MONDAY, DECEMBER 23 The week begins with the miracle of birth, as
experienced by a crowd of onlookers at a West Virginia funeral
home. That’s where a nativity scene featuring live animals was turned into a
bucking, braying birthing pit, as a sheep went into labor.
Gawkers gathered, authorities were called, and members of the Charleston Fire
Department eventually helped deliver the ewe’s newborn, who was listed in
good condition by the time crews left the scene. In a quirky coincidence, today’s
funeral home live-action nativity scene is the exact same one that made headlines
last Monday, after Charleston police allegedly discovered a local man having intercourse with one of the nativity scene’s sheep. No connection has been
made between last week’s alleged-rape-victim sheep and today’s birth-mother
sheep, but readers can’t be blamed for envisioning the worst.
··Following the miracle of birth comes the crappiness of death:
Today brought the sad, sudden news of the death-by-heart-attack of Joe
Strummer, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for the punk-and-beyond
pioneers the Clash, who were, for an unforgettable number of years in the
late ’70s/early ’80s, “the only band that mattered.” The Clash’s greatest
commercial success was their late-career rock-ditty-turned-eternal-frat-boy
anthem “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” but the band’s artistic zenith is more
difficult to pinpoint, with rock crits splitting hairs between the beloved
masterpiece London Calling, the shamelessly sprawling
Sandinista!, and the still-scary (and ultimately definitive)
debut. For Last Days, the Clash were that rare band we loved as much as an
adult as we did as a kid (after a next-door neighbor loaned us Give ‘Em Enough
Rope at 12). In addition, the Clash provided us with what remains our most
cherished concert experience, via a semi-surprise 1983 show in El Paso,
TX, through which the band was passing while en route to the ill-fated US
Festival, and where a young Last Days was happily splattered by a bunch of
Joe Strummer’s saliva before being knocked unconscious by a
stage-diver’s boot. R.I.P., Mr. Strummer.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24 Hot on the heels of last week’s alleged Lamb-of-God
rape comes a far more heartwarming story of the intermingling of human
genitalia and animals. Today’s tale comes all the way from
Norway, where a young mother who saved a newborn litter of puppies from
starving to death by nursing them herself told reporters she “has no
regrets” regarding the act of mammary altruism that saved eight puppies and
made this full-service Florence Nightingale the victim of jokes and judgments the
world over. “I’ve heard that some people thought it was disgusting that I would
nurse [my son] and the puppies at the same time,” said 23-year-old Kine Skiaker
to the newspaper Aftenposten. “I just have to tolerate that, and can only
say that I washed myself thoroughly after I’d nursed the puppies.”
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25 Today was Christmas, the day Americans
expect to be given what they desire by people who claim to love them. And while
we didn’t receive our ultimate Christmas wish–for Jennifer Lopez to get
arrested, tried, and convicted of first-degree murder in a state with the
death penalty–we happened to stumble upon a bit of daytime TV so rich and
hilarious we accepted it as a gift from God. The show belonged to Maury
Povich, the hideous husband of Connie Chung, who today earned a permanent
place in Last Days’ heart by hosting the show entitled “I’m Terrified of
Chalk, Hair, and Circus Clowns!” in which a variety of guests attempted to
overcome their violently irrational fears with help from Maury and
“motivational expert” Gary Coxe. Watching a fully grown man run
screaming from a clown was a pleasure Last Days never anticipated; getting
to witness this man overcome his fear and willingly hug a clown (!) turned
the pleasure to epiphany. However, the true star of the show was the woman whose
fear of chalk was so acute she dropped out of high school–and nearly
scratched her eyes out when confronted with the dreaded stuff on a previous
Maury show. But thanks to Gary Coxe’s motivational treatment, this woman
could not only stand in the same room with chalk without screaming, she actually
wrote “I Love Maury” with chalk on a chalkboard! Thanks to every
single person who made this absolutely magical hour of television possible.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26 Back to the real world: Today Last Days finally
perused Tuesday‘s endlessly troubling, gazillion-word-long
Washington Post article by Post staffer Barton Gellman,
surveying the state of the nation in the face of inevitable
terrorism. Unfurled beneath the headline “In U.S., Terrorism’s Peril
Undiminished” (a masterful bit of grammar strategy, trilling with
passive-voice plainspeak and explosive understatement), Gellman’s article gave
readers a terrifyingly thorough understanding of the multitude of risks facing citizens of the United States from our nation’s many mortal
enemies, who’ve proven themselves willing to do anything to end (or at least
significantly complicate) the lives of as many Americans as possible. Among
Gellman’s revelations: In late 2001, the Bush administration erected the
“Ring Around Washington,” a provisional defense against nuclear attack on
the nation’s capital. Designed to detect nuclear weapons prior to detonation, the
Ring underwent a “large-scale operational trial” with mixed results: In some
cases, detectors failed to identify dangerous radiation; in others, they sent
false alarms, misreading low-grade medical waste and “ordinary background
emissions of stone monuments.” (Monuments fart; who knew?) “Until we can change
the law of physics, we’re not going to make the detectors a great deal better,”
said a “knowledgeable official” to Gellman, who went on to sum things up with
this typically terrifying sentence: “More than 15 months into the war with al
Qaeda, U.S. exposure to ruinous attack remains unbounded.”
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27 Today Last Days continued to beat ourselves
bloody before the pornography for pessimists that is Bart Gellman’s
Washington Post article on the United States’ “security
deficit” (yet another ingenious euphemism, this one credited to an unnamed
“current official”). “The gravest risks from al Qaeda combine its affinity for
big targets and its announced desire for weapons of mass
destruction,” writes Gellman, before handing the mic to retired Army General
Wayne A. Downing, who served as Bush’s deputy national security advisor
for counterterrorism until July 8. “Most sobering to me,” said Downing, “was [al
Qaeda’s] research on chemical weapons and radiological dispersion devices, and
their fascination with nuclear weapons. These guys continue to go back after
targets they have tried to get before. That’s why I expect they’re going to go
back to Washington.” Downing’s expectation was confirmed by a current Bush
official, who told Gellman, “They are going to kill the White House. I have
really begun to ask myself whether I want to continue to get up every day and
come to work on this block.”
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28 Nothing happened today (unless you count Last Days’
continued walloping of our pessimism G spot via the classic cycle of
cynicism justification, employing such self-aggrandizing,
responsibility-diminishing questions as “If this is what the government’s willing
to admit, can you imagine the shit they’re not telling us?” and “Why
shouldn’t I stay drunk for seven weeks straight?”).
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29 Nothing happened today.
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