I have returned from winter vacation in time to warn you to drop this newspaper immediately. This is an issue I always encourage readers to drop, to skip, or to set on fire, and the reason is always the same: Unlike most issues of The Stranger, in which staffers trade good reviews for free alcohol and disgusting sexual favors (which is vile but can be briefly compelling in the way that highway catastrophes are), what we have here is the annual issue in which winners of the holiday charity auction Strangercrombie dictate the contents. To borrow the idiom of the internet: zzzzzzzz. The Strangercrombie auction this year went to benefit two liberal social-safety-net mainstays, Downtown Emergency Service Center and Childhaven, neither of which can really be criticized, thus my boredom. I suppose I could fault The Stranger for trying to burnish its image by raising money for good causes while inflicting manifold varieties of badness on the city the rest of the year, but I have made that critique before and it never sticks.

Still, the shilling for various businesses and entertainers this year redefines "phoning it in." Consider CIENNA MADRID's feature story, about a service for lesbians named Lezzbook. Madrid's prose is so dry it nearly crumbles off the page, but it reads like a housewife's well-thumbed pirate-themed erotic novel when compared to DOMINIC HOLDEN's snorefest in the news section about local small business Office Nomads. It does not seem fair that The Stranger auctions its column inches to people aspiring to have their pet causes noticed by the larger populace only to publish the most flatulent, least invigorating prose of the calendar year when the buyers come calling.

This is what people bought? PAUL CONSTANT's willful misremembering of history, JEN GRAVES's halfhearted jaunt into abstract impressionism, BRENDAN KILEY's intensely uninteresting gloss over two upcoming shows, DAVE SEGAL's listless interviewing skills, DAVID SCHMADER's befuddled and wrong-headed attempts to glorify handouts in his promotional copy for Northwest Harvest, BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT's insanely bloated self-regard, and the opportunity for DAN SAVAGE to mock and belittle his bidder's good- natured advice in print?

At least LINDY WEST managed to restrain herself from her usual orgy of cusswords and typographical mayhem. (You see, Miss West? This kind of professional prose is what is possible when you actually apply yourself to your job! Now that I have been reminded that you are capable of penning a real, reported story, my weekly expectations for you have been raised ever-so-slightly once more.)

And books intern ANNA MINARD managed to compose a Party Crasher that for once did not implant within me a faint desire to drop a nuclear-powered explosive device on someone. Even though she wrote of crossdressing and of sampling an illegal substance (when, o Lord, when will this "Four Loko" finally disappear from the face of the earth?), she somehow managed to retain both her own dignity and the dignity of her subjects. Well-played, unpaid intern! Once again, the peon class shows the drugged-out overlords how it is done. Now go find a job.