What Made This University Scientist Snap?

March 15, 2011 9:47 AM

A recent article from Wired Magazine exploring a tragic case of genius gone mad.
posted by fernabelle (60 comments total)

Good summary of the case, well written.
posted by Melismata at 10:20 AM on March 15, 2011 [2 favorites]

Based on on my reading of this case when it occurred, Amy Bishop is not at a genius. A PhD/professorship does not a genius make.
posted by garuda at 10:23 AM on March 15, 2011 [14 favorites]

Full article
posted by girih knot at 10:25 AM on March 15, 2011 [3 favorites]

While being good at academics and research doesn't necessarily imply the someone is also more likely to be crazy, people with various social disorders or issues who are more comfortable interacting on a purely knowledge-driven level are also likely to prefer jobs relating to academia.
posted by scrutiny at 10:25 AM on March 15, 2011

My problem with this kind of writing is that it's really personal and casual. Which strikes me as being a bit blasé about such a serious issue. Worse, the author really wants to draw connections and tie everything up into a narrative, even in places where experts and courts have not done so. That seems disrespectful at least, and possibly harmful.

With that sad... interesting and sad story. I feel for everyone involved.
posted by Stagger Lee at 10:25 AM on March 15, 2011 [6 favorites]

also MORE likely. I have no idea if they actually prefer those jobs or not. It just seems like a plausible explanation to me.
posted by scrutiny at 10:26 AM on March 15, 2011

Good lord, the "brother's shooting" section of the wikipedia article is messed. up.
posted by DU at 10:35 AM on March 15, 2011

Whenever I read about someone like this I wonder about their Metafilter user name.
posted by LarryC at 10:37 AM on March 15, 2011 [11 favorites]

The "brother shooting" was a big deal here after Bishop became a household name, because it was pretty obvious from a first glance at the situation that the original police work wasn't stellar.
posted by rollbiz at 10:38 AM on March 15, 2011

Subsequent police work doesn't seem to have been too stellar either. They lost the files in 1987, couldn't find them at all, nope. then on Feb 16 2010 they suddenly show up. Huh, musta fallen behind the couch they just happened to be moving 4 days after the shooting.
posted by DU at 10:45 AM on March 15, 2011

I read the article in the print edition but I didn't get the impression she was a genius, unless you consider all Harvard educated PhDs geniuses. She did some good work but she had an erratic record at best. What I don't get is how she lasted so long before cracking without getting caught. She killed her br
posted by clockworkjoe at 10:53 AM on March 15, 2011

whoops. She killed her brother without getting punished and she was prone to unstable behavior her entire life. I would have thought she would cracked before she finished school.
posted by clockworkjoe at 10:55 AM on March 15, 2011

> Based on on my reading of this case when it occurred, Amy Bishop is not at a genius. A PhD/professorship does not a genius make.

You're right on that final statement, but whether Bishop is a genius or not depends on your definition of genius. If you're going by the very common definition of a 140 IQ or higher, then I could very easily imagine Amy Bishop meets that bar. So do I, and probably many people reading this right now.

"Genius" sounds like something almost unattainable, but by very common definitions, it means something more along the lines of the top 1%. 1-out-of-100 isn't that rare, and when you're talking about self-selected communities that value intelligence (like universities, or even websites like this one), then it becomes especially common.

Of course, there are obviously other definitions of genius that are less charitable for those of us that are more along the lines of 140 IQ rather than 180 IQ. :)
posted by legion at 11:00 AM on March 15, 2011

I've read a lot of reporting about Amy Bishop, including this story, and I think the "genius" angle is fluff. It's a spin the Wired reporter is putting on the story to generate interest. The only thing resembling evidence is that she got her Ph.D. at Harvard.

I find Wired is frequently guilty of shoehorning magazine-cliche angles into their stories. Here the angle is mad genius, and it doesn't matter how forced it is.

(Obviously if "genius" only means "top 1% in IQ," then it's not that unlikely for a given person to be a genius. But there's no particular evidence here that she was exceptionally bright or talented at all, she just fervently needed to believe that she was.)
posted by grobstein at 11:13 AM on March 15, 2011 [4 favorites]

What Made This University Scientist Snap?

You'd think they'd actually explore this, given the article's title.
posted by electroboy at 11:19 AM on March 15, 2011 [11 favorites]

The FPP, not the article, calls Bishop a genius. The word "genius" is used in the article only once:

"Which brings us to the Maniac in Geek’s Clothing conjecture. Let’s face it, scientific and technical fields attract more than their share of socially awkward, obsessively focused oddballs. [...] And it’s no different today: Tech companies and R&D labs all over the country don’t just tolerate idiosyncratic geniuses; they celebrate them."
posted by Ian A.T. at 11:21 AM on March 15, 2011 [3 favorites]

It is pretty remarkable how the Harvard degree managed to keep pretty much everyone from seeing her as a mediocre scientist and overall nutjob. I see no evidence that she "snapped," given the plethora of violent incidents cited in the article.

The bit with the brother's shooting is completely messed up. How the hell did the DA miss the fact that she held up a car dealership after shooting her brother?
posted by schmod at 11:22 AM on March 15, 2011 [6 favorites]

There's no shortage of people in the Boston area who knew her or even briefly interacted with her and noted it because she was especially abrasive to them. Most of the first- and secondhand accounts I heard after the university shootings suggested that she's some sort of laboratory-grade narcissist who believes that she's the smartest, most important person alive. If you don't acknowledge that "fact," you're one of the masses of stupid people who don't measure up. If you actively contest her specialness, whether it's taking a parking spot* or booster seat that she wants or something larger, you're an impediment to the natural order of things and should be dealt with accordingly. If she wants something, in her mind she's absolutely entitled to it by nature of her status as the greatest living person.

* A woman former neighbor of mine claims that years ago she was very nearly assaulted by Amy Bishop for taking a parking space at the Natick Mall. Neighbor and Crazy Woman were at opposite ends of a crowded lane, a car left a space that was about twice as close to neighbor as Crazy Woman, and neighbor took the space. Crazy Woman pulled car directly behind neighbor, left her car and began screaming that the space was hers. Crazy Woman became very agitated, loud and menacingly close to my neighbor. It caused such a ruckus that two burly roofers came over and told the crazy woman to leave, stayed with my neighbor until the car was out of sight and suggested she move her car because the crazy woman seemed capable of returning to tamper with it. I ran into former neighbor a week or so after the shootings, and was already familiar with her story of The Crazy Woman Who Lost Her Shit Over A Parking Space and the general description of Crazy Woman. At that meeting she told me "It was that woman [Bishop]. I'm sure of it."
posted by Mayor Curley at 11:24 AM on March 15, 2011 [13 favorites]

I laughed a little at the remote diagnosis of BPD in Bishop by a psychologist who's apparently never interviewed her. BPD is now the catch-all diagnosis for evilness incarnate. Who knew? Anyway, some of the comments are pure conspiracy gold. Search down for "starviego". I bet he also thinks Obama is actually a lizardoid that was was born in Kenya, and orchestrated 9-11 while in the pay of the TLC.
posted by meehawl at 11:24 AM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think the idea of someone who is otherwise-healthy "snapping" is problematic. From all I've read, incidents of extreme violence are generally preceeded by days, months or even years of ideation and planning. The author doesn't seem to know this:

But the Tenure Made Her Do It assertion is undermined by the calendar. Bishop learned she would not get tenure in March 2009, 11 full months before she transformed a routine faculty meeting into an execution chamber.

I don't find it at all unlikely that Bishop could have been "planning" this incident for almost a year.
posted by muddgirl at 11:25 AM on March 15, 2011 [3 favorites]

I too see less snapping and more a general pattern of violence that was enabled to a certain degree by the "clean record" she somehow managed to finagle; I find it very unsurprising that she would escalate her violence, seeing as it rarely had serious consequences for her and was easily swept under the rug every time. The more she was allowed to get away with it, the more it would become an acceptable right in her own mind.
posted by L'Estrange Fruit at 11:38 AM on March 15, 2011 [2 favorites]

Bishop’s dream of being a famous writer hadn’t died. Recently, she asked Dinsmoor to try to sell a poem, written—improbably—in rap style. Once, she mentioned sending some money to the families of her victims. “Here we are sitting in jail. Let me go ahead and tell you our tales,” goes the poem “Jailhouse Rap,” which, Bishop told Dinsmoor, has been adopted by her fellow inmates as a sort of anthem. “We sleep and dream our way out of here. Our powerlessness is very clear. “
posted by basicchannel at 11:43 AM on March 15, 2011

As a Brit I always find the US attitude to guns more than a bit strange... The article does not even seem to address that a woman, who had already killed someone with a gun, and was clearly unstable could carry around a concealed pistol in her purse.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:51 AM on March 15, 2011 [4 favorites]

Because she had never been treated for a mental disorder and the first shooting was 20 years ago and ruled accidental?
posted by electroboy at 12:06 PM on March 15, 2011 [3 favorites]

As a Brit I always find the US attitude to guns more than a bit strange...

Well, as an American I find the US attitude to guns more than a bit strange. The founders of the country were a bit hung up on state tyranny and the populace to be able to defend itself from a hostile government. Of course, when it was written guns were muzzle-loaded, fragile things that shot a lead ball after two minutes of fiddling. So they put something vague about the right to own one in our Constitution and now people who have never read the whole thing start screaming about how they're allowed to have a howitzer if you suggest that there should be some limits.

And of course the country is run by corporations and their lobbyists, and guns are pretty profitable.

So I understand academically why there are all these guns around, but I can't understand why we can't all say "this is nuts. Time for better regulation."
posted by Mayor Curley at 12:16 PM on March 15, 2011 [3 favorites]

So I understand academically why there are all these guns around, but I can't understand why we can't all say "this is nuts. Time for better regulation."

I don't want to go on a huge gun derail, but given that she's never been convicted of a crime, never been treated for a mental disorder or displayed any behavior other than being kind of a jerk, what sensible regulations are you proposing that she wouldn't have been able to navigate?
posted by electroboy at 12:25 PM on March 15, 2011 [4 favorites]

I don't want to go on a huge gun derail, but given that she's never been convicted of a crime, never been treated for a mental disorder or displayed any behavior other than being kind of a jerk, what sensible regulations are you proposing that she wouldn't have been able to navigate?

Not having concealable handguns available for people that want to smuggle them into board meetings would be a start. :)

I'm fine with long rifles, they're harder to hide in your back pocket.

Sorry, Canadian here. I guess the perspective is a bit different.
posted by Stagger Lee at 12:50 PM on March 15, 2011 [2 favorites]

What Made This University Scientist Snap?

You'd think they'd actually explore this, given the article's title.

They did. They strongly implied that 1) she could be psychotic and 2) felt horrible about killing her brother. Both those things could make someone snap.
posted by Melismata at 1:02 PM on March 15, 2011

> As a Brit I always find the US attitude to guns more than a bit strange...

It's your fault. If you guys weren't such dicks with the taxation and the Redcoat beat-downs, maybe our ancestors wouldn't have been so paranoid about having guns!

:) <--- the big smiley of non-seriousness
posted by legion at 1:08 PM on March 15, 2011 [2 favorites]

the big smiley of non-seriousness

No smiley needed good sir, I would never take offence from the words of a mere colonial.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:24 PM on March 15, 2011 [10 favorites]

She also had to deal with her severe allergies, which required her to take steroids that sometimes made her “zone out,” she told friends, and lose track of reality.

Scares the crap out of me. I was on similar medication and it definitely turned me into some kind of angry zombie. It was absolutely terrifying and I feel lucky that I managed to ditch that medication through alternative means. It surprises me that this hasn't been explored more as a cause of at least some of Amy's problems. Doctors should be more aware of the effects these medications can have on certain people. A tiny, but very unlucky, percentage of people get psychosis from them...
posted by melissam at 1:28 PM on March 15, 2011

Decongestants in allergy medication can also cause psychosis.
posted by melissam at 1:31 PM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

melissam, I find it startling that this story glossed over the steroid issue, and the other (bazillion) news stories ignored it entirely. Hmmm. Perhaps the other drama sells better, or something.
posted by Melismata at 1:38 PM on March 15, 2011

Melismata, yeah, when I googled it I couldn't find anything...
posted by melissam at 1:42 PM on March 15, 2011

Information about the author of the article. Please note: "She is not the daughter of Irving Wallace and has not written a book about her affair with Carlos Casteneda (although she has met the lovely woman who did)."
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:44 PM on March 15, 2011

She killed someone in a manner that was careless at best and had few, if any, imposed consequences from that action. The shooting of her brother and the car dealership episode make her sound pretty off-balance. The crazy-bitchy stuff is hard to pin down. Some women who are assertive are perceived as terrible bitches. The writer didn't go looking for anybody who liked her or had nice experiences with her.

I feel terribly sorry for her parents, who lost a son, and have a daughter who is clearly violent and possibly mentally ill. Also for the brother and the dead and injured University members.

The writing is over-dramatic, and hard to follow.
posted by theora55 at 2:05 PM on March 15, 2011

Yeah, that was the point I was trying to make. They never really offered any theories as to why she "snapped". I'd argue that she was mentally ill all along and it had led her to lash out several times (shooting her brother, the attempted bombing, the university shooting). It just seemed like a very long catalog of anti-social behavior without much analysis.
posted by electroboy at 2:16 PM on March 15, 2011

Not having concealable handguns available for people that want to smuggle them into board meetings would be a start. :)

Didn't help her brother very much.
posted by electroboy at 2:18 PM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

This woman sounds like a truly scary and frightening person. I'm horrified that the people who had experience with her could do nothing to get someone, whatever university or body, to force her to comply with a mental health evaluation, though had I been her colleague, I would have prayed for the day I was able to walk away from her and forget she ever existed. According to this article, she was prone to tantrums and rages that were beyond unprofessional.

Podila—the affable 52-year-old department chair who had been one of Bishop’s biggest supporters—was on the floor. He would soon die from his wounds.

I can't feel sorry for Dr. Bishop. Asking what made her snap sounds like such a ridiculous question. There was no snapping, there was ticking. She was going to do this kind of thing, whether over a parking space or over something else. She shot these people in cold blood while they were begging her not to, begging her to think of her children and think of their children. She shot the dept. chairman, who was her biggest supporter and tried to help her, and she shot the people who were her colleagues.

I blame her family for failing to deal with her. My gut sense is worth nothing, but the story her mom gave police about the events leading to the death of Seth Bishop don't seem right. It was their responsibility to get her help instead of enabling her and letting her believe she was okay and that her behavior was okay.

Drs. Davis, Podila, and Johnson did not deserve this, and I hope Bishop is punished.
posted by anniecat at 2:21 PM on March 15, 2011 [6 favorites]

melissam: "Doctors should be more aware of the effects these medications [Steroids] can have on certain people. A tiny, but very unlucky, percentage of people get psychosis from them."

Most are, some aren't. Although I've treated some people with impressively dense psychosis probably caused by their steroid use, frank psychosis is rare with most therapeutic doses. There's a continuing debate over whether in these cases steroid use has caused the condition in "normal" individuals or has unmasked a mental disease process that was ongoing or indolent. People with existing social impairments such as alcoholism seem to be more vulnerable to strong mood disturbances by steroids.

But the systemic effects of glucocorticoids upon all the organ systems of the body are impressive and do not except the CNS, which can involve euphoria mixed with depression, increased mood lability, reduction in executive functioning and task ranking. [via UpToDate]: They affect the hippocampus, frontal lobes and amygdala, with low levels apparently producing short-term memory enhancement but chronic or high-dose use can cause long-lasting deficits in attention, visual-spatial processing, memory, conditional response, reasoning, and verbal fluency. A study of 15 female patients with [hypercortisolism] found additional deficits in slow learning rate, short-term memory volume, memory contamination and false appraisal of task performance, which suggest extrahippocampal effects of glucocorticoids on memory impairment. Exogenous glucocorticoids have similar effects to those of endogenous glucocorticoids on brain volume. In a study of patients under age 40 years with a diagnosis of cerebral atrophy, approximately 10 percent were on chronic glucocorticoid therapy. In a second study, pharmacological doses of glucocorticoids were associated with cerebral atrophy in two groups of either systemic lupus erythematosus or non-lupus patients compared to age and gender-matched normal subjects.

In one prospective but uncontrolled study of 50 patients, for example, large doses of glucocorticoids, given for various ophthalmologic indications, induced hypomanic symptoms in about 30 percent and depressive symptoms in about 10 percent of patients by the end of one week. Some studies have shown that Lithium administered prophylactically has been used successfully to both manage and prevent glucocorticoid- associated affective disorders. Lithium is potentially toxic, and the evidence is too scant to recommend it be used prophylactically in every case of chronic, high-dose steroid use, but in a consult I usually add a quick review of its pros and cons if looks like a patient might benefit.

If you can access it, this is a good review of steroid psychosis.
Nothing in this message is to be construed as medical advice and is not a substitute for medical advice or treatment.
posted by meehawl at 2:24 PM on March 15, 2011 [7 favorites]

Didn't help her brother very much.
posted by electroboy at 2:18 PM on March 15 [+] [!]

Agreed.

I truly believe that a in a healthy society there would be less desire to own handguns, and less abuse of them. That's the most important thing to fix.

...but in the meantime, America has this dangerously unhealthy society with guns everywhere, and a high rate of abuse of said firearms, it's hard to see why there's not more of a movement to control or restrict them.
posted by Stagger Lee at 2:57 PM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

The article does not even seem to address that a woman, who had already killed someone with a gun, and was clearly unstable could carry around a concealed pistol in her purse.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:51 AM on March 15

Because she had never been treated for a mental disorder and the first shooting was 20 years ago and ruled accidental?
posted by electroboy at 12:06 PM on March 15

She accidentally shot her brother... Off course she could be trusted to handle a gun responsibly.
posted by blue collar orc at 3:14 PM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

I blame her family for failing to deal with her. My gut sense is worth nothing, but the story her mom gave police about the events leading to the death of Seth Bishop don't seem right. It was their responsibility to get her help instead of enabling her and letting her believe she was okay and that her behavior was okay.
posted by anniecat

This. My own personal experience with someone close to me who developed psychosis was that the immediate family blithely ignored any problem and carried on as usual, with no help offered to almost absolute denial that any problem existed. This from a "close knit" family. Chilling and a real eye-opener. Luckily my personal story has a happy ending, not like this one.
posted by Ron Thanagar at 3:28 PM on March 15, 2011 [3 favorites]

Whenever I read articles about someone who Just Snapped, I immediately think of how many people in the orbit of that unhappy person knew what was waiting to happen. These are never the same people that tell the news how they knew all along that this would happen.

A note aside: I share the Professor's first name, and I am also an eccentric novelist manque. This caused a Dr. Tran-like bewilderment in me as I read sentences like, "Many had met Arrogant Amy, who seemed to thrive on order and usually had the upper hand. An unlucky few had encountered another Amy—chaotic, confused, full of menace. Angry Amy rarely took charge. But when she did, things never ended well."
posted by Countess Elena at 3:49 PM on March 15, 2011

Before I taint my first impressions by reading the thread: I found this to be a surprisingly good read. Its bias is nice and plainly obvious, which is both helpful to my ability to assess its value and makes it a fun reading of one set of facts.

It's all a strange set of patterns and coincidences; whether it leads to one particular determination of truth or another (ie. found sane or insane) can only be determined when all the facts and interpretations are laid out.

But damn weird on the surface of it, and the author made a well-written, interesting story. I'm surprised it was published by Wired; they usually disappoint me these days.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:05 PM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

Huh, musta fallen behind the couch

Makes me wonder why she was being protected. Her family had connections? Pretty young white girl syndrome?

I, too, think the author has barked up a wrong tree. I think it's a long history of failure to address her illness, and luck rooted in her shifting social environments. Regardless, I liked Wallace's prose.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:21 PM on March 15, 2011 [2 favorites]

Good read. I liked the timeline/location approach. In the late 90's I worked with Matthew Huang, an accomplished microbiologist, at a genetics-software company. We worked together for a few weeks, then our project was canceled. I didn't spend a whole lot of time with him, but my impression of him was an energetic, intelligent person with a good sense of humor. I lost track of him and then a few years later he did this. Also over a dismissal. The event was so amazing that I really had no way to digest it at the time. This article helped understand a little.
posted by telstar at 5:54 PM on March 15, 2011

He’d built a little chamber that was clamped in the vice.

AAAAIIIGH VISE!!!! NOT VICE!!!

(this particular homonym fault also drives me into apoplectic rage when I encounter it (multiple times!) in World of Warcraft.
posted by marble at 7:30 PM on March 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

Also um they never mentioned why a search warrant was served on them... what's the story on that?
posted by marble at 7:30 PM on March 15, 2011

Bishop was indicted for murder today (as was the Boston area's other oddball criminal, Clark Rockefeller).
posted by adamg at 7:45 PM on March 15, 2011

I didn't know about the timeline of tenure rejection, tenure rejection review, final day on contract, mayhem - but that adds a lot to the story.

The story about her brother's death is pretty damning, but... not to apologize for her... I'm wondering how true some of the post-hoc statements and reveals about her personality are. Especially with the anecdote upthread; how influenced were the people quoted in the article by their knowing that the person in question committed a heinous act?

I'm pretty sure that there'd be widely divergent news media quotes from random people who knew me if I had died of some weird unfortunate and strange accident compared to if I had committed some weird unfortunate incident that caused the death of others.

Totally not defending her actions, but this piece really paints her as a "bully" more than a bully-ee, like in a recent thread. There is zero justification for what she did, but I'd be really interested in hearing her side of the story; thing is, she's very likely what the Wired article makes her out to be so she'd just be spouting bs, based on what few actual facts have been established.

Strange to me - her references didn't say negative (but truthful) things about her. I've been asked to write reference letters and have been asked to make references. I'm honest (brutally, when it's deserved). Do professionals not make truthful reference letters? Are reference letters essentially useless for filtering out chaff and only good for deciding between great and supertastic?

The "Dr. Amy Bishop. Harvard trained. really gets me. Harvard trained. WTF? That's *all* you live for? What do you call the person who's the very last of their class at Harvard Med? Doctor.
posted by porpoise at 8:18 PM on March 15, 2011

If you want a good reason civilians should be able to buy high powered weapons, take a look at Libya. Unless we're going to universally abolish ant-aircraft missiles, fighter planes, tanks, cluster bombs, and a slew of other weaponry then the right to bear arms is a good idea.

Perhaps she should have baked poisonous cookies and passed them out as snacks instead, an arguably more effective method. It's not like access to guns is a determining factor in her craziness and intent to kill.
posted by haroon at 8:53 PM on March 15, 2011 [2 favorites]

I laughed a little at the remote diagnosis of BPD in Bishop by a psychologist who's apparently never interviewed her. BPD is now the catch-all diagnosis for evilness incarnate.

The first thing that came to my mind was that she had BPD, particularly when it becomes clear that she alternately is friendly and hateful towards other people (but not because she killed someone, which is not characteristic of the disorder). Nearly everyone that has interacted with her for long enough remarks on that quality. I worked with someone with (untreated) BPD recently. Believe me, once you encounter it, you never forget what it looks like. I'm not saying someone with BPD can't find help and treatment, but untreated BPD is pretty obvious.
posted by krinklyfig at 9:41 PM on March 15, 2011

I'm pretty sure that there'd be widely divergent news media quotes from random people who knew me if I had died of some weird unfortunate and strange accident compared to if I had committed some weird unfortunate incident that caused the death of others.

Do your neighbors celebrate whenever you move? That's pretty telling.
posted by krinklyfig at 9:45 PM on March 15, 2011 [2 favorites]

My wife works at the University where she flipped. In the research circles... she had a reputation for being quite BSC.
posted by insulglass at 10:57 PM on March 15, 2011

AAAAIIIGH VISE!!!! NOT VICE!!! (this particular homonym fault also drives me into apoplectic rage when I encounter it (multiple times!) in World of Warcraft.

Perhaps some of the WoW players you encounter aren't American? It's "vice" everywhere else. The OED notes that "The spelling vise is now usual only in U.S."
posted by rory at 4:48 AM on March 16, 2011

It must get confusing when the police that investigate prostitution and gambling are trying to extract a confession out of a suspect using woodworking implements.
posted by electroboy at 6:30 AM on March 16, 2011

insulglass: Sorry, what's BSC?
posted by orrnyereg at 7:45 AM on March 16, 2011

A PhD/professorship does not a genius make.

Genius is actually not all that uncommon or exceptional, on the continuum of brainy. Okay, I have a biased sample, but you can do little at all and come across as perfectly ordinary as far as what you do with your life, and still meet the qualifications. It's not a title given out unstintingly.
posted by Phalene at 7:59 AM on March 16, 2011 [1 favorite]

insulglass: Sorry, what's BSC?
posted by orrnyereg at 10:45 AM on March 16 [+] [!]

I think in this context = Bat Sh!t Crazy
posted by Mittenz at 5:29 PM on March 17, 2011