The week kicks off with an extraordinarily vivid story from Kansas City, Missouri, where the discovery of several unclean storage areas at the city's Veterans Hospital has led to a series of puke-worthy revelations, brought to you courtesy of Reuters. The hideous saga began in the aforementioned storage areas, which are said to have been left unclean since massive hospital staff cuts in 1998. Replacing the disappeared employees were hundreds of mice, drawn to the hospital by the increasingly filthy storage bins. Enter the exterminator, who executes his job so effectively that soon mouse carcasses litter the hospital's every nook and cranny. The rotting mice then draw flies, which, and we quote, "somehow invaded the hospital's intensive care unit and laid eggs in the fetid nasal discharge of two comatose patients." Horrified hospital staff members quickly removed the maggot infestations growing in the noses of the comatose patients; two days later, one of the patients died, of unspecified, but non-maggot-related, causes.
TUESDAY, MARCH 26
In slightly less icky news: Today the Austin American-Statesman reported on the controversy that's rocking Marble Falls, Texas, where police are investigating allegations that five fourth-grade boys took turns giving each other blowjobs during class at Marble Falls Elementary School. In interviews with the police, the boys (ages 9 and 10) admitted that the acts took place last fall and again in February during a free reading time, when everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, is supposed to be reading; Marble Falls school superintendent Dr. Dana Marable said the acts were carried out furtively, with the boys retreating to beanbag chairs in the back of the classroom and covering their laps with coats. "It was a dare," said Superintendent Marable--but at least one mother has said the acts were done under threat. "My boy didn't want to," said the concerned mother, who wished to remain anonymous. "The other boys threatened him if he didn't." (Confidential to the anonymous mom: Wishful thinking is fine, but as the incidents in question took place during a quiet class reading time, with neither the alleged threats nor any attendant protestations overheard by anyone in the packed, silent classroom; don't be surprised if your son grows up to be a real, live, self-starting cocksmoker.) School officials have classified the incidents as "lewd behavior," and suspended each of the participants for one day before relegating them to the catch-all freak bin of "alternative education." Meanwhile, police are concerned about three things: whether any of the boys used coercion and might be charged with a crime; whether the teacher or school officials were negligent or slow to report the incidents; and whether the boys were re-enacting behavior they had learned elsewhere. "Some kids are really precocious," said Amanda Van Hoozer, director of program services at Austin's Children's Advocacy Center. "But if these kids are just normal, average 10-year-olds... I think it's definitely a red flag that a child somewhere within this network of kids has been abused."
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 27
Proof that God is more twisted than Michael Jackson: Today in St. Louis, the world's foremost road safety expert died after being run over by a bus. The Associated Press reports that safety expert Susie Stephens, 36, was in St. Louis to attend a conference on minimizing road deaths in America; while running across the street to make some photocopies, Stephens was struck by a bus and instantly killed. "On an average day, 14 pedestrians get killed by vehicles in America," said Adam Spey, director of the road safety advocacy group the Thunderhead Alliance. "It's gut-wrenching that someone who spent so much of her life to keep that from happening is now one of the statistics."
··Also today: A whole bunch of famous people died, including pioneering television comic Milton Berle, short drunk actor Dudley Moore, and brilliant moviemaker Billy Wilder, who, after fleeing the Nazis, directed some of the most entertaining movies of all time, including Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and the exquisite Double Indemnity. On a lesser note, country swingster Lyle Lovett had his leg broken by a rampaging bull, and 80-year-old comedian Rodney Dangerfield finally received a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. Adding insult to honor, the chronically respect-deficient Dangerfield was presented with his star by Jay Leno and Bob Saget, the two least funny men in America.
THURSDAY, MARCH 28
Two weeks ago, the South African news station SABC reported on the strange sexual shenanigans taking place in the Mamvuka Village in the Nzhelele Valley, where teenage boys, loaded with hormones but terrified of AIDS, which has ravaged the local population, are turning their sexual attention to goats. "We see people in the village dying every day. It's because they have slept with one another and infected each other," said an 11th-grade boy wisely, before adding stupidly, "We won't become HIV-positive because goats don't get AIDS. We often share the same goat and don't get each other's diseases." Today the National Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Animals issued a statement denouncing the AIDS-wary goat molesters, reminding citizens that bestiality is a criminal offense punishable by mandatory imprisonment, and urging anyone with knowledge of ongoing goat abuse to come forward. Goats aren't the only ones hurt by South Africa's ill-conceived safe sex procedures--ask a goat owner. "Since we've learnt that these rumors are true, people don't want to be associated with these goats," said goat farmer Sinah Muskewa to the SABC. "No one wants anything to do with their meat or milk. I'm going to have to destroy my goats."
FRIDAY, MARCH 29
Today Reuters reported this dark Dukes of Hazzard-esque story from Slidell, Louisiana, where two crackheads jacked a Krispy Kreme truck (left running with its rear doors open, in front of a convenience store where the driver was making a delivery), speeding off to the nearby town of Lacombe and leaving a 15-mile trail of doughnuts in their wake. The cops followed the doughnuts, caught the crackheads, and the rest is silence.
SATURDAY, MARCH 30
Today Last Days was blessed with a brilliant hot tip from a Hot Tipper who wisely wishes to remain anonymous. "My boyfriend and I had just finished doing it," reports our Hot Tipper (let's call her "Tamara"). "I heard a noise and looked down just in time to see my dog gobbling down the post-coital condom." Tamara frantically rang her vet, who asked if the condom in question had been wrapped or unwrapped. Learning that the condom had been unwrapped but good, the vet could only advise Tamara to "sift through her dog's stool for a few days"--a hideous task preempted by the dog's "waking from a nap with a strange look on her face," then strolling into the front yard and pooping out a condom. "It was one of the weirdest things I've ever seen in my life," says Tamara, and we believe her.
SUNDAY, MARCH 31
Today was Easter, the most sacred of the Christian holidays, commemorating Jesus' resurrection from the dead, and celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Being a Jesus fan with no belief in the resurrection, Last Days has little use for the religious ceremony of Easter. Being a candy fan with a soft spot for those malted milk "Robin's Eggs," we've learned to make do.
Send Hot Tips and furious, long-winded e-mails detailing irrefutable physical evidence of Jesus' resurrection to lastdays@thestranger.com.
