The Project Theater Board at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts decided in January to cancel its upcoming annual presentation of the feminist classic Vagina Monologues. The all-women’s college recently declared it would admit males who lived and “identified” as female (regardless of genitalia), and the basis for cancellation of Vagina Monologues was that the unmodifiable script is not “inclusive” of those females — that it covers only experiences of females who actually have vaginas.
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
• Kathi Fedden filed a $30 million wrongful death lawsuit in December against Suffolk County, New York police after her 29-year-old son, driving drunk in 2013, fatally crashed into an office. She reasons that the son’s death is the fault of the police officer who stopped him earlier that evening and who must have noticed he was already drunk but did not arrest him. The officer, who knew the son as the owner of a popular-with-police local delicatessen, merely gave the son a lift home, but the son later drove off in his mother’s car, in which he had the fatal crash.
• A generous resident (name withheld by KDKA-TV) of South Oakland, Pennsylvania, in seasonal spirit the week before Christmas, invited a pregnant, homeless woman she had met at a Rite Aid store home with her for a hot shower, a change of clothes, and a warm bed for the night. The resident was forced to call police, though, when she went to check up on her guest and discovered her engaging in sexual activity with the resident’s pit bull. The guest, enraged at being caught, vandalized the home before officers arrived to arrest her.
The New Normal
The website/smartphone app Airbnb, launched in 2008, connects travelers seeking lodging with individuals offering private facilities at certain prices. About a year ago, entrepreneur Travis Laurendine launched a similar smartphone app, “Airpnp,” to connect people walking around select cities and needing access to a toilet, listing residents who make their utilities available, with description and price. Laurendine told the New York Post in January that New York City is a promising market (though his two best cities are New Orleans and Antwerp, Belgium). The prices vary from free to $20, and the facilities range from a sweet-smelling room stocked with reading material to a barely maintained toilet (with no lavatory), but, said one supplier, sometimes people “really need to go, and this will have to do.”
Government in Action
• Kentucky, one of America’s financially worse-off states, annually spends $2 million of taxpayer money on salaries and expenses for 41 “jailers” who have no jails to manage. Research by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting in January noted that Kentucky’s constitution requires “elected” jailers, notwithstanding that 41 counties have shut down their jails and house detainees elsewhere via contracts with sheriffs. (Though the jailers may be called upon to transport prisoners from time to time, the 41 counties are mostly small ones with few detainees.) Several jailers have full-time “side” jobs, and one jail-less jailer employs five deputies while another has 11 part-timers.
• A.K. Verma was an “assistant executive engineer” working for India’s central public works department in 1990 with 10 years on the job when he went on leave — and had still not returned by the end of 2014, when the government finally fired him. He had submitted numerous requests for extensions during the ensuing 24 years, but all were denied, though no agency or court managed to force him back to work. (India’s bureaucracy is generally acknowledged to be among the most dysfunctional in Asia.)
Ironies
• Timothy DeFoggi, 56, was sentenced in January to 25 years in prison on child pornography charges — unable to keep his illicit online transactions hidden from law-enforcement authorities. Before his conviction, he was acting director for cyber security in
