MONDAY, JANUARY 5

The week begins with a fascinating story of verbal abuse, accidental eavesdropping, and radio-fueled justice from the Associated Press. Today's tale was kicked into action back on November 21, when a disc jockey at Atlanta's WALR-FM picked up a station phone line to hear a woman's voice yelling violent threats and insults at a wailing girl. After recording the call, the station turned the tape over to Atlanta police, who traced the mysterious transmission to the home of Venus Taylor, a 55-year-old woman living in Stone Mountain, where she was caring for her 13-year-old granddaughter (the recipient of the taped threats) along with two other grandkids. After arresting Granny and placing the kids with other relatives, Georgia authorities charged Venus Taylor with child cruelty, to which she today pleaded guilty, receiving six years' probation. Nothing is known about how the call reached the radio station (where, in a praiseworthy display of decency, disc jockeys refrained from ever broadcasting the tape).

--From accidental phone calls to accidental gunfire: Today also brought an explosive object lesson from Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Tomekia R. Wilson was driving a sport utility vehicle containing her sister and her six-year-old son down Madison County's Interstate 69 yesterday when her son accidentally shot her in the back. According to the Associated Press, the boy found a .38 caliber revolver in a duffle bag under the back seat; while playing with the gun (registered to his mother's boyfriend), it went off, firing a shot through the back of the driver's seat and lodging a bullet in his mother's lower back. The shot mom pulled over to call 911, and was soon taken to St. John's Medical Center, where she was listed in stable condition after surgery. No charges have been filed.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 6

Over the course of the new millennium, Last Days has drawn a wealth of rich entertainment from the much- maligned genre of reality television, from The Real World and Road Rules--MTV's twin pillars of contained-space learning-and-growing--to America's Next Top Model, the UPN hit whose premiere season offered the most complex portrayal of young American women ever to hit prime time. (Surprising revelation #249: The key division between would-be supermodels is religion.) But today the reality genre earned every ounce of acrimony it will ever receive with the broadcast of Airline, A&E's new series documenting the ins and outs of employment with and travel on Southwest Airlines. Based on a UK hit of the same name, A&E's Airline is co-produced by Granada television, whose co-executive producer Joe Houlihan told the Associated Press, "We're sure American viewers will find the thrills and spills of life behind the scenes of this huge airline fascinating." As it turned out, Airline was exactly as entertaining as spending an hour in the airport watching desperately chipper Southwest employees appeasing a bunch of drunken, noisy, cranky travelers, from death-threat-spewing boozehounds and exasperated families to oppressively smelly hobos. (Know the only thing more humiliating than being informed that you're too smelly to fly by a Southwest counter clerk? Being informed that you're too smelly to fly by a Southwest counter clerk with a camera crew.) Shame on A&E for showing it, shame on us for watching it.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7

In much better news: Today brought a dreamy new chapter to the ongoing saga of beleaguered entertainer/new Nation of Islam member Michael Jackson. "During Thanksgiving week, I had the flu with a lingering low fever," writes Hot Tipper Michael. "I had a dream that I was at the end of a conveyer belt. Down the belt came boxes of Michael Jackson chicken pies, with his picture on every box. My job was to put five boxes in a carton. This dream went on for days; every time I went back to sleep I was back at work." Unfortunately, Michael's subconscious failed to provide a satisfying conclusion to the richly mythic dream- series: "All of us workers were very poor and lived at the factory, apparently. We'd give each other little gifts like pizza crusts made of chicken pie dough. I would be idle for long stretches of time at my work station. I finally got some control over the dream by refusing to work any more and just talking to fellow employees." Still, Last Days thanks Michael for sharing.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 8

For decades, homosexuals have purged the trauma of high school by making art, jokes, and the occasional woman-suit made out of real women. But today brought the heartening story of some beleaguered gay teens who turned their high-school trouble into cold, hard cash. Reuters reports that the school district of Morgan Hill, California, will pay $1.1 million to six gay students who say school officials ignored their complaints of anti-gay harassment and therefore failed to provide them with equal protection under the law. "The kind of abuse I had to deal with every day when I went to school was horrible," said student Alana Flores after the settlement's announcement on Tuesday. "I am so happy that the district has finally recognized the seriousness of this problem and is ready to do something to stop it." UCLA law professor Stuart Biegel concurred: "Everybody is getting more aware of the fact that if you don't do the job now of protecting the kids, you're going to pay a price for it."

FRIDAY, JANUARY 9

For the past couple years, Last Days has watched Atkins-inspired diets facilitate the miraculous, from the trimming down of countless squishy Americans to the rejuvenation of the pork-rind industry. But the low-carb revolution reached a surreal new low this morning in a Seattle supermarket, where a Hot Tipping barista was working the espresso counter when "a man approached the bar and asked for a large coffee with some room on top. I served him the drink, and he dropped what appeared to be some kind of raw flesh into it. I tried to think of other possibilities. No person in their right mind would put raw meat into their coffee, right? Moments later, I spoke with a woman who said that she saw the same man in the supermarket dining area chopping meat with a meat cleaver. So, it was meat, and the guy probably wasn't in his right mind."

SATURDAY, JANUARY 10

Nothing happened today (unless you count the Associated Press report of the two 12-year-old girls expelled from a Montreal middle school after the preteen entrepreneurs were caught charging male classmates five dollars to watch them kiss).

SUNDAY, JANUARY 11

The week ends with the broadcast of CBS' 60 Minutes, during which former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told Leslie Stahl of how the Bush administration began planning its attack on Iraq days after Dubya's January 2001 inauguration--a full eight months before 9/11, which the administration would retroactively cast as the catalyst for Operation Iraqi Freedom (despite the fact that, aside from a shared, vague, Middle Eastern beige-ness in the minds of terrified Americans, 9/11 had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq).

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