Walking in Golden Gate Park today, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon The San Francisco Old Car Picnic. I don't know much about cars, but I do appreciate a shiny paint job.
2025-10-18T21:53:07.009247
October 10–11 2025, I walked, roughly, around San Francisco.
The Crosstown Trail people published The Roundabout, a walking guide to streets and trails around the edge of San Francisco. I saw it would take me through a new-ish housing development in Hunters Point that had been in the news a lot; and a swath of Sunnydale I didn't know. It would be an excuse to visit some parts of town I hadn't seen in years. So I went. I took some photos. I took some notes to keep in mind for next time. It got kinda long for a blog post, so I made a whole web page for it: Roundabout 2025.
2025-10-14T22:35:44.451047
As Hallowe'en approaches, some of the seasonal displays at the grocery store give mixed messages.
It's not wrong, but it might make more sense above the yogurt instead of the strawberries.
2025-10-13T14:29:10.286846
I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether brunching at a neighborhood crêperie is a fine way to occasionally take a break from my own cooking or a foolish boost to future dementia risk. Lately, some good news and some bad news. As you may remember (depending on whether you read my posts and/or your current dementia state), I track three SF COVID numbers. Lately, the PCR test positivity % has been low. That's good! Also lately, the COVID-in-wastewater numbers have been high. That's bad!
There's an old joke from the age of mechanical timepieces: Someone with a watch always knows what time it is. Someone with two watches is never quite sure. To figure out whether I'm willing to swap inside air with my fellow San Franciscans, I let the dashboard multiply together the numbers I track and look at the overall product. Overall, I'm still happy to go places (he wrote, licking omelet juice from his lips). There were a few days about a month and a half ago in which I avoided going indoors…but as more data came in, I looked back and thought that I prrrrobably would have been willing to go out those days, too.
Some good news for data nerds: The Cal-SuWers dashboard, where I get SF COVID-in-wastewater data, now also has data (and graphs and such) for flu and RSV. They used to mostly post new data weekly (confusingly, with some data coming in at other times), but now post data every weekday. According to them, overall California COVID levels are falling and are now "low". (For the past few weeks, they were plateau-ed at "high".) They also say that SF Bay Area levels are low, though they used to be high. Here's hoping that SF's recent bump is just an aberration and we'll catch up with the rest of the Bay Area soon.
2025-10-07T16:07:45.798585
I took pictures of a couple of boxes in Golden Gate Park this morning.
There are some public pianos in the park, kept in big boxes at night to elude the attention of drunks, raccoons, and coyotes (who never learned to play well but refuse to admit it). A couple(?) of weeks back, the piano by the Conservatory was knocked over. At the time, I blamed drunks. But now I guess that a bona fide musician knocked that piano over while struggling to extract it from its box. Today, there was a new box on rollers and tracks, a lot easier to move. Hopefully, future musicians can sit at the piano even if they've skipped leg day for the past twenty years. (Well, almost: when I rolled the box back to take this picture, I couldn't get it all the way back; a couple of cutouts on the back panel weren't quite big enough to clear obstacles without me lifting. But that's fixable!)
The de Young Museum sphinxes are under repair. They're pretty old, the internet says they've been there since 1907. For now, you can't see them, they're enclosed within big boxes. There's a flyer on one of the boxes that tells you what's going on and encourages you to call the arts council with any questions. I was tempted to call up and ask "What is it that walks on four feet in the morning, two feet in–" but I thought they might not have anyone answering questions at 0730 on a Saturday morning,
2025-09-27T15:58:52.808756
Occam's Razor hard at work in Golden Gate Park this morning.
Me walking past the tennis courts: Hm, why is there a big crowd of people standing around awkwardly at 0730 in the morning?
Me walking along JFK: Who is this bozo driving their car along the car-free part of JFK? Oh, there's a big decal on the side of the car. "Laver cup?" What is that? Are they advertising something like a Stanley Flask?
Later on, I'd get on the internet and find out that the Laver Club is a tennis tournament, and I was watching some tennis official gradually figure out that they'd passed the place and were lost and late.
2025-09-20T15:54:24.895315
Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts
It's a puzzlehunt drama, with the emphasis on the drama. The hunt's designer says "And the true prize, the jewel at the end of the journey, is the discovery of the self." I kept trying to emphasize the puzzlehunt; but this book ain't Winston Breen.
The story's a mystery; this book report contains, uh, converse-spoilers. That is, I kept reading the book in puzzlehunt-mode and thus anticipated things that don't happen. I guess they're minor? (If you were hoping for a plot synopsis or discussion of the (interesting!) characters, probably you want someone else's review. If you're reading my blog, I assume you're here for puzzly stuff.)
Our protagonist reads a note from the puzzlehunt designer, noting there are typos. I, of course, reached for a pencil and a piece of scratch paper to jot down the typos to see if they spelled out a secret message. They do! You think that's a spoiler, but: Nobody in the book ever notices. The secret message is an easter egg for the reader.
So that got me thinking about other places the puzzlehunt designer might leave overlooked easter eggs. There's a coded message made of dingbats: ☥☈⚰…many symbols…♀♛. I wondered about the choice of the [spoiler redacted] and [spoiler redacted]: those symbols seemed like they could relate to the plot. I wondered what meaning the puzzlehunt designer assigned them in the code. But when I read the decoded message, it mostly but didn't quite match up to the coded message. Maybe some editor decided to to re-word the coded message but then didn't go back to insert a couple of new dingbats? Anyhow, I gave up on that one.
At one point, a secret message says "Seek well," a reasonable phrase to use in instructions to puzzlehunters. The main characters really fixate on the phrase. I wondered: is this an "easter egg" from the author to readers that we should be on the lookout for a sequel? It's been years since this book was published, and no sequel has appeared. I think I was once again barking up the wrong tree.
It's a fun book. I probably would have had more fun if I hadn't hared off chasing down mirage "easter eggs" though. (But maybe not? I am kinda wired for that?)
BTW, if you "view source" on the blog post version of this here post, below you'll see a kinda major spoiler: my notes on the dingbat message. If you want a head start on analyzing and don't want to figure out how to enter weird characters like ☈, it could come in handy. (I'm guessing "you" are me, five years later.)
2025-09-14T15:46:44.662677
A neighborhood mystery solved: Some weeks back, I walked past as someone in a forklift repeatedly rammed into the side of a UCSF building at Arguello and Irving, poking a big hole in the wall. Since then, the room thus entranced has been under construction. Like the guy in the Tom Waits song, I wondered "What's he building in there?"
As I walked past today, a forklift stood by for the delivery of a big ol' medical scanner (MRI?).
2025-09-13T18:02:24.248781
It's a vax selfie.
Normally I'd wait a month for the COVID vax so it would be full-strength for mid-January. But I worried that some worm-eaten snake oil huckster might find a way to ban all vaccines in the next few weeks, so got it early.
2025-09-12T17:55:25.134533
#SFHellscape
2025-09-10T15:14:29.935681
