It's spelled "fascists," kid. You got the important parts right, though.
![stenciled graffito on yellow crosswalk paint on asphalt. It reads: Facists wont stop until you [picture of crossing guard's handheld stop sign] stop them](https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/importable/2025/facists-wont-stop.jpg)
2025-08-25T14:17:41.542976
For years, I've enjoyed the sidewalk chalk art at 20th Ave and Irving (or, earlier, Judah) street in #SanFrancisco. Today, there was no sidewalk chalk art, so I looked up… and thus spotted a window sign telling me who the artist is: Kal Zakzouk. Apparently, he even got written up in the neighborhood paper, but I didn't notice (perhaps distracted by the many many unhinged letters to the editor that dominate that paper's feed)..
He has a gofundme for legal fees. If you've enjoyed his art and can spare it, maybe toss a few bucks his way.
2025-08-25T13:58:38.316301
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: David Hill writes about gambling nowadays; but back when he lived in Hot Springs, Arkansas he was kind of a big deal in their Midnight Madness puzzlehunts. So maybe it's not surprising that he ran a puzzlehunt for serious sports bettors in Las Vegas recently https://davidhill.substack.com/p/not-fun-at-all-really
2025-08-22T15:36:38.271780
A couple of things I saw on my roundabout walk to the supermarket in #SanFrancisco this morning:
- Some sidewalk chalk art by Kal Zakzouk from Irving at 20th Ave. The art features four monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and wearing headphones and staring at mobile phone oblivious to real world (no evil, I guess)
- A storefront advertising "AI integrated PoS system." Merchants and normal people can't agree on whether PoS stands for "Point of Sale" or "Piece of Shit." But thanks to AI integration, both can be true! Seen on north side of Irving St near 15th Ave.
2025-08-24T15:56:05.777877
Book Report: Hella Town
It's a history of Oakland, California viewed through the lens of physical construction: buildings, roads, infrastructure, etc. I learned some things.
E.g. Why did San Francisco take off, population-wise, while Oakland stayed a sleepy set of farms for such a long time? OK, the Portola expedition stuck to the coast, so it makes sense that they'd establish a mission in San Francisco; and San Francisco had an OK port. But Oakland has a great port; and it's better-connected to more arable land. Why didn't Oakland become the hub?
Nowadays Oakland has a great port. That's the the result of a lot of dredging. Back when the Spanish first invaded, the waters around Oakland were shallow and marshy. If you convinced a seaship captain to sail into Oakland instead of San Francisco, that seaship would get stuck in the mud.
Nowadays, a lot of big businesses make stupid mistakes all together. One imagines an echo chamber of CEOs at their parties and group chats, talking each other into the most asinine schemes. Maybe that's not new. I read about Oakland's Mahogany Eucalyptus and Land Company planted a lot of trees in the Oakland hills, planning to use them for timber; but they chose a kind of tree that doesn't grow into good timber. I pinched myself: was I reading a book about San Francisco? Adolph Sutro planted a lot of eucalyptus around San Francisco, which turned into a nuisance; the trees grew fast, which would have been good from a quick-timber-harvesting point of view; but, alas, they didn't grow into useful timber.
Anyhow, sympathies, Oakland. Sorry about that big fire up in the hills some years back.
Back before BART, there was no commuter rail system from the east bay to SF; but before that absence, there was a different such commuter rail system: the Key System. When the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge was first built; one deck was for cars and one deck was for the Key System. But then the Key System wasn't working so well anymore. Train tracks were dismantled, replaced by buses; eventually taken over by AC Transit.
I always assumed this was some anti-train conspiracy of oil companies and auto manufacturers. That was a fine guess; oil companies and auto manufacturers have ruined many other things. But this book pointed out that I'd overlooked another wellspring of conspiracies: land speculators. The Key System itself was a sneaky ploy by real estate developers.
The Key System wasn't exactly an economically sustainable business. It often lost money. But it was owned by a real estate developer who was selling homes in Oakland. You could sell houses for much more money if homebuyers had an easy commute to their San Francisco jobs. So a little subsidy to the Key System meant making much much more money selling houses.
But when he had sold all those houses, he was no longer motivated to keep subsidizing the Key System. And thus it fell apart, and those homebuyers found out that they were going to have to figure out how to drive to San Francisco (and park there) after all.
Pretty sneaky.
Do sports fans in your cities try to attract teams by building massive sports complexes? Do they claim that these are wise investments that will, long-term, bring revenue to the city? The Oakland Coliseum had nine profitable years from 1966-1991; mostly it needed subsidies.
Oakland's politicians in power were pretty eager to tear down houses in not-white neighborhoods to build highways and BART tracks. This wasn't insane; racist whites had voted in Oakland's government. "Those people" in the torn-down neighborhoods already weren't happy. Surely Oakland's racist whites would appreciate the shorter commute times to their San Francisco jobs; surely they would re-elect Oakland's politicians for life, surely. And maybe that happened to some extent.
But many, many of those racist whites thought, I know I can tolerate a commute of N minutes. And thanks to this new highway/BART line, that N-minute commute could carry me further east, to one of these new developments in Contra Costa county. In the end, those highways and BART lines sped up white flight; and new politicians rose to power in Oakland.
Ha ha, kinda funny until you remember that those houses aren't coming back. Ah well.
A welcome bright spot: Eichler, as in "Eichler home," was willing to sell to minorities even before laws forced sellers to do that.
2025-08-17T00:28:22.049770
Some things I spotted on my morning exercise walk:
- A chestnut sticker by @SFColorPalette (Alas, that's an Instagram link, and this design doesn't work so great on Instagram.)
- The Golden Gate Park bison. I was kind of groggy because the outdoor concert Outside Lands, 30+ blocks from my apartment, had been loud enough to keep me awake last night. I wondered how the bison, across the road from the concert, dealt with it. Bear up bison; never say die.
- A mural on a garage door that was new to me, but dated last year; I guess I don't make it out to 2722 Judah Ave very often.
- Sidewalk chalk art at 20th and Irving by Kal Zakzouk; alas, kinda smudged and faded by the time I got there.
2025-08-24T15:42:50.678906
get_memes.py , bye
Back in 2023, there was this new-fangled social media thing called Lemmy. It was pretty cool but with an annoyance: its RSS feeds didn't embed graphics. Weirdly, they did include the text addresses of graphics that were embedded. So if you followed a Lemmy channel in your feed reader, instead of seeing pretty pictures, you just saw not-so-pretty nonsense like "https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/75598c1e-c833-44b5-9bc4-cae93d2a3685.webp". It was pretty easy to write a little program to fetch some Lemmy feeds and create new feeds with embedded graphics, and I did.
Yesterday, my little program had a hiccup and before investigating that hiccup, I thought to check: Does Lemmy still do that annoying thing? Lemmy now embeds graphics in their RSS feeds, yay! At some point in the past couple of years, my little program became the workaround to a non-problem or ex-problem or something.
This morning, I shut it down. Thank you, get_memes.py . You were pretty handy for a while.
2025-08-08T13:29:58.538399
Today I failed to find something scavenger-hunt-y at Lobos Creek Valley, but to make up for that I found a Presidio Field Note.
2025-08-05T17:06:41.974475
Some things I saw on my morning exercise walk in #SanFrancisco 's Golden Gate Park.
fnnch's light-up Solar Arch got moved to a new spot. Back when it was on the east end of the park, walkers on Stanyan after dark would get surprised to see this lit-up thing shining through the trees. Now that it's in the new spot, I guess nighttime walkers on Fulton can have the same experience. (Not shown in the photo: an impressive caravan of trucks installing porta-potties for tomorrow's marathon. I couldn't fit the whole caravan into one picture, sorry.)
Naga the Sea Serpent is still taking shape. I waited around a little while for bubbles, but none seemed to be forthcoming. Something to look forward to, I guess.
Some tires with (Mayan-style?) art painted on in gold. I dunno what these are; didn't spot anything obvious on the Golden Mile web site. I'm not sure whether the big orange barriers mean this artwork is still being installed; or are meant to keep tomorrow's endorphin-addled marathoners from bumbling into them.
2025-07-26T18:14:56.174870
My library lets me use PressReader, a collection of magazines and puzzles, including a daily cryptic crossword. Maybe your library does, too. (The magazine selection seems weird to me, mostly European? Does Italy really need its own version of Wired? I gave up on the magazines and went back to the puzzle section.) Thanks to Bunnytown for pointing this out.
2025-07-21T23:21:14.715355
