Close your eyes for a moment and join me in a thought experiment, won’t you? I would like you to think of the most useless article that CHARLES MUDEDE could possibly write. Bear in mind, please, that this is a man who has written about his romantic feelings toward trees, who has all but accused a toddler of committing a racially motivated murder, and who once observed a burglary in his neighborhood and, rather than calling the police, decided to write a pithy blog post instead. How inappropriate, how idiotic, can the man get?

I believe I have located the answer: Mr. Mudede writes this week about clouds. Yes, clouds. As in those things in the sky. And because Mr. Mudede has nothing to say on the subject of clouds—nothing scientific, nothing radical, nothing humorous—he goes to the two places his notably limited imagination always goes: crime and women. Crime involving women, preferably. It is as if he believes all he has to do is describe a death or an instance of female sexual longing when the unwitting audience is, say, expecting an essay about clouds, and the reader, stunned stupid, will just surrender to his rhetoric. In a remarkable performance of the act of stalling—and a remarkable abdication of responsibility on the part of the editor, CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE, who had every opportunity to intervene—the first 938 words of this supposed essay on clouds detail a lovers’ quarrel as summarized by a police report Mr. Mudede misplaced years ago and barely remembers, one that had nothing to do with clouds. Then Mr. Mudede quotes several people with knowledge of clouds. And then he closes his essay with an irrelevant 540-word story about woman-on-woman sexual violence.

In other forays into areas of utter ignorance:

BRENDAN KILEY, who has never owned a car, attempts to act as a consumer reports correspondent for car owners. Mr. Kiley could not identify a carburetor if it were inserted into one of his favorite orifices, although he apparently has solved the world’s oil-supply problems—it involves you not changing your oil on a regular basis. If this is The Stranger’s attempt at destroying most readers’ only means of conveyance—well, that might have worked in 2009, but since the commencement of Mayor McGinn’s reign of error, the readership of the defiantly anti-car Stranger has been whittled down to five deviant mimes on bicycles.

In further capriciousness, after having spent several weeks building up the reprobates and hoboes of Occupy Seattle, news editor DOMINIC HOLDEN decides to pull the rug out from under them, exactly as I predicted. This is what happens when you trust The Stranger with your message, Seattle; they will adore you unflinchingly until they get bored, whereupon they will turn around and bite your tenderest, fleshiest bits.