Sometimes, we nerds win.

I’m referring of course to the tale of
Steuard Jensen, Prom King.
As it turns out, Steuard was a physics major at HMC,
just one year behind me. I stumbled across his page by accident.
Of course, his story is still not quite as good as the one about
the
straight-A clarinet player who took Miss December 1989 to his Winter Formal,
but all in all, not bad.

In other news, Linda Lay is
bemoaning
her husband’s fate. The spin is that the family is facing bankruptcy, and that Ken Lay
is an “honest, decent, moral human being who would do absolutely nothing wrong.”

It’s funny how bankruptcy just kinda creeps up on you like that. I mean, I
haven’t cashed out $101 million dollars in stock, and I don’t
own several multimillion dollar
homes in Aspen, and yet somehow I manage to pay most of my creditors on time.
Maybe his teenagers have, like, huge phone bills or something.

Heck, forget about Lay. I’m still having trouble feeling sorry for
those poor Enron employees. I mean, if you’re a white-collar worker
at a big company, you know what’s going on. Sure, you probably
don’t know enough to be prosecuted for anything. But… you hear rumors.
You pick up on things at meetings, on email aliases, in casual conversations.
You just kind of know things you’re not supposed to know, unless you’re
socially blind, deaf, and dumb.

Here’s who I do feel sorry for: the janitors. And the landscapers, and the cafeteria
people, and the workers who built and maintained Enron’s plants and pipelines.
And possibly the admins. But as for the energy traders and the IT department?
Let’s see… you earned your living screwing over helpless people for money, but
it didn’t occur to you that perhaps your bosses viewed you in the same light.
Well, tough luck and good riddance.