A text from my brother Dick laments the passing of his favorite restaurant: “I guess ALL the Old Spaghetti Factories are out of business. We tried going to the OSF by SouthCenter but they have shut down like all the others.”Next text, an hour later: “We went to Applebee’s, our second choice, but it was closed and locked, ‘power outage sorry’ said the sign. We are currently headed to our third choice, Outback Steakhouse.”Everyone hates a smug jerk who sneers at people for their choices and habits, but also, hello it’s me. I’d never eat at any of those places unless someone else was buying. So bland. So sterile. So same as last time. Everything’s better at a restaurant where the owner works.

Yesterday, for example, I lunched at King Buffet in Renton. There’s only one location, one restaurant, and it was maybe the best buffet of my life. Six plates of excellent Chinese food left me so satiated, so bloated, I needed the whole day to recuperate … which is why nothing got posted on the blog.

In California it’s been well over 100° every day for a week, and in Texas they’re heat-waving without electricity, so I’m a wuss for complaining, but I’m fat and this sucks: it was past 90° in Seattle for three days in a row.Welcome to climate change — when I was a kid 90° would’ve been Seattle’s hottest day of the year.With no air conditioning, I opened both windows in my room. On one of the windows there’s no screen, so for several days it was an invitation to the bugs, and by yesterday there were twenty flies circling the airspace.

Also a few icky giant mosquitoes, though (I think) they’re not really mosquitos and don’t drink blood.Flying bugs don’t bug me too much, but cripes I hate spiders. It’s a phobia. They’re so gruesome with all those legs, and there’s nothing in life so terrifying as a surprise spider — walking into its web accidentally, or finding one crawling on your shirt.

CRANKY OLD FART #437  [archive] JULY 12, 2024

Well, along with the flying bugs, the spiders came in through the open, un-screened window.Coupla days ago, a pinprick spider walked across the screen while I was watching Guilty Bystander (1950). By pinprick, I mean a spider the size of the head of a pin — so itsy bitsy you wouldn’t even see it unless it introduced itself. I screamed, like always when there’s a surprise spider, and killed it.Didn’t freak out, though. I’m tough.Yesterday, a second pinprick spider, only visible because the spider was in a stream of sunlight, climbed up its web from the edge of a book on a shelf. I screamed, killed it, and again refused to freak out.This morning, a third pinprick spider came dangling lower and lower on its web right in front of my face while I was eating corn dogs. I screamed, killed it, the corndogs landed on the floor, and I fearfully looked up at the ceiling, where I should’ve looked days ago.Yeah, about fifty pinprick spiders were wandering upside-down above my head, and all over above the room. How many more were on the floor, in my dirty laundry, or crawling in the gears of my recliner? I freaked out, screamed, almost puked, but couldn’t squish ’em or anything; it’s a tall ceiling and I can’t even reach it.So now Dean’s not the flatmate I hate most. He’s not even in the top 100. 

The Speaker of the House has endorsed Trump’s call for mass deportations of up to 20-million undocumented immigrants. There are only about 11-million undocumented immigrants in America, so you know the Republicans will be very, very careful about who gets deported.

“Gay furry hackers” have released two gigabytes of data swiped from the Heritage Foundation, the radical right-wing group behind Project 2025.I have no qualms about this — playing by the rules gets you nothing. Three cheers for the gay furry hackers.

Oklahoma’s wingnut in charge of schools has invited his fellow wingnuts to rejigger the Social Studies curriculum, making it more Bibley and bullshitty.

It says here that working from home is commonplace in America now, and will probably stay that way until the collapse.Gotta wonder how such headlines play for retail clerks and warehouse workers and truck drivers, and all the other people who can never work from home. 

Before the internet, news came from newspapers and TV, and it was far from perfect or comprehensive, but it was vetted and at least plausible if not factual.Now news comes from anywhere, and people believe whatever nonsense they’re fed. Hard to have a democracy when the “informed electorate” believes elections are being rigged, Christians are persecuted in America, vaccines are dangerous, Jewish space lasers, etc.

This is nice, I guess: comfy chairs for rape victims as they describe their ordeal to cops who don’t care.But also, jeez, how many decades has it taken before cops could be convinced that obvious victims of crime should have their statements taken more kindly than the suspected perps? 

Redbox was a service helpful for some people, especially non-streamers and rural folks. It was basically an automated video store, but with only a few hundred titles. I was not the target audience. The company croaked a few days ago, everything will be liquidated, and all those ubiquitous red kiosks will soon become past tense, like BlockBuster and DVDs in the mail from Netflix. 

⚡ LINKS FOR THINKS ⚡ • Harm reduction: “We are, for many people, the only service they receive that doesn’t try to make them do something, that doesn’t demand shame as the price of care.” • Only 4% of national TV news segments about Hurricane Beryl mentioned climate change 

⚰️  DEAD PEOPLE  ⚰️Shelley Duvall
actress, Faerie Tale Theatre Benji Gregory
actor, ALF Jim Inhofe
unwiped asswipe Jane McAlevey
union strong 

  7/12/2024   Cranky Old Fart is annoyed and complains and very occasionally
offers a kindness, along with anything off the internet that’s made me
smile or snarl. All opinions fresh from my ass. Top illustration by Jeff Meyer. Click any image to enlarge. Comments & conversations invited. Tip ‘o the hat to the AVA, Bleepity-Bleep, Breakfast at Ralf’s, Chuff, Dirty Blonde Mind, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Jesus Is My Hostage, Lemmy.world, Looking for My Perfect Sandwich, A Sudden Violent Jerk, Mr Souza’s Happy Place, Voenix Rising, and anywhere else I’ve stolen links, illustrations, or inspiration.Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Wynn Bruce,
Joey Jo Jo emeritus, Jeff Meyer, John the Basket, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra
special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and
proved that the world isn’t always shitty.