In a League of Their Own

There aren't many days when the obituaries keep me from getting to the sports section on the train ride in. But today was one of them.

There were four news story obituaries in today's Times that I found worth reading. It was the fourth one that caused me to miss reading the sports section. I had to re-read the whole obituary, and selected parts of it so many times that before I knew it we were in the tunnel and Penn Station's Track 15 was fast approaching.

The obituary was written by Joyce Wadler, whose name I don't remember seeing on the page. I usually see her name associated with what I guess the Times would call hate to call gossip, but others might. A few sentences into the obituary and I got a sense why perhaps Ms. Wadler got the call in the bull pen. Only someone who makes a living reporting on celebrities could get all that straight.

In case anyone is curious, the obituary was about Shi Pei Pu, a person of several orientations who seemed to be fairly well known. They passed away at 70.

The obituary is well worth reading just to marvel at how pronouns can be used properly. Mr. Shi was really a male, who often presented themselves as a female, especially to someone they loved, who it seems also enjoyed companionship from both sides of the equation, but who was particularly distraught when it became known that Ms. Shi was Mr. Shi.

Part of my real-life work involves programming to catch oddities in health care claims processing. Sometimes this is fraud. And believe it or not, today involved writing edits to see if there were any male specific medical procedures performed on people who are listed as female, and also if their were any female specific medical procedures reported on males. Because if there were, something's wrong somwhere.

One claim from Shi Pei Pu and I venture it might have crashed the system.

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