12 September—Following up on the Litchfield Tax Collector issue, I stopped by Town Hall late in late morning yesterday, crooning “Dein is mein ganzes Herz.” But no Tax Collector. (Nobody seemed to mind my immusical crooning. They must be as deaf as I.) So I asked the Assistant Tax Collector to have the Tax Collector phone me. When, as I had expected, that didn’t happen, I stopped by Town Hall in mid-afternoon on my way to do some grocery shopping.

And—mirabile dictu!—the Tax Collector was there. And she answered my work-hours question, albeit reluctantly. But her answer raised some other questions and issues that require further investigation. So I’m working on those points and will report in due course.

In the meantime, then, here’s some news to disgust you. Front page over the fold in this morning’s Republican-American, we read that a career criminal, William Bayarinas, a 53-year-old white recidivist with 21 convictions, murdered a 70-year-old widow, a retired teacher, in Watertown—shortly after his release from prison in January 2019.

Yesterday, a day before his trial for murder was to begin, the murderer’s lawyers did a plea deal that reduced the charges down to manslaughter, first-degree burglary, and larceny. With a maximum sentence of 20 years, which his lawyers will be allowed to argue down to 15 years.

Twenty years—probably 15 or even fewer, given Connecticut’s unconscionable leniency for violent criminals—for taking a life?

Overseas, then, the BBC reported early this morning on a University of Exeter survey that revealed almost a third of female surgeons in the United Kingdom have been sexually assaulted—and in some cases even raped—by colleagues in the past five years. The survey, to which 1,434 registered surgeons of both (or all?) sexes responded, anonymously found that 30 percent of female surgeons said that they had been sexually assaulted, 29 percent had experienced unwanted physical advances at work, and over 40 percent had experienced “uninvited” comments about their bodies.

(What about the men as perpetrators, victims, and observers? Seriously.)

Ninety percent of women and 81 percent of men in the survey claim to have witnessed some form of sexual misconduct, even in operating theatres (operating rooms to us). Evidently, judging by the survey, sexual misconduct occurs frequently and goes unchecked thanks in large part to an entrenched macho hierarchical structure, resulting in an uncomfortable environment for staff and an unsafe environment for staff and patients. Kind of like the military. And that would explain the lack of complaints.

And what’s the NHS (National Health Service) Trust doing about it, not to mention the General Medical Council and the several Royal Colleges that regulate the medical specialties?

Of course, it could never happen here . . .