our 85th weekly open mike

Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.

6/20/2026

Anything goes

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Riding to and from my mom & sister’s house takes me to the Renton Transit Center twice daily, and I’ve been intrigued by a vegetarian restaurant across the street, named simply Blossom. So what the heck, a few days ago I stopped there for lunch.

The place is kinda big, with probably more than a hundred seats, but business was not brisk while I was there, about 2PM to 3PM on a weekday. Which is OK by me. I hate crowds. Three tables were occupied when I walked in, nobody else came in after me, and I was the last customer remaining when I left.

This is an injustice against the universe, because Blossom fed me a pretty dang good lunch. And it was vegan, not merely vegetarian.

I ordered Tofu with Assorted Vegetables ($17), described on the menu as “Tofu with bok choy, broccoli, carrot, celery, zucchini, baby corn, mushroom, snow peas, cauliflower. (Rice not included).” I chose it because I’m increasingly weary of tofu pretending to be meat. Even if the restaurant nails it and you’d swear it’s chicken, beef, prairie dog, whatever, meatlessness is the point of being vegetarian, so eating fake meat seems peculiar.

$17 is a reasonable price for lunch in the Trump hyperinflationary era, but it made me suspect portions would be smallish. Being a fat man who hates leaving a restaurant hungry, I added an appetizer, the Blossom Fresh Rolls ($9.50). “Assorted mushrooms, tofu, carrots, jicama, lettuce, basil wrapped in rice paper, served with either peanut sauce or lime vinaigrette.” I went with the vinaigrette, because it was marked as vegan, and the peanut sauce wasn’t.

It took ’em twenty minutes or so to prep my lunch, which gave me time to absorb the place’s atmosphere, and there’s plenty. With wooden tables, heavy wooden chairs, and plenty of Asian décor, including inside trees and bushes and ferns galore, artsy sunflowers, paper lanterns, a bamboo and rock garden in the corner, a friggin’ life-sized statue of some woman/goddess, and lots of art all over the walls, Blossom looks like a place where a meal would cost plenty more than $17.

On my table were three mid-sized silver cruets, each containing who knows what. I neither peeked nor poured.

The waitress was college-age, efficient, courteous, and authentically Asian, complete with an accent from across an ocean or two.

The only drawback was the recorded music, which was weird and got weirder the more I listened. Sitar-heavy pop, heavy on the woo, with oddly over-romantic lyrics sung in a whispered, new-age style. The singers alternated, breathless female and male voices. The arrangement and performance were so damned mellow, it could’ve been fluffy Christian light rock, but instead of lyrics about Jesus it was all about love, bordering on creepy. One of the songs was “I Am Obsessed with You,” but that seemed to be the theme of all of the songs, for the whole hour I was there.

Then the food came, and it was way better than the music.

First, the appetizer: there were supposed to be three rolls, but there were four, each the size of an erection bigger than mine’s ever been. Wrapped in lettuce and a thin layer of some stretchy, almost elastic material, the rolls were exquisite, whether dipped in the lime vinaigrette or eaten without.

Then, the main course: It came on a pretty big plate (rectangular!), jammed with food enough to fill me, so ordering the appetizer wasn’t necessary (but I don’t regret it). All the promised vegetables were there, seasoned and sauced very nicely. The tofu was mixed in like it was another vegetable, and tasted fine.

Despite the menu’s statement, “rice not included,” a large mound of brown rice was present. It was bland and rather dry, same as rice almost anywhere (I’m not a fan), but it became something seriously special when I poured the leftover lime vinaigrette over it.

This felt like a major discovery — boring old brown rice becomes actually, honestly scrumptious, just by drenching it in the lime vinaigrette. Suddenly, that rice was better than the tofu, at least as good as the (very good) vegetables, almost as good as the (fantabulous) Fresh Rolls, and definitely the big surprise of my meal. Best rice I’ve ever eaten.

When I return to Blossom Vegetarian Restaurant, I’m ordering the Fresh Rolls again, with the lime vinaigrette, which I won’t use at all except to pour over the brown rice.

A fork and chop sticks were both supplied, and the latter were real, not cheap balsa wood. I’m a fork guy, though, and never touched ’em.

No fortune cookie, which is my preference.

The restaurant asked for customer feedback on both the tab and the credit card form, so both times I scribbled the same thing — excellent food, very good waitress, reasonable prices, and could you please axe the awful music?

Blossom Vegetarian Restaurant
Food & drink: excellent
Price: reasonable
Service: excellent
Transit: #101, #105, #106, #107, #148, #153, #160, #240, #560, #566, #907, RapidRide #F
Verdict: BIG YES.

6/19/2026

Cheap Seattle

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Here’s a phenomenon I’m seeing more and more: baby strollers with a built-in slot designed to hold cell phones, tablets, or other screen devices.

I don’t mean the slots near the handles, allowing Mom to insert her cell phone and watch YouTube influencers as she’s pushing Junior — strollers had those slots ten years ago. No, I’m talking about device slots at the baby’s eye level, allowing Mom to insert a tablet or a second cell phone, so a drooling infant can watch videos while seated in the stroller, while Mom watches videos as she pushes the stroller.

Humanity is so very fucking doomed.

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A small band of entitled white people torch billboards and blow up bridges, making a messy statement against sprawl and progress, and then they try to outrun some cops trying to arrest them.

I’d heard great things about The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey, but somehow never read it until a few weeks ago, and it definitely gets thumbs up.

The book’s main perps are rednecks, which surprised me. They’re all basically Republicans, driving drunk and tossing beer cans out their car windows, even as they complain about the encroaching suburbs and yak about how much they love the unspoiled wilds. These characters love the National Rifle Association, spew bigoted comments about natives, women, etc, and trade wisecracks like “Register communists, not guns.”

It’s a good read, though. I enjoyed the casual vulgarity of it all, the untidiness and obvious contradictions. It’s more fun that way, than if Abbey had written these guys (and one woman they all leer at) recycling their tin cans, eating vegan, respecting Mother Earth, and working at a food bank during their non-vandal down time.

Verdict: YES.

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Since her surgery and the complications, Mom has recovered most of her strength and personality, but she’s changed in one unexpected way — she’s no longer obsessed with watching the grossest entertainment on television. Instead she watches MSNOW (formerly MSNBC), with occasional side trips to CNN, and nothing much else.

Mom hates Donald Trump, which is my favorite of the few things we have in common. But I hate television. Almost anything on TV, including MSNOW and CNN, leaves the audience dumber than before they’d watched, and I’m not immune. My IQ drops every time I glance at the screen at Mom’s house.

At my request, though, Mom’s willing to mute the sound, and watch only with captions. The silence is appreciated, sincerely. I glance at the screen far less often when they’re not talking, saving endangered brain cells, so thanks, Mom.

Decades ago, I used to watch what was then MSNBC, and it wasn’t as awful then as it is MSNOW. Now it’s 24/7 news with almost no news at all, just talking heads saying Exactly What You’d Expect, as they discuss inside-politics and news that doesn’t matter but dominates the news.

Always, every damned day, they dissect Trump’s popularity polls, citing numbers which matter to nobody. They analyze polls about upcoming elections, and after the election they analyze the vote — state by state, how did blacks, browns, whites, men, women, blue collar, white collar, religious, and the not-religious vote? They’d analyze the vote by voters’ height if the data was available.

If there’s a Congressional hearing, the cameras will be there and air every moment, gavel to boring gavel, and MSNOW’s dozen pundits will all parse and re-parse every witless word. Later that same day and into the next morning, their parsing and re-parsing will be re-run.

When President Trump holds a press conference, getting facts all wrong and insulting his perceived or imagined enemies while his mind wanders everywhere and he’s unable to focus on any topic for more than mere seconds before taking a tangent to some other topic, MSNOW will carry every moment, live and later on tape, without ever pointing out that a buffoon is runni9ng the nation.

Then it’s “breaking news” that the President has signed a bill, that there’ll be Congressional hearings tomorrow, or that the Vice President is giving a speech, “and we take you there, live!”

All this they do, because it’s cost-effective. Doing actual reporting of actual news would be expensive, so while the world almost literally burns, MSNOW provides the shallowest news coverage that could plausibly be described as news coverage.

And it’s always at least a day behind the “real time” of my internet surf cycle. Whatever scandal or event I’ve read about online on Monday will be the main topic on MSNOW all day Tuesday, and they’ll still be talking about it on Wednesday.

And only one, two, or maybe three news stories are discussed. The rest of the news is never mentioned. I’ve glanced at MSNOW during my Mom-visits often enough to have seen perhaps twenty hours of their ‘coverage’ over recent months, without even a moment seriously addressing climate change, or Trump’s military murders in the Caribbean, or any topic that wasn’t all over that morning’s fluffy headlines in mainstream media. You’d be better informed, I think, spending fifteen minutes skimming headlines at The Guardian, than watching MSNOW around the clock.

Last week, for example, Trump made more bullshit claims of rigged elections, this time in California. No evidence is offered, of this or anything Trump lies about, because there is no evidence, but MSNOW spent days debunking Trump’s lies as if they’re serious allegations.

Anyone with a non-negative IQ no longer needs debunkery to know Trump is constantly lying, and nobody needs seven different hosts on seven different shows debunking the same Trump lies seven times.

It’s not too late, Mom — and America. Turn it off.

♦ ♦ ♦

One of my frequent bus routes goes past a Catholic high school, with a big electronic sign out front. When the sign announced, “FATHER-SON CORNHOLE GAMES THIS WEEKEND,” I laughed and laughed.

For Christians and other innocents, cornhole is a beanbag-tossing game, but I spent some years living in San Francisco, where cornhole is slang for anus-play.

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I’ve been eating vegetarian since May, and this item has been in my notebook since March, so it’s outdated, but it still pisses me off:

Fast-food has always been unhealthy as hell, but at least it was cheap. Now it’s unhealthy as hell, and priced the same as a real restaurant meal, or even higher. At McDonald’s, I ordered two Filet-O-Fish and nothing else — $16. At Burger King, two Whoppers and nothing else — $19. And they were Whoppers without cheese!

At my favorite diner, I can eat two juicy quarter-pound hamburgers with the works, each accompanied by an order of sizzling, delicious fries, plus a cup of coffee with endless refills, and it adds up to $18-something.

So seriously and permanently, fuck your fast-food, fuckers.

6/17/2026

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