Cienna Madrid has returned to her regular life (but oh how we love when she visits).

MONDAY, OCTOBER 3 The week kicks off with a bowel-purging wave of relief for Amanda Knox, the American exchange student sentenced to 26 years in Italian prison after being found guilty of the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. For nearly four years, Knox has remained jailed in Perugia on what anyone with a healthy sense of justice can identify as the sketchiest of evidence. Today, an Italian appeals court acquitted Knox of murder and ordered the now-24-year-old immediately released. Upheld by the court: Knox's conviction for slander, following her identification of an innocent bystander—Diya "Patrick" Lumumba—as Kercher's murderer. Set free with time served and a promise to pay a $29,000 fine, Knox will fly home to Seattle tomorrow. The end. (Until her Oprah interview/perfume launch/season on Dancing with the Stars.)

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4 Speaking of freed jailbirds, the week continues in North Dakota, where today a crew of police officers and farmers spent an inordinate amount of time yelling at a cornfield in an attempt to flush out an escaped convict. Details come from KIRO, which identifies the escapee as Joseph Megna, a convicted sex offender who faces new charges of child molestation in Washington State. That's where Megna was being taken today when he broke out of a transport van during a restroom break and fled into the corny wilderness, eventually being caught and set back on the road to Washington. For what it's worth, Megna appears to be the funniest convicted sex offender at work today, as he credited his flight into the cornfield not to his desire to escape criminal charges but to his desire to eat corn. "The 29-year-old told reporters he fled because he is a vegetarian and wasn't getting enough to eat during his cross-country trip from Florida," reports KIRO.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5 In much worse news, today brings the sad announcement of the death of Steve Jobs, the American inventor and entrepreneur whose cofounding of both Apple and Pixar secures his stature as the most entertaining man of his era. (Suck it, dead Michael Jackson.) For Last Days, Jobs will forever be the man who gave the world the iPod, i.e., the closest thing yet to a robot you can fall in love with. Of course, our reverence for the now-lowly iPod is tied to our place in history. Growing up during the five-pound Walkman era, we could never imagine a day when our entire record collection would reside in a four-inch steel wallet. The iTunes-enabled ability to search for all songs containing the word "beige" in the title and/or confirm the exact number of times one has listened to "Addams Family (Whoomp!)" is simply icing on the cake. Also: Pixar. Thanks for the mind-blowing entertainments, Mr. Jobs (and fuck you, cancer).

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6 In relatively lighter news, the week continues in North Seattle, where in the wee hours of this morning a woman lay down in a dark and rainy parking lot and learned a terrible lesson about lying down in dark and rainy parking lots. As KIRO reports, officers were called to an apartment complex on 15th Avenue Northeast around 1:00 a.m. and soon found the twentysomething woman trapped under a car and screaming. "Officers said the woman had been with her boyfriend in the lot when she laid down on the pavement," reports KIRO. "It was dark and raining outside. Around that time, a man in his mid-50s was driving through the lot in his sedan." As cops told KIRO, the victim's boyfriend attempted to alert the driver to his girlfriend lying the roadway, but instead appeared to startle the driver into accelerating. "He hit the woman and dragged her several feet," reports KIRO. "Once freed by firefighters, the woman was transported to Harborview Medical Center with non-life-threatening injuries."

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7 The week continues with a novel solution to job creation from the big, stupid state of Florida, where Republican state representative Ritch Workman has introduced a bill to undo the state's ban on dwarf tossing. In case you've forgotten, dwarf tossing is the reprehensible "sport" in which bar patrons compete to see who can toss a well-padded little person the farthest. As Bloomberg News informs us, Workman is seeking to overturn the ban "as part of what he says is his mission to repeal overreaching and outdated laws from Florida's books." And though Workman declined to label his measure a "jobs bill," he acknowledged it might put a few people to work in his highly unemployed state. "If this is a job they want, and people would pay to see it or participate in it, why in the world would we prohibit it?" said Workman in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. "In my worldview, we have the freedom and liberty to do these kinds of things." Bullshit, says Carolyn Fiddler, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee spokesperson who told Bloomberg that the bill highlights Republicans' lack of understanding of what drives employment growth. "It's a really telling symptom of the larger theme that they push, which is that government is the greatest obstacle to job creation," said Fiddler. "This shows how absurd that notion is." Fiddler's bullshit was seconded and enhanced by Leah Smith, spokesperson for the Little People of America. "There are many, many risks involved" with dwarf tossing, said Smith to Bloomberg. Also: "There's a basic issue of humanity. What other population group would you toss?"

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 Speaking of dangerous tossing, the week continues in Baltimore, where an argument at Walmart turned into an emergency hazmat situation. As ABC News reports, Baltimore County Police arrived at the Walmart just before 11:00 a.m. and found two women fighting among the household cleaners. Things turned from adversarial to biohazardiffic as the women reportedly threw bleach and disinfectant at each other, creating toxic fumes and forcing the evacuation of the entire superstore. Nineteen people reportedly required medical treatment, including three Walmart employees treated for respiratory problems. Arrested for the incident: 33-year-old Theresa Jefferson, who was charged with first-degree assault, second-degree assault, theft under $100, and malicious destruction of property, for which she's being held on $350,000 bail.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9 The week ends with another day of Seattle being occupied by Occupy Seattle, the Occupy Wall Street offshoot that's logged a week in Westlake Park and is covered in full starting on page 7.

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