5/17 - Something Not so Nice

Today I shall be content simply to poke holes in the Prudecution.

L1: "Talk to your sister's pediatrician"? What a monstrous assumption of privilege. Do we really live in a country in which every person under a certain age can be automatically assumed to be in possession of an individual, personal pediatrician who will have known the child in question for likely a lengthy period of time, perhaps since birth or at least since locating in the area in question? Why, anyone would think that almost every person in the country actually had access to affordable and personalized health care! Even if one were to preselect only from among those who have both the privilege and the outlook to consult the Prudecutor in the first place, that is still far from a warrantable assumption.

L4: The letter is a complete softball. The Prudecutor manages not to whiff, but completely fails to go into the salient point of the letter, that the degree has taken double the usual time to acquire. Yet she provides only the standard-issue response. Clearly more care and attention was called for in this case. LW4 is clearly the sort of person prone to using events as tools with which to manipulate people, as well as being financially of a feckless disposition. That such a person is in charge of hes (gender-neutral; I prefer using hem/hes to the dual hir) finances at all, which has clearly not worked out terribly well thus far, might have given a counselor more pause.

L3: "Something nice"? LW3 specifically stated that hes present was a nice fountain pen. The word was right there in the letter, in black and white. Now clearly, either the Prudecutor does not include fountain pens on her list of Things That Can Possibly Be Nice when she plays Pyramid on her Will & Grace night or her private reaction upon reading the letter was to issue a sharply-worded memo to all her unpaid interns about the new policy change that would have such a positive effect on their careers. The Prudecutor also misses that the birthday in question was last year. B3 has been giving LW3 the silent treatment for nearly if not over six months and this has had no further repurcussions? Also, where is the evidence of what the other staffers provided in the way of B3's birthday boodle? It seems a lot to be taking CW3's drunken word for the situation without corroborration. Does CW3 have an eye on LW3's position, or a possible promotion for which LW3 is a likely candidate? Is LW3 the only person subordinate to B3? That's hardly likely. What, then, were the gifts with which the nice fountain pen was in competition and why has not the situation come to the attention of those even higher up in the company? Or are the upper executives even worse about it? While I am not making suggestions to the LWs this week, what would happen, one wonders, if LW3 were to request official corporate guidance on what gifts were appropriate and commensurate with the level of the particular executive in the case? And what, one wonders, does B3 have to buy his superiour on hes birthday? The mind boggles.

L2 "Bridge tournaments"? Has the Prudecutor ever attended a bridge tournament? Even the smallest of tournaments require considerably greater accommodation than a recreation room - although doubtless the recreation room of Mr Trump (a highly approrpiate bridge name, along with Mary Ann Singleton), as it must provide sufficient space to house his ego, could certainly accommodate a tournament. Minor points include wondering why it should necessarily be shocking for a teen to discover that hes grandparents were sexual beings? Swingers might be a bit of a problem, but the Prudecutor has come out strongly on the sides of porn-star mothers in the past, and a well-raised teen ought not to be traumatized by the fact that Sex Does Not Die At 25. If anything, that might be an encouraging point.

Moral: Rather than provide a quotation, I shall give an acrostic clue of my own devising:

"Bridge player with a void?" (5,5)