Last Days

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 This week of cracked-out Chihuahuas,
resuscitated sanity, and world-historic economic peril kicks off with
nothing, unless you count day one of the aforementioned
world-historic economic peril, a plate-shifting nightmare we can’t bear
to confront today, so instead let’s divert ourselves with the
35-year-old man arrested for indecent exposure after being
caught wanking in the bushes of Seattle’s Green Lake
Park. Details come from the police report obtained by The
Stranger‘s Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, which identifies the true star of
today’s nonstory: the woman who hid behind a tree to call police
while she watched the wanker wank. According to the police report, the
woman recognized the man as the same fellow who’d masturbated in front
of her and her daughter near Green Lake Community Center three days
prior. She also said the man “had some kind of flesh-colored,
realistic-looking phony penis strapped to his genitals.” Cops
arrived and apprehended the man, who produced a dildo from his pants
along with the explanation that he only had it “to make it look like he
did have a large real penis through his tight-fitting pants.” The dildo
was confiscated, and the man—who has a prior conviction for
indecent exposure—was arrested.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 Nothing happened today, unless you count day
two of Economic Hell Week, which we’ll continue to ignore with the help
of the week’s obligatory mauling-by-pit-bull. Today’s setting:
Moses Lake, Washington, where this evening a 6-year-old
boy was playing in his grandmother’s backyard when a pit bull
pushed through the fence and attacked. When the boy attempted to flee,
KING 5 reports, the dog pounced and commenced biting the boy’s face,
ears, and scalp—stopping only when the boy’s mother and some
neighbors fought the dog off—and inflicting injuries so severe
the boy was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center, where he remains in
serious condition. “They estimate it will be about a month,” said the
boy’s aunt to KING 5. “He’ll need a lot of things done and a lot of
future surgeries.” Police say the dog will be put down and its owner
will face charges.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 In much better news, the week continues with
a much-needed tonic to last week’s barrage of race-baiting innuendo and
easily disproved bullshit flowing from the stunningly filthy John
McCain campaign. After being stunned into submission by McCain’s
unapologetic mendacity (and his genius ploy of casting any and all
critique of the GOP as knee-jerk attacks from a biased liberal media),
this week the press struck back with a series of sane, careful articles
calling McCain on his shameless crap. Last Days’ favorite: the
concisely titled “McCain Waging Dishonorable Campaign” by
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus: “All campaigns
fall short, but… it is a phony evenhandedness, comfortable for
journalists but ultimately misleading, that equates these failures
without measuring the grossness of their deviation from the standard of
decency. In the 2008 race, and especially in the last few weeks, the
imbalance has become unnervingly stark. Neither candidate is running
the honest, confront-the-hard-questions campaign he promised. McCain’s
transgressions, though, are of a different magnitude. His whoppers are
bigger; there are more of them… He asserts that Obama’s new taxes
could ‘break your family budget’ and that an Obama presidency would
inflict ‘painful tax increases on working American families.’ Hardly.
Obama would lower taxes for most households and lower them more than
McCain. The only ‘painful tax increases on working American families’
would be on working families making more than $250,000. Likewise, the
McCain campaign has its story about Sarah Palin, and it’s sticking with
it—facts be damned. She said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to that
‘bridge to nowhere,’ except that she didn’t: She backed the bridge
until it was unpopular, then scooped up the money and used it for other
projects… Called on these fouls, he has denied and repeated them…
Is there any reason to trust that a man running this campaign would go
on to be an honest president?” By next week, the McCain campaign will
be actively barring press from campaign events. Stay tuned.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 Speaking of nerve-racking progress: One day
after certified Hollywood star Brad Pitt announced his
$100,000 donation to fight California’s Proposition 8 (the November ballot initiative that would eliminate same-sex couples’
right to marry), today brings another chunk of sensible pro-gay
activism, made all the more gratifying by its unlikely source—the
San Diego Union-Tribune, the conservative
California daily that today announced its position against Prop. 8.
“Christian conservatives have asserted for years that allowing gays to
marry would undermine heterosexual unions—hence, such laws as the
Defense of Marriage Act. In truth, however, there has been no
discernible impact on traditional marriage between a man and a woman
now that gay couples in California have the same right.”

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 In goofier news, today we turn to life in
Tacoma, Seattle’s southern sister city, where last night an
employee at a veterinary clinic called police with news of a
suspicious incident. As today’s Kitsap Sun reports, “The
employee told an officer a Chihuahua had been brought into the
clinic by a 40-year-old Silverdale man. The veterinarian believed
the dog had ingested methamphetamine based on its strange
behavior.” Scanned for its microchip, the dog—which the
Silverdale man told the vet had been given to him to repay a
debt—was discovered to be the long-lost pet of a
58-year-old Bremerton woman, who’d reported the dog missing a year
ago. The tweaky-but-okay dog was returned to its original owner, and no
charges were filed.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 The week continues with a hideously
blood-splattered Saturday, thanks to the massive truck
bombing at a Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, (which killed
53 people, including two U.S. Defense Department employees and a Czech
ambassador) and the deadly shooting spree in Washington State’s
Olympic National Park, where a 36-year-old psycho fatally shot
51-year-old Forest Service officer Kristine Fairbanks and 59-year-old
retired corrections officer Richard Ziegler before being fatally gunned
down by police.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 The week ends with Last Days’ long-delayed
acknowledgement of the week’s history-altering financial mess,
courtesy of guest know-it-all Jonathan Golob: “Nothing happened
today, beyond the continued implosion of the get-rich-quick scheme that
apparently was our economy. One by one, huge institutions of the
American financial system—many that survived the Great
Depression—were swallowed into the growing black hole. Fearing
for their lives, having lost the money of Asian central banks and oil
despots worldwide, the fund managers of Wall Street started raiding the
American taxpayer’s wallet—to the tune of a trillion dollars. On
the positive, we now own an aircraft-leasing business (among many other
things). On the negative, the downward spiral of our financial lives
was only temporarily halted.”

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