I see that The Stranger has managed to lure another hapless victim into the position of staff writer. Welcome, CIENNA MADRID, and may you quickly learn that the reading public is not impressed by stories such as your debut offering, which is simply more boilerplate liberal garment-rending over that fetid mass of interlopers who choose not to get jobs, mistake public parks for bedrooms, and spend their days befouling the stoops of Seattle with their excrement whilst also harassing my driver at stop signs with their pathetic mimed offers of a 25 cent window-washing (as if there were a spot to be found on my mint-condition 1948 Land Rover).

Miss Madrid, your name suggests to me that you are both brown and foreign, and your misplaced sympathy for the most lazy creatures in this woe-begotten welfare state leads me to believe that you have been plucked from their ranks. That would make sense. A homeless female minority without a proper visa—that is exactly the type of person I like to lowball when I am hiring for mindless labor jobs at Steen Industries, and I trust that the same strategy was employed in the purchase of you and your "words." I shall open a file on you as soon as Conseula comes back from "vacation," and in the meantime, I have already added your relevant characteristics to the Official Stranger Census—which I have been assiduously tallying at appropriate intervals over the years, out of a combination of morbid curiosity and legal necessity—to somewhat historic results.

Your hire, Miss Madrid, means that women in the editorial department at The Stranger are now equal in number to those writers in my census category marked, for brevity's sake, Girly Men. Regular readers of this column will not be surprised to learn the identities of the sexual deviants in that category: Christopher Frizzelle, Dominic Holden, Eli Sanders, Dan Savage, and David Schmader. In the past, their kind has been the dominant (and insufferable) majority. Now real-woman-kind appears to be ascendant. Granted, many things—including gender—tend to change quickly around here, but presently in the Actual Female category we find Bethany Jean Clement, the newly arrived Cienna Madrid, Erica Grandy, Jen Graves, and Lindy West. Young ladies, may your increased count (and the resulting increased estrogen level inside the Stranger offices) be a blessing unto us all and a calming force in these troubled times—and may it also set a more suitable example for the sole member of the Indeterminately Gendered category, Paul Constant, while also providing the three members of the Straight Male species (Charles Mudede, Dave Segal, and Brendan Kiley) with inspiration for their manly endeavors.

As for the product assembled this week by this absurdly populated penal colony? Aside from the embarrassing article by Miss Madrid, the issue is mainly devoted to page after page of valentines written by readers to other readers, in a font size that requires a magnifying glass to view, in pornographic prose that requires a Valium after every sixth entry. Also included: the coronation of the "sexiest" among The Stranger's readers—a ceremony that I now formally request a disinvitation to for next year.