by Peter Mccollum

“Late Tuesday night, a man broke into a Wenatchee, Washington home, in search of another man he intended to murder. When the residents came home, they found him standing by their open refrigerator, feeding their pet dog pudding. They informed him that this was not the home of the man’s victim and he should leave before they call the police. He did, but not before calling the dog, who trotted out after him. The man was arrested later that night at his home in Wenatchee. The dog has not been found since.”

Crazy story, you may be thinking. And: crazy dude! However. The suspect — one Jason McDaniel — is not as crazy as he seems. Here’s why.

The family wasn’t home on a Tuesday night. Yup: a family in Wenatchee, Washington, was not home on a Tuesday night. What could possibly be happening to make a Wenatchee family not stay home? Were they out watching the local College Summer Baseball team, the Wenatchee Applesox? Because they’re a thing. Were they out marveling at how goddamn cold it is, because they live in freaking Washington? Did they just not want to be in the same room as a TV while the “Jeselnik Offensive” aired? Probably the last one, too. Still, that’s pretty crazy.

And. They have pudding sitting in their refrigerator and they left the house? No.

Their dog is a “black lab-pitbull mix.” Why does that exist?

Their dog, A BLACK LAB-PITBULL MIX, did not attack the man who intruded their home. Then, what was the purpose of combining those dogs?

The man was out to kill someone. He had a reason to break into that home, people.

How many times do you think that dog watched the refrigerator door close, the beautiful pudding sitting idly by, while his owners munched on some carrot sticks or something. How many times do you think he ate absolute gunk and desired just one small taste of some pudding? If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s the pudding’s fault.

Speaking of pudding, pure craziness is the lack of description for the pudding’s flavor or size in the Wenatchee World article. Biased!

Shut it down, Wenatchee’s got a Curling Club. Okay, maybe the family wasn’t as crazy as we thought.

The Applesox play on “Paul Thomas Field.” How many cinephiles go out there just to box with bowling pins or whip their massive, fake Marky Mark dongs out? Lots probably.

The concept of a robber feeding a dog pudding is not really too over the top. Imagine if you broke into someone’s house and the dog barked outrageously. Would you just try to finish up? No, you’d do something to hold the dog over. We’ve already established that these people are probably majorly misguided, so they certainly didn’t keep milkbones lying around for the dog to chew on. Maybe the pudding was the only viable option.

Or maybe he was just hungry for some pudding.

WHAT KIND OF PUDDING WAS IT.

Jason McDaniel is apparently a pretty nice guy. They told him to leave and he did. All he did was wave to the dog and it followed. What does that tell you about the dog’s relationship to his human parents? It’s like the end of Air Bud and McDaniel’s not the clown. “Just saying.”

The only conclusion that can be made from this story is that Wenatchee sucks, plain and simple. It’s a city where people can break into your home and feed your dog pudding, and then steal your dog. It’s a city that has a baseball team named the Applesox. It’s a city where pudding goes uneaten. It’s a city where, this week, a man was arrested for getting naked on a playground and bear-hugging a teacher. The city itself is crazier than Jason McDaniels will ever be.

Crazy Person Of The Week Rating: 3/10. That’s somewhere between a Don Draper puke sesh and a night out with Papa John.

Death approaches, for one and all. But what about our important data stored within free services that Google may or may not shut down before our death? For this, there’s Google Afterlife. It’s not called Google Afterlife, but that’s just what some tech writers have named it, because “Inactive Account Manager” sounds like something Verizon would do to you for $6.99 a month, in or out of the grave.

Here’s how it works: You can go to some Google page and click some things. No more worries about death! After your demise, if Google hasn’t killed off the service, the particular way you misunderstood “Inactive Account Manager” will function as your “Digital Will.” Anyway, you’ll be dead.

Before that happens, you’ll surely want to spend some of your remaining minutes trying to find the “Inactive Account Manager.” Right click the pull down and select “Account,” then look around for a while until you’re not sure if you’re even in the right place, and then just click this link here and there you are! Did you start a YouTube account in 2007 for some reason? That’s probably going to be an issue. Does Chrome keep trying to log you into your mother-in-law’s email because she used your desktop computer once in 2009 and you accidentally clicked “Allow” when those dozens of Keychain prompts kept popping up when you installed Chrome last year? We might need to contact tech support for that one. Just kidding! Google has no tech support.

Anyway, should all of this work out, you can designate another person to get an email someday, assuming this person is still checking email and hasn’t died or finally signed up for a @disneyearth.com address because Google discontinued the Gmail product in 2018. Who will you choose? I know that when I think about death and think about who I want to go through my crap, the usual person I come up with is “nobody.” But go ahead and pick someone! If you have kids, pick the one you like least. They’ll certainly enjoy going through the 30 years of Calendar reminder emails. “Reminder: Re-order dog’s thyroid Rx @ Thu Apr 11, 2013 8:30am — 9:30am” will surely bring a lot of insight and nostalgia to your survivors.

The most important part of the Google Inactive Account Manager is the winsome little graphic on the otherwise stark and graphically barren page. It is a representation of modern life, ending with a trash can. Your memories, and the memory of your existence, will ultimately be deleted just like your Twitter account and your Flickr photos and your one YouTube comment on that “Chocolate Rain” video. Nothing will remain but your tax and debt obligations, and the people or robots assigned to settle those accounts won’t be depending on your voluntary fiddling around with some account management page on the Internet.

(Also, Google won’t let you plan your death until you give Google your cell phone number. Good try, Google! The old-fashioned solution is to just print a text file of your logins and passwords and put that in the manila folder with your printed will, and also put a fast-acting neurotoxin on all the pages.)

• “Their mothers walked down the aisle accompanied by French porn actor François Sagat.”

• “Finally, [a groom] convinced his hero, Erasure’s Andy Bell (an enthusiastic fan of Fab.com, it turned out), to light up the dance floor with a trio of Erasure’s greatest hits.”

• The same groom: “’When I met my current boyfriend, I was getting married, invitations were getting sent, everything was done, and then I met Georgi and fell in love. I met him and a month later, I called off my wedding.’”

When something is just this damn gay, you have to say: good for you, honey. There’s also a 20-image slideshow! Why not. What a town.

NBC/WSJ poll: Most Americans favor gay marriage. Most oppose abortion. nbcnews.to/12QbxWB

— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) April 12, 2013

One problem with Twitter as a news-and-churn source is that it’s hard to summarize things! So here is a telephone poll, of a whopping 1000 people, that finds that… well what does it find?

“According to the survey, a combined 52 percent say that abortion should be illegal either with exceptions or without them, versus a combined 45 percent who say it should be legal either ‘always’ or ‘most of the time.’” What does that actually mean? We already know from far more thorough studies that 63% of Americans would not like Roe v. Wade to be overturned. Here’s the survey’s data. It says this.

“MPs are demanding the BBC back down over plans to play the song Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead on the official singles chart this weekend, after a concerted campaign to make it number one. The Judy Garland song has been seized on by opponents of Margaret Thatcher to celebrate her death from a stroke earlier this week and it has already sold 20,000 copies since Monday. A collection of right-wing newspapers — which just recently were campaigning for media freedom against the Leveson report –have also demanded the BBC desist from playing the song, no matter where it ends up in the charts.”

This weekend marks the thirtieth anniversary of the release of R.E.M.’s Murmur, which makes some of us very old. Those of you who are all, “I wasn’t even born yet” can just remain respectfully silent for a few minutes, okay? Not that we could hear you anyway.

“There was such a purity of thought at the time with people who were involved… We believed if we could create something useful we could be successful. By and large a lot of companies thought we were inventing something good and help people.”
 — Guess what they invented! GUESS!

If I could just point out three of the most excellent of many excellent things on this weekend’s events calendar?

• The Splitsider + Tumblr Dog and Pony Show is happening tonight at UCB East.

• The New York Map Society is hosting our own Victoria Johnson to talk on “Cartography in Fantasy Literature” at the Mid-Manhattan Library, at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.

• The Robin Byrd Show Live is happening at The Cutting Room on Saturday night, with our own Mark Allen as guest star.

by Mike Duncan and Jason Novak

Mike Duncan lives in Austin and is studying public history at Texas State University. He used to write The History of Rome podcast. Jason Novak is head illustrator at The Rumpus and a regular contributor to The Paris Review Daily. Their other collaborations include She Nukes Me, She Nukes Me Not and Papal Abdication: A Potpourri of Popery.

★★★★ In the span of less than 15 minutes, the morning clouds cracked apart and blew away. Daffodils in the building’s side garden were toppling over under their own weight. On Broadway, a man in a black ball cap was lettering “HomeLess” in outline on a fresh piece of cardboard. A half-dozen Mormon missionaries, in neckties and shirtsleeves, were gathered on the subway platform. Downtown, an immense model’s cleavage was coming unzipped in her bathing suit, up against the water towers and the sky. By late day, on the way out of the office, drops were falling from a bright sky; uptown, after a train ride, the contradiction had resolved itself into darkening gray. Night was falling too fast and with sinister pale dents in it. There was lightning over New Jersey, then lightning and thunder close by and all around, and real rain falling. And then came a different, rounder booming noise, clapping off the buildings: The storm had paused long enough for fireworks in the Park.