Lead Story
A Navy Department employee newsletter reported in July that Bea Perry, a secretary with a Navy unit in Washington, D.C., commutes to work daily from her home in Trenton, New Jersey–171 miles away. She hits the road at 2:30 AM to make it to her desk by 6:30. She has been making the same commute for 25 years.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In a performance art presentation at the University of Maryland in September student Jessica True, 23, placed a “hex” on the fraternity system, as a bastion of race and gender privilege, by dressing as what she called “The 100 Percent Domesticated Vagina.” As fraternity men gawked and mooned her, True screamed and danced and dragged a sheet through the opening in her vagina costume.
Before sending the Greenwood, Indiana, high school yearbook to the printer over the summer, editor Heidi Gerdts defaced photos of three girls she didn’t like by drawing in mustaches and underarm hair and blackening their teeth. Said one of the girls, “It all has to do with boyfriends. Heidi has a big problem when guys go out with other girls after they’ve gone out with her.” The school was forced to recall all 500 copies.
David S. Bethune was charged in Greenville, South Carolina, in August with threatening the president after he disclosed to a hospital employee that he was going to “ambush Bush” and “remove [him] from office.” Bethune referred to himself in court as “the world’s number one man,” a title he said he has held for the last 20 years. He also proclaimed that he “topped the world” in academics, athletics, business, military issues, and social matters, and added that he had solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle.
Joseph R. Shatley, 22, committed suicide in Lexington, North Carolina, in November by shooting himself in the head, but the bullet passed through him and also killed a friend who had been trying to talk him out of it.