Est. 2026 · Vol. I · The Daily Grievance
Grump News
"The worst thing that happened to me today that you NEED to know about. And some other news stuff."
❖ The Gripe ❖
A Personal Affront, Reported Faithfully
I run a small newsletter where I complain about companies. It never occurred to me that this was dangerous. Then I read about Ina Steiner, who ran a small newsletter about online selling, until eBay's chief executive sent a text saying it was time to take her down. Then the packages started. Live cockroaches. A bloody pig mask. A book about surviving the death of a spouse. Seven people pleaded guilty, and the bill came due this week at fifty-six million dollars. I will continue writing into the void and hoping for such a fate.
❖ The Damage Report ❖
Today's News, Ranked By How Much It Ruined My Mood
🔥 Most Enraging
Federal regulators wrote to the driverless car companies this month about a clear pattern of the cars getting in the way of emergency responders. They park in front of fire stations. They roll into active crime scenes. They do not know what a flare means. There is now a bill in Congress that would require somebody to answer a phone when a fire truck needs a robot moved. I learned what a flare meant from a man yelling at me. It took four seconds.
😩 Most Exhausting
A marmot study in Colorado has been running since 1962. Sixty-four years of watching the same animals in the same place, and last year the grants were canceled, so the researchers opened an OnlyFans. It is called OnlyMarms. A first-year master's student posts the videos, and the professor in charge went to the trouble of telling the New York Times it would be G-rated. There is also a beer now, called Marmot Tears. That is the part I cannot get past.
😤 Unreasonably Annoying
Researchers found charcoal hidden in the black pigment at Font-de-Gaume in France, which finally let them date the paintings. The bison is about thirteen thousand years old. A mask-like figure in the same cave was worked on in three separate stretches, and the last came nearly seven thousand years after the first. Somebody walked back into that cave seven thousand years later and touched up the family painting. I have a hallway I started painting in April.
🤷 Somehow Also Happening
Deputies in Douglas County, Colorado, took a report of a break-in and arrived to find the house still occupied. Two bear cubs, siblings, in through an open window, working through the cat food. Wildlife officers walked them back to the woods, and the sheriff's office asked everyone to bring the bird feeders in and lock the lower windows. Two cubs got further into that kitchen than I get into mine before somebody asks what I am doing.
❖ And Some Other Stuff ❖
Briefly, And With Limited Enthusiasm
▸ A message in a bottle came back 53 years after a 9-year-old threw it in — A man cleaning up wetlands in New Jersey found a sealed bottle with a note in it. A nine-year-old named Laurie threw it off an Ocean City beach in 1973, claiming ruthless sponge fishermen had taken her and were forcing her to dive in shark infested waters. Her older sister took the dictation, having the better handwriting, and remembers Laurie being sure somebody would find it one day. It took fifty-three years. Laurie died in 2019, so her sister is saying I told you so for her.
▸ A black hole nowhere near its galaxy's center was caught eating a star — Astronomers found a black hole a million times the mass of the sun sitting thirty thousand light years from the middle of its galaxy, which is not where black holes are supposed to sit. They only spotted it because it caught a passing star and tore it apart, and the flare outshone the whole galaxy for months. Drifting out there with no address, noticed only because it ate something. That is more or less how my family locates me at Thanksgiving.
▸ The seafloor has a gold kitchen and there is not enough gold in it — Researchers in Kiel worked out that the mantle under the volcanoes north of New Zealand melts over and over until the sulfur minerals that normally trap gold break down and let it go. They are calling it a gold kitchen. It runs constantly, on the floor of the ocean, and it yields six nanograms of gold per gram of rock, which is far too little to be worth going after. The earth has a hobby.
That's all I had in me. Goodbye.
— The Grump · (and Larry)
Grumpnews. Filtered through one bad morning at a time.