Good Morning, News: You’re (Gonna Be) All Wet, Oregon. With Special Guest Star Ebola!

This bedeviling “summer in October” we’ve been enjoying (or at least I’ve been enjoying it; the rest of you keep keening for grayness and misery) ought to wash away by this weekend. A Pacific typhoon has helped give birth to a “pineapple express” storm that’s imminently headed for Oregon’s shores.

Remember the pit bull that killed the Pomeranian on the streetcar? The attacking dog’s 16-year-old holder has been banned from the streetcar system for three months, under the city’s harassment code—with streetcar officials putting up big signs telling passengers that only service animals are allowed to ride outside a “secure container.”

Columbus Day is dead in Seattle. Instead, they’ve declared Indigenous Peoples’ Day—celebrating the people Columbus’ arrival in the Western Hemisphere helped devastate.

Job openings in America have hit a nice-sounding milestone. They’re as high as they’ve been since January 2001, when President George W. Bush took office. But we’re a more populous country since then, so we’re still technically worse off. It’s estimated that are two job-seekers for every one job that’s available.

Ebola’s spread to Spain, after a nurse contracted the disease while treating a patient flown in from Sierra Leone. Blame, so far, has been cast on the equipment at the hospital where she works: A Spanish newspaper says the protective suits in use at the hospital did not meet World Health Organization standards. (And, yes, every time I write one of these incrementally more worrisome Ebola updates, I imagine it as one of many in a montage at the beginning of some post-apocalyptic thriller.)

The stealthy enterovirus 68, meanwhile, seems far more immediate and frightening, with hundreds of children contracting it in dozens of states. A New Jersey boy who went to bed with some very minor cold symptoms was found dead the next morning after the virus, which causes severe respiratory distress, took hold all of the sudden while he slept.

A key town on Syria’s border with Turkey seems destined to fall into the hands of ISIS—prompting Turkey’s leadership to taunt the United States by publicly complaining that American airstrikes have been far short of effective.

The Islamic State, in expanding its reach in the face of bombardment, has begun cowing resistant villages by threatening to cut off their water supplies, a desperately precious commodity in the arid Syrian and Iraqi lands where ISIS holds sway.

Question! Is it worse to have huffed some solvents before putting your 3-year-old child in the bathtub (I was so not surprised to see this was in Erie, Pennsylvania…)?

Or to have been caught by cops after your 4-year-old passed out some of your 249 baggies of heroin at her day care, because she thought they looked like candy?

EVERY HIGH-SPEED CHASE IS BETTER WITH STOLEN CHAIN SAWS THROWN FROM THE BACK OF A STOLEN CAR. THEM’S JUST THE RULES!