The Lewinsky Affair

Michael As you all have surely heard, things are getting tough for President Bill Clinton here in America, who had an affair with an intern in the White House and denied it in a statement before the so-called "Grand Jury" under oath. Now, however, the intern has made a detailed statement and described in minute detail what interesting things happened there. The whole procedure was secret and a certain Ken Starr had the task of writing down the statements and findings in an even more secret report.

Now, Congress, the US lawmaking body with elected officials, has surprisingly decided to make this report available to the public - not in a newspaper, but, because we don't live on the moon: on the Internet! You can imagine that AOL was going crazy. On the day before the planned publication, teams were assembled who, as soon as the report appeared, would type it out, convert it into a suitable format and put it on the AOL internet page. The MyNews software (which your beloved narrator designed and wrote), which displays the news on the AOL page, unfortunately still had (fortunately not in my part) one error, which the guys were hunting down until four in the morning and finally could fix. In the early afternoon, then, events came in like wildfire: The media representatives, including one from AOL, were able to convince the government to release the report in electronic format right away, and we made it appear on the web page within a few minutes. Immediately the onslaught on our servers began, millions reading the report, and could hardly believe it: There it was, describing in detail, how the president and the intern had fun, and prudish Americans almost fell out of their chairs. Immediately an additional web page was set up, which pointed out that the report was not suitable for children and gave advice to parents on how to tell their offspring about the event. Over the weekend I then evaluated the data and counted how many people clicked on which pages - madness!

So, that's enough for today! To finish off, here's a photo of the two of your expats at Angel Island, the island in the San Francisco Bay that we visited on a Sunday by ship. The fog was still over the bay, but the skyscrapers of San Francisco were already visible.