. I can no longer access it. I have had the page for about 10 years, and it had a couple hundred stock tickers that I had chosen, headlines that I am interested in, and of course a long list of cities whose weather I wanted to have at my fingertips...plus scores from the few sports teams I still care about. But it's all gone now. My efforts to retrieve it have been 100% unsuccessful; Yahoo customer service is hopeless. I have offered to prove that the page is mine by listing many of the stock ticker symbols, etc. But all I get is the automated responses that don't address what to do if someone hijacks your page and CHANGES your password and e-mail address associated with the account. Very odd and disturbing...why would anyone *WANT* my Yahoo page? I have no valuable personal info on it.

But this story has a happy ending...I finally gave up and switched my homepage to a customized Google page. I think the ability to have a customized Google page as your homepage has been around for awhile, but Google only recently (I think) added a bunch of optional extra "gadgets" (e.g., a box on my homepage that is a window onto my gMail account) and has added an ability to use new art from several different artists as the background for the top of the page. It's very cool and incredibly easy to "install." (As Jed can attest--if I can manage to install it, it is indeed very simple.)