Poor Harvey John “Jack” McGeorge. A former Marine and Secret Service agent with experience in disposing chemical and biological agents, he was ready to serve the cause of world peace as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq. Then the world found out he was a sado-masochist.

He’s not the kind of sado-masochist that would, say, rule a Middle Eastern country through torture and mass murder. He’s the kind that would serve as a founding officer of the Leather Leadership Conference, an outfit that trains “current and potential leaders of the sado-masochism/ leather/fetish community.” There’s a difference, you know.

According to the Washington Post, McGeorge is a co-founder of Black Rose, “a pansexual S&M group,” and a past leader of something called the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. But that’s just in his spare time. He also runs a firm called Public Safety Group Inc., which offers seminars on chemical and biological weapons, along with other “bioterror products.”

When confronted by the Post about his sexual proclivities, McGeorge said he would resign from the U.N. team if the newspaper publicized them. “I have been very up-front with people in the past about what I do, and it has never prevented me from getting a job or doing service,” McGeorge said. “I am who I am. I am not ashamed of who I am—not one bit.”

Nor should he be. In fact, the world might feel a little safer knowing a leather man was on the case.

Need another reason not to live in Texas? Kathy Grubbs, a 47-year-old traveling saleswoman, was driving drunk near the town of White Oak. The cops pulled her over, searched her truck, and found 17 sex toys and other products. Grubbs sells them, it turns out, in a version of the Tupperware Party. Big deal, right? Yes, it is. Possessing more than six dildos implies intent to distribute, missy. And that’s a felony in the Lone Star State. According to the Longview News-Journal, Grubbs could face a couple years in jail for it.

When it serves its own interests, the American academy likes to explain itself as a charmingly archaic institution. Graduate students and adjunct facultoids, for example, are not ruthlessly exploited wage-earners—they are apprentices.

But what are we to make of Lindenwood University, a liberal arts college in St. Charles, Missouri, which accepts tuition payment in pigs? According to the Los Angeles Times, Lindenwood accepted some 50 hogs in lieu of the $22,000 it would have cost farm girl Sally Miller for her junior and senior years. Sally’s folks haven’t been treated too nicely by the commodities markets of late. So Lindenwood President Dennis Spellmann thought outside the box and hit upon the hogs-for-learning scheme.

Heart-warming as the story may be, it belies a disturbing trend. Tuition inflation has outstripped median wage growth by 400 percent in the past two decades, with no sign of abating, and federal financial aid has been cut drastically.