Dead Drop: May 26

PUTIN TO BUD LIGHT: “HOLD MY BEER” Russia’s “Special Military Operation” has also turned into a war of words.  Russian President Vladimir Putin was reportedly peeved last week, when a group of Kremlin critics met in Prague. To display his distaste, Putin declared that Czech beer contains “female sex hormones.” That’ll show ‘em.  Of course, the critics in Prague got off easy compared to the trouble brewing for naysayers closer to Vlad’s reach.  Also last week, another Russian official who had been opposed to the invasion of Ukraine, Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education Pyotr Kucherenko, 46, died of an unknown ailment on a flight back from Cuba to Russia. The number of prominent Russians who have fallen out of windows, unexpectedly committed suicide or otherwise mysteriously died after criticizing Putin, is now in double digits. Maybe they all just chugged some bad beer.

I NOW PRONOUN YOU….  What’s in a name? And more to the point, what’s in a pronoun?  In the case of the State Department – potentially a lot of trouble.  It seems that IT officials at Foggy Bottom were road testing a new feature they were hoping to roll out on the State Department’s Microsoft Outlook email system.  The idea was to give users the option of including their preferred pronouns such as she/her/hers, he/him/his etc. in the “from” field of outgoing communications.  But something went haywire during the test and the computer (whose pronoun we assume is “it”) started randomly assigning pronouns to employees without their consent. Chief Information Officer Kelly E. Fletcher (no pronoun provided) said in an internal email that “the feature inadvertently went live, and a large number of employees had randomly assigned pronouns added to their profiles.” According to Mediaite, some State Department employees said they were “triggered” by getting the wrong pronoun assigned to them. As a result, the department is encouraging “any employee who feels hurt or upset as a result of this unfortunate mistake,” to seek professional counseling through the State Department’s Employee Consultation Service.