In every issue of this fine rag my hack team of wannabe journalists and I tackle some of the most laughable criminal acts that have recently happened in our area. Then - if we're doing our job - we write about those crimes in a way that makes you chuckle, or at the very least gives you something to talk about at family dinners other than how hard it is to hold down your mashed potatoes while wearing The Contour Belt.

It's not the most important of jobs, but someone has to do it. At the Weekly Volcano Crime Desk - along with sending nasty, irrational, downright dysfunctional text messages to former Seahawks coach Jim Mora, just because we know he's got the time to read them, it's our life's work.

This week's Ragnet takes all the way out to the Aberdeen area, where it's so depressing that even lighting porta-potties on fire sounds like a good idea.

Enjoy. - Matt Driscoll

Burnin' for you

Anyone who's ever taken that drive knows it. The Aberdeen area is, quite possibly, the world's most depressing place.

I'm not even going to waste my time drawing the Kurt Cobain parallel here. You get it. The Aberdeen area's gloom has been well documented.

Taking the perpetual dark cloud over Grays Harbor into consideration, we weren't surprised to read last week in Aberdeen's quintessential paper, The Daily Word, about a 21-year-old Montesano man arrested by police last week for a string of mischief that has been wreaking havoc on the town since July.

According to published reports in The Daily Word, police in Montesano responded on the night of Thursday, Jan. 7 to a fire in a recycling bin at city's park-and-ride. Firefighters were originally called to fight the flames around 9 p.m., and it wasn't long before arson was suspected and police were notified - especially because Montesano had been battling a string of similar, intentionally set fires for almost six months.

When police arrived, the fire was, indeed, identified as suspicious. While the Weekly Volcano has no official word on what led authorities to consider the fire suspicious, our knowledge of the Grays Harbor area leads us to believe this is standard operating procedure for all fires in the area - as it's too goddamn wet and soggy in Gray Harbor for things to catch fire without arson being involved.

While police knew they had a serial arsonist on their hands, they weren't expecting a rocket scientist. Luckily, that wouldn't be a problem.

Soon after responding to the flames, police identified a man they suspected of being the culprit hanging around with what The Daily Word called "a group of young men." The Weekly Volcano suspects Daily Word editors nixed the version of the story that included "gaggle of surly white park-and-ride rats" for fear of offending older readers.

While The Daily Word provides no real explanation of how the suspected arsonist was identified, or - really - why he was arrested and booked into the Grays Harbor County Jail on suspicion of second-degree arson, we do know that the string of fires - which, up until the park-and-ride blaze had mostly consumed porta-potties - is estimated to have inflicted $4,000 to $5,000 worth of damage.

"It's a good day," Montesano Deputy Police Chief Brett Vance was quoted as saying in the paper.

For Grays Harbor, it doesn't take much. - 49 Cent, Arson Crime Correspondent