MONDAY, JANUARY 5 This extraordinarily upsetting series of days kicked off with the first idiotic attack on a purveyor of comedy of the week. The scene of today's blessedly nonfatal attack: the Local 907 pub in Renton, which this evening hosted a comedy show MCed by the stand-up Dylan Avila, who was about to introduce the next performer when a man rushed the stage swinging a baseball bat. As KOMO reports, Avila was struck twice in the head before fellow comics and audience members subdued the attacker, whom some of them recognized. "According to witnesses, the man with the bat had tried out a stand-up routine a few weeks before," reported Joel Moreno at KOMO. "In it, he claimed to be Jesus Christ, but apparently the bit bombed with audiences. Each week the man pushed the same routine, Avila said, so he banned him from the show. Whether that is the motive for the attack is unclear." Whatever the motive, Avila—a well-regarded comedian and a father of three—sustained a double skull fracture that required the surgical placement of two titanium plates in his head as well as four stitches to his ear. As for his alleged attacker, identified by Q13 Fox as Steve Baldwin: He's being held on $250,000 bail and is expected to be charged with first-degree assault. Happy closing fact: The temporarily down but definitely not out Dylan Avila can be seen opening for the comic Craig Gass at Seattle's Neptune Theatre on January 17.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 6 The week continued with an occurrence that will forever be remembered by Seattleites as "that night everything got foggy and smelled like ass." As witnesses to TNEGFASLA can attest, the evening announced itself with an impressively dense fog, which seemed like normal Seattle fog until one inhaled its olfactory awfulness. Described by survivors as "mossy feces," "10,000 rotten eggs," and "like wearing a wig made of used dental floss," the stink was immediately seized upon by conspiracy theorists eager to identify its source. (Top contenders on social media: sulfur [allegedly released as "a precursor to an earthquake"] and dead fish.) Lucky for all, an actual answer came from University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass, who described the likely cause of the stinkfog to The Stranger's Brendan Kiley: "We now have a very strong inversion over the city, which is capping a thin layer of cold, foggy air... Inversions act as atmospheric lids. Winds are very weak. Between the inversion and weak winds, there is very little mixing, so pollutants (and smells) are trapped. So I suspect you are smelling your neighbors' garbage and others are smelling some of the sewer smells that normally are mixed out." Tomorrow, Mass will expand his hypothesis to include a simmering muck of flooded farmland in the east, warm temperatures, and westward-pushing air trajectories.

•• Meanwhile in Denver, the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP was attacked with an improvised explosive device, which detonated against the exterior wall of the building and fortunately injured no one. "The FBI said that a gasoline can was placed next to the device but the contents did not ignite," wrote Jesse Paul in the Denver Post. "According to the FBI, officials are seeking a 'potential person of interest,' described as a balding white male, about 40 years old." In an incriminating twist, today's story of domestic terrorism will remain ridiculously underreported until tomorrow, when stories about the ridiculous underreporting will make their own headlines and a stupid tragedy in France will throw an even harsher spotlight on which skin tones are likeliest to earn the label "terrorist."

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7 In epically worse news, the week continued in France, where today two masked gunmen armed with assault rifles stormed the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where they fatally shot 12 people and wounded four others before being fatally shot by police (the next day, after an extended standoff). Key fact #1: The staff of Charlie Hebdo was known for mocking everything, most notably the prophet Muhammad, who, according to the tenets of Islam, must never be depicted. Despite and/or because of this tenet, Muhammad's likeness has graced the cover of Charlie Hebdo numerous times, often in grotesquely perverse and racist ways. Key fact #2: According to witnesses, the gunmen who executed the staff of Charlie Hebdo wrapped up their bloodfest by shouting, "We have avenged the prophet Muhammad!" These two facts will devour the rest of the week, as the Western world grapples with concepts of free speech and censorship and "poking the bear" and picking your satirical battles, and how even the crappiest, most racist "satire" must be protected from fascists. Key fact #3: Very little of the above actually matters, as critiquing the output of Charlie Hebdo artists after their brutal slaughter is, as Slate's Stephen Metcalf put it, "like critiquing the architecture of the World Trade Center after 9/11." Today's tragedy was nothing but a stupid act of brutality carried out by shitheads. In closing, a modest proposal: If Charlie Hebdo wants to underscore that nothing is sacred, an upcoming cover should make fun of today's tragic massacre.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 8 In not only better but actually good news, today brought an announcement from President Obama, who posted a Facebook video announcing his plan to make "the first two years of community college free for everybody who is willing to work for it."

FRIDAY, JANUARY 9 In not only worse but historically tragic news, today brought word of a humongous massacre in Nigeria, where Amnesty International says as many as 2,000 people have been killed by the terrorist organization Boko Haram.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 10 Nothing happened today, unless you count the Seattle Seahawks' clobbering of the Carolina Panthers in something called "an NFC divisional play-off game." Go Hawks! Your fair-weather fans salute you.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 11 Speaking of hometown excellence, the week ended at Seattle Opera, where today Last Days had the pleasure of attending the matinee performance of Tosca, Puccini's gorgeous funhouse of an opera, based on an 1887 melodrama tracking the travails of a celebrated opera singer, whose Category 4 emotional hurricanes are matched only by her power to enchant. Unfortunately, Tosca's power of enchantment lacks discrimination, and for every handsome prince-figure drawn to Tosca's flame—such as Mario Cavaradossi, the brave, passionate painter—there's a loathsome sociopath like Baron Scarpia, the sadistic police chief who spends an entire aria praising the pleasures of sex with the unwilling. As someone who knows next to nothing about opera and reliably hates 50 percent of everything he sees, Last Days found Seattle Opera's Tosca to be ravishing. Specific point of ravishment #1: the set, created in the legendary Italian scene studio of the Ercole Sormani family, obtained by Seattle Opera in the late 1960s, and consisting entirely of "wing-and-drop" scenery—flat panels intricately painted to appear three-dimensional. Just gazing at these l'oeil-trompeurs had our head buzzing, and then came the cast, led by Mary Elizabeth Williams, one of the two sopranos performing the title role over the course of the run, whose simultaneously powerhouse and restrained performance was a marvel, and peaked with act two's "Vissi d'arte," which inspired a full minute of mid-act applause. (Specific point of amazement #2, for those still counting.) Seattle Opera's Tosca continues through January 24, and if you can go, you should.

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