MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17 Hello and welcome to a very special edition of Last Days, in which we venture out of our usual private bunker of composition to write this column from within the heavily scented, human-filled wilds of the Alderwood Mall. For those who don’t know or can’t remember what a “mall” is, think of it as the internet in 3-D, where stores are sites, seasonal kiosks are pop-up ads, and everyone’s allowed to hang out for free so long as they don’t mind being aggressively advertised to. In the second half of November 2014, the Alderwood Mall is a holiday wonderland, where the endless red of the Christmas window displays gives way to ever-present bursts of ice blue, sea blue, and neon green, thanks to the omnipresent licensing triumphs of Disney’s Frozen and the Seattle Seahawks. The alleged point of it all: finding the perfect holiday gift, which, as the week’s first news item makes clear, cannot be found in any mall, as it is already in the possession of Jose Canseco, the former baseball great who last month blew off his middle finger while cleaning his gun and today announced his plan to auction off his liberated digit on eBay. “The eBay ad will read slightly used middle finger with 462 home runs could be used as a stirring straw for drinks,” wrote Canseco on Twitter this evening, after which he tweeted his plan to also auction off the gun that did the finger-blasting, perhaps as a “package deal.” “Despite Canseco’s intentions, he likely won’t be able to auction either item,” reports the New York Post, as “eBay’s policies prohibit the selling of firearms and only allow the selling of human remains if they are ‘items containing human scalp hair, and skulls and skeletons intended for medical use.'”
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18 Speaking of gifts, the week continued with a wonderful one from the Bavarian town of Wunsiedel…
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