MONDAY, JULY 8 Hello and thanks to Cienna Madrid for taking over this column while we took an honest-to-God vacation. Now we’re back and ready to tackle this week of amorous rafting, fatal urination, and deeply upsetting legal doings. Things kick off with an exemplary story of would-be vigilante justice in Seattle, where a citizen found herself mysteriously menaced by a teenager and somehow refrained from fatally shooting him. Our heroic protagonist: Eliza Webb, a West Seattle woman who was going about her life a couple weeks ago when she noticed that the inside of her car looked weird. “I thought maybe my husband had come looking for something and made a mess of everything,” she told KOMO. “But then I looked at the driver’s side seat and found a black cell phone and immediately realized that it’s not a cell phone I recognize, and I started looking closer and we had some missing items.” Upon determining that the abandoned phone belonged to a 19-year-old man, Webb took an inspired course of action: “I called his mom… I said, ‘This is a very uncomfortable phone call to make. I have your son’s phone and I’m missing some things out of my car and I think they might be two related items,’ and she was devastated.” Following the call, Webb and her husband visited the teen’s house to return the phone and recover their missing property. “We knocked on the door and he answered in just sort of a defeated look,” Webb told KOMO. “He looked like he had been crying.”
•• Speaking of young men doing dumb things, today also brings a much worse story from New York City, where early this morning 30-year-old Matthew Zeno was walking with a friend along the subway tracks in Williamsburg when he decided to urinate. Tragically, Zeno’s urine stream connected with the electrified third rail and he was fatally electrocuted. “His 26-year-old pal tried saving him and was also shocked,” reports the New York Post. “Both men were rushed to Woodhull Hospital where Zeno died and the second man was listed in stable condition.”
TUESDAY, JULY 9 In lighter news, the week continues in Australia, where a restaurateur has invested nearly $40,000 into developing a new letter for the alphabet. Details come from the Daily Telegraph, which identifies our moneyed letter-promoter as Paul Mathis, and describes his would-be 27th letter of the alphabet as a combination of an uppercase T and a lowercase h designed to represent the word “the.” “The word ‘and’ is only the fifth-most used word in English and it has its own symbol,” Mathis said. “Isn’t it time we accorded the same respect to ‘the’?” Certain that his new letter has a natural home in a world of Twitter and texts, Mathis must now “convince mobile phone developers and keyboard manufacturers to add a new key to their devices,” reports the Telegraph. Good luck, fake letterman.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 10 In squeakier news, the week continues in Ohio, where today a man with a history of allegedly having sex with inflatable pool rafts was indicted on charges of public indecency after allegedly having sex with an inflatable pool raft. Details come from the Norwalk Reflector, which identifies the alleged raft lover as 34-year-old Edwin Tobergta, who was arrested last month after stepping out of his house naked in the middle of the afternoon and having “sexual relations with a rubber pool float,” according to the police report. Having been arrested at least five times previously for similar offenses, Tobergta faces up to a year in jail if found guilty.
THURSDAY, JULY 11 Nothing happened today (unless you count the millions of
headline-avoiding citizens sensible enough to fuck their beloved rubber rafts behind closed doors).
FRIDAY, JULY 12 The week continues with this remarkable sentence from the Associated Press: “An Oregon man told police he was using his assault rifle as a crutch to help him get up from a couch at a friend’s apartment when it fired a burst through the ceiling and killed a little girl upstairs.” Charged with manslaughter, assault, and unlawful possession of a machine gun, gunman Jon Andrew Meyer Jr. remains held on $250,000 bail, while 5-year-old Alysa Bobbitt remains dead. Condolences to all.
SATURDAY, JULY 13 Speaking of kids fatally shot by idiots, the week continues with Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old Florida boy who was fatally shot by a gun-toting neighborhood watch volunteer in 2012. In a heart-
sickening twist, today a Florida jury pronounced this gun-toting neighborhood watchman—George Zimmerman—not guilty of the murder of the unarmed-except-for-a-bag-of-Skittles Trayvon Martin. America promptly lost its shit, with “justice for Trayvon” marches filling streets across the country tomorrow and beyond. As (failed) prosecuting attorney Angela Corey will tell HLN on Monday, “We never said Trayvon didn’t do something to George Zimmerman. What we said is you can’t take a concealed weapon and encourage or incite a fistfight—which is what he did by stalking a teenager who didn’t know who he was—and then whip your gun out and shoot.” For more words on the Trayvon Martin verdict, see Charles Mudede’s story on page 19.
•• Meanwhile in Texas, citizens awoke to learn that, just before midnight last night, the state senate approved one of the strictest abortion laws in the country, which “bans abortions after 20 weeks and will force the closure of all but a handful of the clinics that perform them,” reports ABC News. Texas women: You live in a state that is waging war on your private parts, and we encourage you to consider revoking all access to your private parts by any and all Texas men. We’re talking some serious Lysistrata shit—no vaginal access until this fucking war is over. (For helpful reinforcements, visit Babeland.com.)
SUNDAY, JULY 14 The week ends in Seattle, where tonight an overflowing audience crammed into Velocity Dance Center for the final performance of Cherdonna and Lou’s latest dance/burlesque/performance art extravaganza, My Obviously Unsuccessful Lifestyle, which doubled as the final show by Cherdonna and Lou. After a half-decade run, Jody Kuehner (Cherdonna) and Ricki Mason (Lou) are officially and mutually going solo, with Lou Henry Hoover continuing on with the burlesque mainstay DeLouRue productions and Cherdonna veering off on her own into the wilds of contemporary dance/performance. As for tonight’s final show: It was a woozy, pervy dreamscape with occasional punch lines and a canny through-line of self-interrogation. Among the questions left hanging in the air: Should you keep dancing just because people are clapping? Isn’t mindless repetition annoying? Is there anything sadder than the straggly remains of an awesome party that’s over? 
Godspeed, Cherdonna and Lou. Everyone else, send hot tips to lastdays@thestranger.com and follow me on Twitter @davidschmader.
