About A Clockwork Orange

After having successfully ripped off the "I, Anonymous" column in The Stranger of Seattle and renaming it "Hey, You!", OC Weekly editor Will Swaim set about pilfering The Stranger's week-in-review column, "Last Days." Matt Coker drew the short straw to compile the thing, and "A Clockwork Orange" was born on Sept. 20, 1996. Actually, a Coker column called "The Week in Review" appeared a week earlier, in the first issue of the Weekly's second year, but since that sounded so boring, Coker decided to help himself to the title of the Anthony Burgess novel/Stanley Kubrick film. It banged along for the next several years, in different formats, until Steve Lowery's far superior "Diary of a Mad County" took over Clockwork's print-edition slot, and Clockwork eventually found a (temporary?) home on the web.