Toll Road Follies

Curmie got two bills (of sorts) for toll road fees today. 

One appeared on his phone; it was an obvious scam.  Curmie’s cell has a New Hampshire number, but he hasn’t been in that state in about three and a half years, and to the best of his recollection has never driven on a toll road there, even if there are any.  This is perhaps the third time he’s had one of these threatening messages.  The last one was from a phone number from the nation of Tuvalu; this time he didn’t bother to check before tapping the “delete and report” tab.

The other one came by mail, and was actually legit.  Well, sort of.  Curmie and Beloved Spouse were able to get away for a brief vacation in San Antonio between Christmas and New Year’s.  Our GPS took us onto a toll road near Austin on the way there; we took another route on the way home.  Anyway, we owed the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority (what a title!) a grand total of $2.71, $1 of which was a processing fee.

Anyway, the outside of the envelope reads, in big letters, “Past Due Payment Required.”  Whoever was sorting the mail at the post office couldn’t have missed it, nor could our mailman.  Needless to say, there was nothing past due about our account, and those assholes knew it.  The invoice wasn’t even processed until the 11th, and just arrived today.  So we begin with a defamatory lie.  Way to start off on the right foot, CTRMA!

But there’s a $15 fine if you don’t pay the bill by the actual due date (February 10), and this is this kind of thing that sometimes gets buried, so Curmie decided to pay it immediately.  There are manifold ways of paying: by mail, online, by scanning a QR code, in person (in Austin, about a four-hour drive) or by phone.  Curmie didn’t have any stamps handy, and he didn’t really want to have to pay for one, let alone drive to the post office.  And he really didn’t trust those bozos to process a check as soon as they got it, especially since they’d get more money if they delayed.  Having a credit card receipt seemed the way to go, so he tried online first. 

You’ve got to fill out a form that wants far more information than is necessary, but Curmie shrugged and entered it all in.  But, of course, there were problems.  The form insists on a cell number.  Curmie dutifully plugged his in.  Nope.  It was the “wrong format.”  Of course, there wasn’t a specified format, but whatever.  After you get told you did it wrong, there’s (sometimes) a pop-up that says to use only numbers with no spaces.  That’s what Curmie had done, of course.  After a couple of tries, it became clear that “only numbers with no spaces” means “parentheses around the area code and then a space, and a hyphen after the exchange.”

Then you’ve got to enter a user name and password, then to identify the letters or decide what part of the photo includes a motorcycle or whatever.  Curmie got that far, hit the “next” button and watched the spinning wheel of death for a good four minutes before finally getting the message that there was an error, and to “please try again later.”  Curmie waited a few minutes, then tried again.  But this time he got a message that the secondary email couldn’t match the primary email.  Of course, Curmie hadn’t entered a secondary email.  So he added one.  Remember, all that’s happened so far is the system rejecting Curmie’s attempt to establish an account. 

One more try to establish the account… now the message reads that the primary email is already in use, presumably meaning that although the previous message had said that there was an error, apparently the account really was established… except that it wasn’t, or at least the password Curmie had just created didn’t work.

Anyway, after some more fiddling, we finally get to the point where you can enter your credit card information.  Another interminable wait while it processes, and another message that there’s been an error; try again later.  Arrgghhh.  Went through the whole process again, with the same result: there was an error, try later.  Okay, that’s it.  The online system is obviously FUBAR.  Fine.  Let’s try scanning that QR code.  Well, it doesn’t work, either.  At least it tells you that pretty quickly. 

Ah, but there’s still the possibility of paying by phone.  The robot voice, sounding rather like a junior high girl trying to be elegant, asks for the account number.  Curmie provides it.  He is then informed that he has a credit balance of $2.71.  Not only had they charged his card while claiming the inability to do so, they’d done it twice!

So Curmie called the credit card company.  Apparently they can’t do anything while the charge is still officially “pending” (Curmie would have thought it would be easier under those conditions), but once the charges are fully posted, Curmie can call them back and they’ll claw back the money.  It’s only $2.71, which Curmie can afford, but dammit, CTRMA is not getting paid extra because they’re inept.

Curmie already knew that avoiding that toll road in the future is of paramount importance, and that customer service at Discover is really good.  He’s learned one more thing: No one who works for CTRMA should be allowed within ten paces of any device that wasn’t manufactured by Fisher-Price.

Donald Trump Shows Why He’s Unfit for Office (Again)

Like millions of other Americans, Curmie learned this morning of the horrific, presumably terroristic, attack in New Orleans.  Obviously, we all grieve for the casualties and sympathize with their loved ones.  As this essay is being written, there are still lots of unanswered questions, but we do know some things with reasonable certainty.

Gentle Reader, you will notice the modifiers in the previous paragraph: “presumably,” “some,” “reasonable.”  Those words are there because Curmie really doesn’t want to claim as fact something that isn’t true.  If only the President-elect would be as honest circumspect… but then, he never was.

True, no intelligent person believes that Donald Trump is anything but a narcissistic, mendacious, blowhard.  His post on the ironically titled Truth Social is presented here in what Curmie presumes to be its entirety (you didn’t think I’d visit that site to check, did you, Gentle Reader?):

When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!

The first thing to notice is that whereas any normal person would lead with his sympathy for the victims, Trump always opens with political posturing; basic humanity is an afterthought, if it shows up at all.  Even if the conjecture about “criminals coming in” were accurate, the statement would mark Trump as an absolute asshole.  But we knew that, of course.  What we didn’t know but certainly should have suspected as a possibility is the fact that Trump’s bluster was 100% wrong on the facts… and that the so-called leftist media scrupulously avoided highlighting his bullshit. 

Yes, Newsweek does mention in paragraph five (!) that the suspect, Shamsud Din Jabbar, was a Texas-born American citizen.  Oh, and he was apparently a US Army vet.  Ah, but the headline proclaims only that “Donald Trump Says New Orleans Terror Attack Proves He Was Right.”  Anyone not reading past the first two sub-heads might be led to believe that Trump was spewing something other than his usual brand of xenophobic drivel.  Well, anyone who has been asleep for the last dozen years or so might be so tempted.  Those of us branded as “Trump deranged” by the MAGA apologists, of course, knew better were prepared to disbelieve a serial prevaricator.

To be fair, The New York Times did (finally) headline their story as “Trump Falsely Suggested New Orleans Suspect Was an Immigrant.”  Of course, the MAGA crowd wouldn’t believe the NYT if they said NBA centers are tall.  But you can bet the ranch that the truth that Donald Trump yet again made a false allegation will be ignored by most and dismissed as either leftie propaganda or irrelevant by most of the rest.  Curmie, unlike Trump, doesn’t claim to be the sole source of truth, but he’s right about this one.

The discussion will (and should) focus on what could have been done differently and what can be done to prevent a recurrence.  The answer isn’t easy.  Better training for cops: needed, but not enough.  Stricter gun laws, even if none of the deaths were caused by shooting (the two wounded cops definitely were): useful, but not enough.  And no, smug asshole right-winger, no one is calling for tighter restrictions on rental trucks.  We need to recognize that we can’t solve every problem without creating worse ones, but we damned well better do a little creative thinking.

One side note: Curmie and Beloved Spouse are grateful for a friend who asked us to look after her cats while she spent the holidays in Maine with her partner.  We otherwise might well have tried to head to NOLA for New Year’s… and our go-to hotel is about 20 yards from where that truck crashed.  It was almost certainly one of the hotels evacuated by authorities.  Curmie is fine with missing that particular bit of excitement.

 

On the "Barbie" Snubs

Let’s get this part out of the way up front.  The only times Curmie has ever cared about awards like the Oscars were when a friend or a friend’s project was nominated.  Also, Curmie has never seen “Barbie,” and has no intention of doing so: he is outside the target audience for reasons of age, gender, temperament, and probably a host of other things, too.  That doesn’t means it’s a bad, or even undeserving, movie.  If, Gentle Reader, you saw it and loved it, Curmie is pleased that you were entertained or enlightened or whatever; if you saw it and were disappointed, Curmie sympathizes.  He’s been there.

Gentle Reader, you are no doubt at least as au courant with popular culture news as Curmie is, so you’ll already know that the anthropomorphized doll movie was a huge box office success.  It collected a passel of Oscar nominations, as well, including for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor/Actress—Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera.  Ah, but the two driving forces of the project, director Greta Gerwig and title actress Margot Robbie were not nominated in those categories (see below for the ”yeah, but…”).

On the one hand, there are certainly ironies at play.  The meme you see here is one of many variations on the theme.  Yes, it would be logical that if a film is nominated, then its director and star would be, too.  It’s certainly worthy of raising an eyebrow that in a film with such feminist undercurrents it would be Ken, not Barbie, who got recognized.

But “Past Lives” also got Best Picture and Screenplay nods without either a directing or leading actor/actress nomination, so it’s not a complete anomaly.  Plus, there’s the simple fact that there are twice as many nominations for Best Picture as there are for the other categories, so some major contributors to nominated films are inevitably left out.

This has not prevented howls of protest from the movie’s fans.  There are the usual, frankly rather tired, allegations of sexism, for example.  How could Ryan Gosling be nominated and Margot Robbie not be?  Well, perhaps the voters (all actors themselves—you can only vote in one category) liked his work better.  Perhaps there were more outstanding performances from female leads in other films than there were from supporting men in other films.  Gosling and Robbie wouldn’t be competing with each other, after all.  Perhaps Gosling just did better work than Robbie.

Perhaps, too, the directors who voted in that category just thought the work of Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, and Justine Triet was better.  All of their films were Best Picture nominees, too, after all.  And those folks aren’t exactly rookies.  Between them, they had one Oscar win and ten other nominations in directing, and that doesn’t count their work as writers or producers, or awards like Golden Globes or BAFTAs, or wins at festivals like Cannes and Banff.

There is not, indeed cannot be, any great conspiracy to “erase women’s work” or some such nonsense.  Robbie didn’t get nominated because some other woman did.  Gerwig didn’t get nominated, but another woman did.  Yes, there will be those who claim that somehow all those voters secretly got together and decided that precisely one woman should get the nod.  Curmie sees <checks notes> zero evidence of that.  If, Gentle Reader, you think the “Barbie” women were better than one or more actresses or directors who did get nominated, that’s fine.  Curmie thinks something similar in virtually every category virtually every year.  But that’s a matter of taste, not backroom machinations.

It's also worth noting that the meme isn’t quite accurate.  No, Gerwig didn’t get nominated by name, but that’s because the award is for Best Adapted Screenplay, not Best Adapter, although exactly what she is alleged to have “adapted” is beyond Curmie’s ken.  (Get it?  Ken?  OK, moving on.)  Robbie, as one of the film’s producers, also has a nomination to call her own. 

Importantly, virtually any recognition for a film like “Barbie” is significant.  It may be that the movie wears its feminism a little ostentatiously, but the adjective Curmie’s friends who liked the movie have employed the most is “fun.”  The film may not be Curmie’s mug of lapsang souchong, but Curmie will take “fun” over “self-consciously earnest” ten times out of ten.  No, Curmie hasn’t stopped being an intellectual elitist, but he does believe that Hollywood is generally a lot better at entertainment than at intellectual stimulation.

In Curmie’s experience, most Oscar nominees are rather boring exercises in pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness.  Of the last several Oscar winners that Curmie has seen—he hasn’t bothered with some of them—there are more truly terrible films than excellent ones.  That’s just Curmie’s opinion, of course, and you should consider yourself under no obligation to agree.  But hopefully, Gentle Reader, you’ll grant that “fun” is not an adjective applied to most Oscar winners.  If “Barbie” changes that, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. 

Curmie would also bet that individual accolades are less important to Gerwig and Robbie than the success—in all the different definitions of that term—of the overall project… or at least they’ll say it is.  And so we move on to one of the most oft-referenced statements by a nominee ever, by Ryan Gosling :

I am extremely honored to be nominated by my colleagues alongside such remarkable artists in a year of so many great films. And I never thought I’d being saying this, but I’m also incredibly honored and proud that it’s for portraying a plastic doll named Ken.

But there is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film.

No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius.

To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.

Against all odds with nothing but a couple of soulless, scantily clad, and thankfully crotchless dolls, they made us laugh, they broke our hearts, they pushed the culture and they made history. Their work should be recognized along with the other very deserving nominees.

Having said that, I am so happy for America Ferrera and the other incredible artists who contributed their talents to making this such a groundbreaking film.

It is a gracious statement, expressing both appreciation for his own recognition and disappointment that his colleagues on the production were not similarly honored (well, they were, sort of, but we know what he means).  True, it has a little of the aroma of a press release, but there’s a legitimate possibility, even a probability, that it’s largely heartfelt, whether he actually wrote the thing himself or not.  People do tend to be loyal to friends and colleagues.

You can be forgiven your skepticism, Gentle Reader.  But please do not countenance descriptions of Gosling’s comments as “the baby goose’s insufferable blubbering,” “virtue signaling,” or “whining,” which apparently is what a fair number of people whose demographic profiles (but not politics) match Curmie’s seem to be suggesting to anyone who will listen.  Doing so would serve as evidence of precisely the attitude the film apparently seeks to lampoon.  Paranoid, mendacious, and bitchy is not an attractive combination.  There are more than a few walking exemplars of fragile masculinity to whom the truth of the foregoing sentence would seemingly be a revelation.

To sum up: 1). Curmie neither knows not cares whether Gerwig and Robbie “deserved” to be nominated as director and leading actress.  2). An ironic coincidence is not the same as evidence of a conspiracy.  3). A lot of old white guys need more bran in their diet.  

In other words, no, nothing new here.

 

Kavanaugh's Unfitness and Curmie's Memories

It wasn’t that long ago that Curmie was working on a piece he called “Triple,” as there were three stories he wanted to cover with short commentaries rather than writing a longer essay about a single topic. I’d decided to treat them in what I perceived to be descending order of importance. I wrote the first mini-essay, about “Plaid Shirt Guy” (I’ll get that posted eventually), but I got tired and went to bed before writing the second of the three parts, about the credible but imprecise and anonymous allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. (The third section was to be Serena Williams’s petulant display at the US Open; I may or may not get back to that one.)

The building, unlike Brett Kavanaugh,
doesn't make Curmie want to puke

The next morning I woke to news that the charges against Judge Kavanaugh were no longer anonymous, and carried at least some more specificity than had hitherto been realized (or at least publicized).

Everything changed then. Personally, I went from a grudging acceptance of Kavanaugh as a deeply problematic inevitability to real questions about him—not for what he is alleged to have done as a teen-ager, but because of how he comports himself now. Do I believe that any candidate ought to be judged on events from decades ago? No. Curmie intends to vote for Beto O’Rourke for Senate in a few weeks; I’m not unaware of his arrests for DWI and burglary a generation ago. But I’m voting for him for two reasons: most importantly, he is not the mendacious, pusillanimous, fecal accretion that is Ted Cruz, but more relevant to the point here is the fact that he’s come clean about his past, addressed it, and argued that he’s not a post-adolescent idiot anymore. I believe that.

Had Brett Kavanaugh taken a similar approach, Curmie would be back to thinking about Kavanaugh the way he thinks about Samuel Alito: as a lightweight partisan, technically qualified but not one of the nation’s 100 best conservative judicial minds. That isn’t Brett Kavanaugh, though.

His defense is two-fold: that stuff didn’t happen, and if it did, it shouldn’t matter. Besides, that’s what guys do. Well, sort of. I suspect it’s true that most boys have, shall we say, run through a stop-sign or two. Curmie did when he was a teen—in part because the girl’s text and subtext (or at least Curmie’s interpretation of the subtext) didn’t exactly converge and Curmie chose to believe in the one most in synch with Curmie’s short-term desires at the time. In retrospect, the motivation seems not to have been lust, much less a power dynamic; rather, I think it was the intoxicating naughtiness of the moment.

I would, however, argue that we’re talking about a much lesser offense. In this scenario, no one was physically restrained, nor were there any locked doors. There was no use of superior physical strength, no taking advantage of a drunken girl unable to give a reasonable consent. There were no leering friends laughing at a victim. There was no attempt to cover her mouth, nothing close to making her fear for her personal safety (per se), no attempt to remove panties, or indeed anything close to that. Does that excuse the behavior? No. Does being younger than Kavanaugh was at the time of his alleged transgressions? No. But does it suggest a different scenario than the one described by Dr. Blasey Ford? I think so.  More importantly, it was behavior I outgrew by the age of 16.

OK, let’s flip the script. A few years later, Curmie, then a young adult and a college professor, was accused of forcing himself on a student. Curmie had just cast a show, and this particular young woman didn’t get the part she wanted. It’s unclear exactly how the story developed. The bottom line was that I had supposedly offered her a better role if… well, you know. It’s unclear whether she was just venting to her friends and made up a story that one of them passed along, or whether there was an actual allegation about me to my boss. Anyway, as I understand it, the suggestion was a little too specific, and (purely by luck) I had a credible witness that I was someplace else at the exact moment in question. But I didn’t know that when my boss talked to me.

Obviously, I denied the allegation, and I suggested a possible motivation. What I didn’t do was scream. Or vow vengeance. Or evade questions. Kavanaugh’s performance at the post-allegation hearing, on the other hand, was not that of an innocent man. He came across as a guy who’s been fined $200 for jaywalking: “yes, I’m technically guilty, but nobody ever really enforces that rule.” Given the multiple sources—whether the FBI could be bothered to interview them or not—who corroborate the general character of the young Brett Kavanaugh, even if not the specific allegations that precipitated the second look at his candidacy, we can confidently believe that he was considerably less than the choir boy he pretends to have been. 

This may mean that he graduated summa cum laude from the Bill Clinton School of Sexual Predation, chanting the institutional motto, Nega, Nega, Nega (deny, deny, deny). Or it may mean, as some have suggested, that attempted rape was such a matter of course for Kavanaugh and his privileged cohorts that it really did make no impression on him… why, after all, would he remember an event as inconsequential as that? Curmie can’t decide which is worse: perjury or a stunning level of hubris. Either way, we’re a long way from a legitimate reason to confirm.

The foregoing presumes that Kavanaugh really did assault teen-aged Christine Blasey. That’s because, speaking as someone who has been falsely accused, Curmie believes her. She brings a calm credibility to her allegations; and Brett Kavanaugh’s performance at the hearings did not give his denials the same gravitas. Indeed, at this point it becomes irrelevant for our present concern whether Kavanaugh is “innocent.” Rather, the hubris, petulance, paranoia, and general lack of decorum he displayed in the re-opened hearing ought to have disqualified him not merely from SCOTUS, but from every courtroom in the country except as a defendant.

Chances he’ll be confirmed, anyway: 99%

Is it the university's fault if you don't go to class?

There’s lots of political news, of course, plus several stories from the world of education that merit comment. Given Curmie’s schedule right now, it’s unlikely he’ll even make a dent in the backlog. But here’s a start.

We begin Operation Catch-up with the saga of Balayla Ahmad, a black, Muslim woman who was studying at the University of Bridgeport, hoping to become a chiropractor. Now she’s suing the university, who, she says, ignored her allegations of sexual harassment against a fellow student but called in the FBI when he, in retribution, began spreading rumors alleging she was a terrorist.

Ahmad alleges that the other student “made repeated sexual advances at her, often hurling obscenities such as ‘I want to eat you like I am eating this sub [sandwich]’ or yelling ‘I'm going to cuff you’ while holding a pair of handcuffs.” According to the lawsuit, Ahmad talked to more than one teacher about her situation, one of whom urged her not to go to the dean, as he would speak to the harasser. Eventually, Ahmad—against advice—went to the university president, who apparently wasn’t much help.

Then campus security showed up on her doorstep with allegations of terrorism, threatening her with bringing in the FBI (as, apparently, they did). Ahmad’s attorney says “The sexual harassment investigation never occurred. Instead it became about her.” The FBI found no substantiation for the charges against Ms. Ahmad, but somewhere along the way, she was removed as a student. The university is declining comment—and we’ve heard nothing but Ahmad’s side of the story… this may or may not be a relevant concern.

Assuming what she says is both true and all there is to know, it’s pretty damning for the university. There are three problems: the lack of action on the sexual harassment allegation, the apparently swift action on what turned out to be unfounded reports of terrorism, and the failure to perceive what in retrospect (at least) would seem to be a pretty obvious link between the charges.

Let’s take these one step at a time. The news reports don’t make it clear whether the harasser ultimately stopped as a result of university action; they suggest only that Ms. Ahmad didn’t think they would. A teacher reportedly told Ms. Ahmad that the university normally doesn’t immediately suspend students for the level of sexual harassment she alleges; the dean subsequently told her that his “hands were tied.” The teacher was almost certainly both telling the truth and describing a reasonable policy. The dean, probably not so much.

I’ve dealt with two cases of student-on-student harassment in my career. Both happened to have occurred when I was a graduate student teaching Beginning Acting. One involved two theatre majors and stemmed from the out-of-class rehearsal conduct of the male partner in a two-character scene. The female student brought the case to me. I talked with her for nearly two hours, then took the case to the department chair, complete with a lengthy written report. I don’t know exactly what happened after that in procedural terms, but I do know that the female student agreed to complete the scene with the young man provided there was always another person present at their rehearsals and that she’d never be partnered with him again.

I know, too, that the department chair read the riot act to the male student, who seems to have been more unaware of the inappropriateness of his actions than really being a jackass. He was, I think, not allowed to participate in the next round of departmental auditions, although he subsequently became an active member of the department, as far as I know without further incidents. I received both a personal and a written apology; so did the female student. And that was that.

The other case involved two non-majors, and dealt with in-class activity. The man in question always managed to position himself close to the woman on days when we were talking about concepts rather than rehearsing scenes or doing exercises. He’d then mumble or whisper sexually explicit suggestions to her while covering his face with his baseball cap or when I was looking elsewhere. I suspected that something was going on, but it wasn’t until the young woman talked to me after class that I knew exactly what.

I consulted the chair again about what to do, and he said, and I believe this is a direct quote, “Send him to me. You don’t get paid enough to deal with this shit.” (Good boss!) He asked me when my class met, cleared his calendar for the beginning of the next class period, and told me to send the male student to him as soon as he arrived, without telling him why. I did. I don’t know what was said in that room, but I do know two things: 1). the big tough football player returned to class 20 or 30 minutes later having obviously been crying, and 2). there was never a problem again.

It is unreasonable for Ms. Ahmad or her lawyer to think the university should have expelled the alleged harasser without due process, especially since (as my own experience indicates) there are often less drastic but nonetheless effective means of solving the problem. Plus, of course, as this case itself demonstrates, allegations aren’t always true—there is no objective reason to believe that a specific claim of sexual harassment is any more credible than a specific charge of terrorist sympathies.

All that said, the “my hands are tied” defense is more often than not the go-to position of the lazy, the diffident, and the dishonest. It may be true that the dean was not in position to impose a punishment on the alleged harasser, but that would only be true if a judicial board or some similar agency had reviewed the case and dismissed the charges. (They might have been incorrect to do so, but such a decision might well have been founded on an innocent-until-proven-guilty rationale rather than on a firm belief in the male student’s innocence.) Even if the dean had no authority to exact a penalty, he could certainly use the power of his office—as my former boss used the power of his—to make it very clear that any further complaints against the alleged harasser would be taken very seriously indeed. But—apparently, at least—he punted, instead.

Campus security types always like to pretend they’re more important than they are. If every college and university fired every campus cop who is more interested in strutting than in serving, the unemployment lines in college towns would be out the door. Ahmad argues, according to the Huffington Post, that “college officials recklessly disseminated false accusations by the harasser that they had good reason to believe were unreliable and threatened her with arrest by the FBI.” That’s a serious charge, especially if a). it really was college officials disseminating the accusations, and b). they did so even if they suspected the reports were of dubious provenance.

But imagine what would have happened if the alleged harasser’s claims had been legitimate: if security hadn’t investigated, if the FBI hadn’t been called in… and if there had been an attack of some kind. Yes, it is a threat to say you’re going to call in the FBI. But even a die-hard civil libertarian like me doesn’t read that as inherently creating an environment in which it is impossible to do one’s work.

It’s important to note that Bridgeport apparently didn’t suspend Ms. Ahmad for either her allegations against a fellow student or for his against her. Here’s the ABC report: “Ahmad was dismissed from the school in June 2009 after, she says in the complaint, she was unable to attend class because of the alleged persistent harassment as well as perceived threats of federal prosecution.” Translation: she flunked out.

Forgive me, but I just have a little trouble believing that the harassment was so severe and unchecked, and the (perceived) threat of prosecution so portentous that it was impossible for a 35-year-old woman to go to class. (And if they were, dropping as opposed to failing classes would seem to be an appropriate course of action.) Not that students have ever before blamed their truancy on someone else, of course…

There’s enough on the surface here that the Bridgeport administration might be worth a Curmie nomination. But until we find out a little more information, this one is on hold.