Dear readers: As you may have noticed, Last Days has been reporting last week's news for the past nine years. During this time we've chronicled floods and riots, deadly acts of terror and hideous public grooming, microwaved babies and ambling scabs. But never have we experienced a series of days so densely packed with trashy horror as last week. From start to finish, the week of February 5 spat forth some of the most agonizingly lurid news stories of the 21st century—and one blessed day of rest. Let's get started.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5 This week of escalating and incriminating tabloid horror kicks off today with a story destined for the history books and next season's movies of the week. We're speaking, of course, of the saga of Lisa Nowak, the 43-year-old NASA astronaut whose love-ridden interstate freak-out made her the bediapered laughingstock of the nation. Details come from police in Florida, where Nowak was arrested early this morning after allegedly driving 900 miles in a wig and adult diaper to confront a perceived romantic rival at Orlando International Airport. At the time of her arrest, the New York Times reports, Nowak was found in possession of a steel mallet, a buck knife with a four-inch blade, a BB gun, and a map to the home of U.S. Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, whom U.S. Navy Captain Nowak reportedly considered a rival in her romance with fellow NASA astronaut Bill Oefelein. Following her arrest today on charges of attempted kidnapping, tomorrow Nowak will face additional charges of attempted murder, with police alleging that Nowak intended to bring "serious bodily injury or death" to Ms. Shipman. But what seized the world's imagination were the diapers, which Captain Nowak—a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who operated a robotic arm during last July's space shuttle mission—told police she'd worn "so that she would not have to stop to use the restroom" during her 15-hour drive from Houston to Orlando. Further investigation revealed such "maximum absorption garments" to be a standard component of the astronaut's toolkit, and the Los Angeles Times took it from there. In an exclusive interview with Valerie Neal, curator of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., Times writer Roy Rivenburg learned that in the 1980s, female astronauts wore zipper-fastened "disposable absorption containment trunks," while male astronauts wore condomlike "urine collection devices" connected to a tube and pouch. In the 1990s, these methods were swapped for adult diapers, laced with a liquid-absorbing chemical called sodium polyacrylate. Stay tuned for more jokes about astronauts in diapers than you ever knew to dread, and for Jennifer Love Hewitt's Emmy-nominated turn in Lifetime's Revenge Served Damp: The Lisa Nowak Story.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6 The week continues with a blessed miracle, as one of the four ministers who oversaw "three weeks of intensive counseling" for Ted Haggard announced that the disgraced reverend has reformed his meth-and-rentboy habits and is now "completely heterosexual." "That is something [Haggard] discovered," said Reverend Tim Ralph to the Denver Post. "It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing." According to Reverend Ralph, members of Haggard's heterosexual advisory board investigated Haggard's claim that hustler Mike Jones was his sole extramarital sex partner, and reportedly found no evidence to the contrary. "If we're going to be proved wrong, somebody else is going to come forward," said Reverend Ralph. "We're into this thing over 90 days and it hasn't happened." With his meth-fueled hunger for cock all cleared up, Haggard is now free to enjoy the fruits of his heterosexuality. According to an e-mail sent to his former parishioners, Haggard and his wife, Gayle, are planning to use their "undisclosed sum" of hush money to pursue master's degrees in psychology and relocate their family to "Missouri or Iowa."

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7 From galling whimsy we move to abject horror, thanks to a cockpit videotape capturing some deadly friendly fire. Details come from the UK tabloid the Sun, which reports that the horror unfolded on March 28, 2003—day seven of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—when a pair of American pilots shot up a British convoy, killing one British solider and seriously injuring four others. Worse, the American pilots, both of them inexperienced reservists, are alleged to have broken a slew of rules en route to the shooting, including failure to identify the coalition insignia displayed by the British convoy, failure to provide precise grid references to their guidance-providing superiors, and failure to attain permission from the forward air controller before firing. Further horror is provided by the cockpit video's audio track, which captures the moments after the pilots learn of their mistake. "I'm gonna be sick," says one. "Yeah," says the other. "We're goin' to jail, dude." Condolences to all.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8 The week continues with the entirely predictable yet still shocking death of Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy playmate turned GUESS jeans model turned seductress of octogenarians turned bloated reality-TV mess turned Supreme Court litigant turned corpse, who was found dead today in a hotel room in Hollywood, Florida. For a detailed wrap-up of the mess and legacy of Anna Nicole Smith, see our memorial on page 18. For now, please join Last Days in praying for a day of reckoning for Howard K. Stern, Anna's lawyer and alleged babydaddy, whom toxicology reports could potentially show was a bystander to not one but two fatal drug overdoses within the immediate family of a clan involved in a multimillion-dollar-estate battle in the past six months.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9 Nothing happened today, unless you count the gazillion hours of television devoted to the events of yesterday.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10 The week continues with the soul-molesting story of Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize–winning author whose attendance at a San Francisco peace conference was marred by an attack from a rabid Holocaust denier. Details come from the San Francisco Examiner, which reports the attack happened on February 1, when the 78-year-old Wiesel was dragged from a hotel elevator by a man who'd reportedly been trailing him for weeks. On the "anti-Zionist" website ZioPedia, a man named Eric Hunt takes credit for the attack, stating that he intended to "bring Wiesel to my hotel room where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his nonfiction Holocaust memoir, Night, is almost entirely fictitious." Lucky for all, Wiesel yelled, his attacker fled, and police escorted an uninjured Wiesel to the airport. And while authorities haven't officially identified a suspect, a source close to the investigation said Hunt is the focus of their probe.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11 Nothing happened today, unless you count the artistically negligible but politically thrilling Grammy sweep by the Dixie Chicks, as Grammy voters celebrated free speech and mocked our embarrassing president by crowning the Chicks winners in every category in which they were nominated, including Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Album of the Year. Congratulations and thanks to the Dixie Chicks, who managed to bring this week of tabloid horror to a nonharrowing close. (Although by next week, Natalie Maines may have slapped on a diaper and hauled ass to Colorado for a meth-ridden three-way with Ted Haggard and that dude who clobbered Elie fucking Wiesel. Stay tuned.)

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