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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
For years I have been told to worry about the sea coming up. Now researchers in Munich and New Orleans have measured the other half of it. In a lot of the big coastal cities the ground is going down faster than the water is coming up, because of what we have pumped out from under those cities: water, oil, gas. Jakarta is dropping about half an inch a year, and in places a good deal more. So it was never only the sea. We have been pulling the ground out from under ourselves.
❖ The Damage Report ❖
Today's News, Ranked By How Much It Ruined My Mood
🔥 Most Enraging
The whole point of a cold wallet is that the password never touches the internet. You write it down, you put it in a safe, you feel clever. It turns out one brand, Coldcard, generated those passwords predictably, because of a single line of code from 2021, so the thieves never had to break into anything. They worked out how to cut the keys instead. A man who lost one point six million dollars said he had done everything right, and none of it mattered.
😩 Most Exhausting
Two researchers writing up the current science say the brain treats whatever your heaviest weight was as the number it is supposed to defend. Lose some and it turns up the hunger, sharpens the cravings, and burns less energy until the weight comes back. It is not a failure of will. It is the body doing what it evolved to do, which is assume a famine is coming. Forty years of being told I lacked discipline, and the organ in charge was working against me.
😤 Unreasonably Annoying
Nathan Thomas started college at ten, moved to a university at fourteen, had a master's in electrical engineering by eighteen, and was teaching at Miami Dade College less than three weeks before his nineteenth birthday. Guinness has confirmed it. The record he took had stood since the seventeen hundreds. He is now twenty-one and doing a law degree, because the engineering was apparently not enough. I was nineteen once. I remember it as a period of considerable uncertainty about a car.
🤷 Somehow Also Happening
A cinema in Cartagena had to clear a screening of the new Spider-Man film when the room filled with a smell that witnesses agreed was flatulence. Video from the lobby shows the evacuated audience standing about, one of them dressed as Spider-Man. Nobody has established whether it was a person with a medical problem or somebody with a stink bomb. The cinema has not commented. I have sat through worse and said nothing.
❖ And Some Other Stuff ❖
Briefly, And With Limited Enthusiasm
▸ A horse that lost its rider mid-race was airlifted off a wilderness ridge — A horse and rider got separated early in a hundred-mile endurance ride in California. The rider turned up unhurt. The horse took two hours to find and was eventually spotted by a sheriff's helicopter, standing at seven thousand feet in country nobody could reach on foot. They flew a vet in, sedated the animal, strapped it into a lift and carried it out to a reservoir. It walked into the trailer afterwards without a scratch.
▸ Taiwan turns out to have been hiding a forest of eighty-meter trees — A team in Taiwan spent a decade looking for the island's tallest trees, first on four-day treks with the equipment on their backs, then by scanning the terrain from aircraft. Hundreds of volunteers went through the scans by hand. They have now found more than nine hundred trees over sixty-five meters, and the tallest, a Taiwania fir, stands at eighty-four. The Rukai people call that species the tree that hits the moon.
▸ A chewing gum made from beans cut HPV levels sharply in lab tests — Dental researchers at Pennsylvania built a chewing gum out of lablab beans, which naturally carry an antiviral protein, and added an antimicrobial peptide to it. Tested on saliva samples from patients with head and neck cancer, it brought HPV levels down by more than ninety percent while leaving the useful mouth bacteria alone. This was all done in the laboratory and not in people, so nobody should go looking for it yet.
I've used my words for the day.
— The Grump · (and Larry)
The news, but make it personal.