Like weary mountain climbers, we begin our journey through The Stranger at the bottom: JONAH SPANGENTHAL-LEE dithers at length about a supposed connection between the CIA and the University of Washington. Perhaps if, like his fellow un-American paranoiacs at the New York Times, Mr. Spangenthal-Lee was actually a capable writer, this story would be readable. As it is, his Woodward-and-Bernstein-on-crack routine smacks of Special Olympics–style showboating, and is borderline treasonous. Immediately after this, DOMINIC HOLDEN raises the bar to just below ground level with a tirade about city officials actually doing their job in the Central District. Mr. Holden doesn't bother to inform us why we should care.
The good news: This week's Stranger has no feature story. Cue the horns of heavenly deliverance. The Job-like burden of struggling through a brutally long first-person account of some illegal sexual peccadillo (I was a drug-addled necrophiliac! I cross-dressed for personal insight! I had a bad boyfriend who visited a sex club! I skinned rabbits in my bathtub and somehow believed that other people would want to hear about it!) has been lifted from my shoulders this week.
The bad news: This week's Stranger is devoted to the Capitol Hill Block Party, that moronic annual celebration of sodomy, alcohol, and off-key caterwauling. A cast of miscreants—including MEGAN SELING, ERIC GRANDY, DONTE PARKS, JULIA MULLEN GORDON, and SAM MICKENS—have scribbled out fawning appreciations of rock bands with satanic or apocalyptic names like "the Airborne Toxic Event," "Vampire Weekend," "Sleepy Eyes of Death," and, the coup de gracelessness, "Lesbians." No doubt these starry-eyed blurbicles are intended as an homage, probably calculated to earn their glue-huffing "writers" gifts of sexual favors or drugs from the musical acts in question. Unfortunately, in typical Stranger fashion, they are unreadable—riddled with typos and festooned with grammatical errors. Special note to the circus geeks who function as "proofreaders" for this rag: "SRSLY," "jamz," "hubby," and "funnest" are pseudowords that are only acceptable in meth labs and within the walls of The Stranger offices. Or do I repeat myself?
Next, in the section of the paper dedicated to "arts," JEN GRAVES interviews a group of hobos who deface crumbling buildings and then invite swarms of people to the firetraps to drink themselves insensate. Ms. Graves, who it should be noted is from the gutter-city of Tacoma, is predictably impressed.
On to books, where CHARLES MUDEDE scrawls a diatribe against an offering that he declares is never-ending. The irony of Mr. Mudede, of all people, declaring a piece of writing to be a self-obsessed, endless drone of pseudointellectualism is apparently lost on him; perhaps he does not make enough money as a "journalist" to purchase a mirror. It's all for the best, I suppose: If a mirror somehow found its way into The Stranger offices, half the staff would probably be rendered suicidal, and the other half would masturbate themselves raw within minutes. 
