The Golden Age is Over and the Gilded Age is Here.

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An era has passed with the closing of the Geocities website on October 26, 2009.  According to Wikipedia, GeoCities began in mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California. Yahoo! acquired Geocities in 1999, for about $3.75 billion in stock just before the dot com bubble burst soon after the filing of the Microsoft Anti-Trust suit by Attorney General Janet "Lurch" Reno. Geocities never proved to be a profitable venture.  As a result of the closing of Geocities, Yahoo!, will no longer offer free web pages, i.e., you have to pay to play. Most everybody I knew back then had a webpage on Geocities during the mid to late 1990s. That was when the Internet was fun and many things were free.  The pages were creative and funny. Once Yahoo! acquired Geocities many of the free spirits that populated the Geocities website left.

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The forerunner to this blog was a Geocities webpage called The Anti-Political Weasel Page. The webpage originated in 1997, just as the County of San Diego was going to outsource its Information Technology department. I was a County employee back then. The Chief Administrative Officer at the time was Larry Prior III or "LPIII" as he was nicknamed by his contemporaries at the County Administration Center in downtown San Diego.  Prior was brought in to streamline County government. His mantra was "Better, Faster, Cheaper" (sic).  One County Supervisor, that was rumored to use Preparation H as lip gloss, was one of the driving forces behind a newspaper ad showing County government as a pig that was going to be a racehorse under the LPIII regime.  County employees were justifiably offended.

County employees called "LPIII" the "Weasel" because of his chainsaw management style.  The chainsaw management style was in vogue during the mid-1990s, with corporate tough guys like "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap slashing and burning their way to profitability--ethics be damned. Because of his questionable ethics, Dunlap is barred for life from ever serving as an officer of a publically traded company.  The mascot for the The Anti-Political Weasel Page website was a cute little weasel (actually it was a ferret) named L.P. Tree.  It was a far better depiction than Prior deserved.

The main feature of the page was a Drudge-like column called Nick Nafta's Eye on Politics. It featured gossip about the County and tidbits about LPIII.  My co-workers that knew about the page warned that "they would get me."  I brushed off the warnings safe in the knowledge that I could sue the County under a 28 USC §1984 lawsuit for abridging my First Amendment right to criticize a government official.  The page lost steam after Prior resigned in 1999.  It was revived briefly in 2003, as a multimedia class project called Welcome to Scam Diego!  The page chronicled the history of various political scandals in the City of San Diego.  On October 24, 2004, USA Today declared San Diego, "Enron by the Sea" because of its many financial and corruption scandals.

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Needless to say, I miss the good old days. Even though I had to put the site together by learning HTML while using WebTV© I had the most fun playing Drudge.   Somehow, there was a sense of righteous indignation against the sell-out of my co-workers in the soon-to-be defunct County Department of Information Services.  Prior was a just another manager that would eventually move on to a new hatchet job. Now when I write in this blog, I have the sense of fighting an immoveable evil.  And as you know, evil with a "d" spells devil.