FEATURE: After last week's 9,000-word apologist-nostalgia charade of an investigative feature— involving a band of criminals trying to use their "art" and "environmentalist" bona fides to excuse many years' worth of prosecutable activities—it is something of a relief to find The Stranger getting back to what it does best. Namely, latching onto predictable liberal "controversies" and reprinting press releases. CIENNA MADRID's monotonous whine about the feelings of elephants is barely a story, but at least it's not as long as last week's dreck. Why is The Stranger tackling the question of elephants living in zoos now? That's anyone's guess. As an undocumented worker, perhaps Miss Madrid feels some sympathy for the rights of the rightless, which would explain all the embarrassing personification. Or perhaps one of the editors woke up in a cold sweat rightly regretting the recent feature in which the residents of the Woodland Park Zoo "reviewed" an album by a band with an animal in its name, and then decided that something more substantial about the zoo was the only way to eclipse that blunder. Whatever its provenance, the result is a shopworn bore: Every alt-weekly in the country has written about animal-rights activists versus zoos, and Miss Madrid has no talent for making a tired issue seem relevant.

VIGNETTE: Oh look, advertising content masked as editorial content. This one-page advertisement plugs The Stranger's own amateur porn festival, making it that much more reprehensible.

CITY: In the festering hotbed of delusion that is the news section, ELI SANDERS drools over the carpetbagging dreams of hippie elf freak Dennis Kucinich, while GOLDY shills for an imaginary plot by Republicans to strip some pretend constitutional right to public transit from the unwashed masses.

ARTS: It only gets worse as you move from the section of the paper that is supposed to be dedicated to real-world events to the made-up realm of "arts" coverage. JEN GRAVES documents the documentation made by people who prefer to overshare every aspect of their lives, from nudity to bodily fluids to sexual congress. (It is like the blind reporting on the blind in The Stranger's visual art section, I swear.) In the books section, CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE writes with vivid detail all about the stationary bike he was sitting once while reading a book, leaving him very little room to cover the book in question. And in theater, ADRIAN RYAN poses questions to a transvestite and then dutifully records the questionable answers.

ELSEWHERE: In the chow section, CHARLES MUDEDE believes that adults care about where chocolate comes from. In the music section, TRENT MOORMAN needs a fact checker and MEGAN SELING needs to be notified that no one cares. And in the back of the paper, SPORTS BLOTTER needs a bigger typeface if I'm actually expected to read it.