MONDAY, AUGUST 23 It's a marriage made in Heaven: Syphilis and the Internet. While investigating a recent outbreak of syphilis among homosexual men, officials from the San Francisco Department of Health followed the virus into cyberspace, and have declared an America Online chat room as ground zero for infection, reports Reuters. The discovery was made after the last seven men reporting syphilis cases to the S.F. Health Department revealed that they found their most recent sex partners through San Francisco Men-For-Men, the popular AOL chat room for slutty fags and the men who love them. Combating the online outbreak has been no easy task: Health Department protocol requires the notification of at-risk individuals, but America Online policy insures the anonymity of chat room visitors. The chore of disseminating information has fallen primarily on PlanetOut, an online gay and lesbian community that has spent the past two weeks visiting the syphilis-ridden chat room urging users to take STD tests and practice safer sex.

In other sex news: Today actor Mickey Rooney joined lawmakers and animal rights activists at a Simi Valley, California news conference to denounce something Last Days didn't even know existed: Crush videos -- pornography in which women wearing boots or open-toed shoes crush small animals and insects beneath their feet. UPI reports that Rooney displayed still photos of a woman in stiletto heels squashing a mouse, a rabbit, and what appeared to be a guinea pig or a hamster, while calling the practice "deplorable," and saying, "the right of free speech does not include crushing small animals to death." Also at the news conference was Rep. Elton Langely, who has introduced a bill in Congress to impose a prison term of up to five years for sale of the videos. A quick Internet search by Last Days turned up no evidence of the animal crushing video industry; however, simply contemplating the concept of crushing makes us never want to have sex again. (Adding Mickey Rooney to the mix doesn't help much either.)


TUESDAY, AUGUST 24 Apparently unwilling to exit the Oval Office without telling one more big fat stinking lie, today an obviously attention-starved President Clinton issued a statement that he has never, ever done cocaine. "That applies to his entire life," presidential spokesperson Jim Kennedy proudly told The Washington Times. Clinton's bizarre, uncalled-for denial was plainly influenced by the cocaine rumors swirling around Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush, who has spent the past week deflecting drug use questions with cagey answers. (Bush admits he "made some mistakes" in the past, and has claimed to be drug-free for both seven and 22 years.) Still, one wishes Clinton had chosen a sturdier plot of land for his moral high ground: In an interview on the Fox News Channel program Hannity & Colmes, former Clinton hussy Gennifer Flowers claims the then-governor told her of times "he did so much cocaine that his head would itch." And in his 1996 bio of the Prez, Roger Morris quotes Clinton's convicted coke dealer of a brother Roger from a 1983-'84 surveillance film, "Got to get some [cocaine] for my brother. He's got a nose like a vacuum cleaner."

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25 Speaking of creepy men, here's yet another story of unappreciated nudity in Seattle public parks. Today's incident occurred at that little point in the arboretum where people gather to sit and swim. Our two eyewitnesses were lounging on the grass when a female jogger raced up to ask, "Does anyone have a cell phone?" The woman revealed that a man had just flashed her and she was "gonna nail him." Unable to find a phone, the woman sped off toward Broadmoor after telling park dwellers to keep an eye out for the elderly dick-waving sicko. A few minutes later, the man emerged from the bushes -- "a saggy old white guy in flesh-colored shorts," says our pair of eyewitness, who proceeded to jog after the wheezing geezer in hopes of catching him the act. The couple shadowed the man all the way to "the gay area," where he disappeared into the infamous blackberry thicket. There the couple halted their search, wisely recognizing that the man-packed thicket was probably more contagious than an AOL chat room; the flashing man remains unidentified and at large. However, calls from Last Days to the office of Slade Gorton have revealed that the senator's whereabouts at the time of the aforementioned incident are mysteriously unknown.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 26 Speaking of icky things in public parks, today's Seattle Times featured a stomach-churning story on the gobs of toxic algae that have forced the closure of Green Lake. The unprecedented closure -- banning all boating, swimming, and fishing from the "murky pea-green gruel" of the lake -- was caused by the presence of aphanizomenon, a toxic bacterium whose growth is promoted by sunlight, warm temperatures, and the excrement of animals. As Seattle has been suspiciously short of both sunlight and warm temperatures this summer, Last Days can only surmise that Green Lake's animal excrement levels are booming. The poisoned lake remained closed throughout the weekend; new toxicity tests are underway.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 27 Last week, Last Days reported on the fascinating song "No Scrubs," by TLC. This week, we received several complaints about our characterization of the overplayed summer smash as "new" (we were comparing it to "The Star-Spangled Banner") and one complaint charging us with racism. "Black artists have a tendency to create their own terms for things in their lyrics," wrote the hotheaded, finger-pointing lady. "When some white people don't understand the language, they ridicule it. I wonder if you would make fun of the song if the group was white." While Last Days is no less racist than your usual upper-middle-class, liberally educated child of the cosmetically appealing but fundamentally empty politically correct era, race played no part in the item in question. We didn't say TLC shouldn't be allowed to vote. We said they recorded a song called "No Scrubs."

SATURDAY, AUGUST 28 The spirit of '60s-style radical activism was alive and well tonight at the Shell gasoline station on Denny and Aurora, where a well-dressed businesswoman took it into her own hands (and panties) to sock it to The Man. The incident occurred around 2:30 a.m., when the woman stopped by the Shell station to use the restroom. When the employee on duty informed her that the store's public restrooms were closed from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m., the woman promptly yanked down her underpants and took a protest piss on the floor, before racing out to hop into a waiting Far West cab. And while Last Days is in full support of the use of bodily fluids as political tools, we cannot support this particular act of urinary terrorism, as the true victim of the deed is not the corporation who instigated the stupid "no bathrooms at night" rule, but the unfortunate clerk forced to mop up a drunk woman's pee for $5.45 an hour.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 29 Today it rained.

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