Suddenly had a good guess at who made those Mario-themed drain covers on Page St when I saw this DraINvader cover on Baker St. #SanFrancisco #StreetArt
2026-07-10T15:12:41.507259
Sidewalk chalk art at 22nd and Irving St in #SanFrancisco in front of Uncle Benny's donuts, where, miraculously,* there was no line this morning.
Maybe(?) it's supposed to suggest a bagua? I'd expect more, uh, mid-octant U-turns where there are straightaways to really get something bagua-like.
Maybe I'm just jumping to a culturally-insensitive conclusion based on the presence of Chinese characters at the bottom which I can't even read.
That would go well with the "Laozi" in Chinese characters at the bottom, legendary
author of the Tao Te Ching. (Many thanks to
Paul Masson for translating
those characters.)
I suppose that
Pac-Man on top would be handy for harrying evil spirits a la one of those feng shui mirrors or something.
Maybe(?) by Kal Zakzouk who I vaguely remember making some Pac-Man mazes when he was drawing on Judah sidewalks but hoo boy not sure how well I trust my memory back that far.
*Maybe miraculously or maybe a large fraction of the Uncle Benny's regulars weren't sure whether it'd be open on Independence Day.
2026-07-04T22:24:20.159953
I saw some things on my walk in the #SanFrancisco Upper Haight this morning.
- Page Street, across from the International School of SF: Sewer covers decorated with Mario things. [Update Jul 10]: I bet these are the work of DrainVader
- A block west, near 1260 Page: Sidewalk carp. Jeremy Novy trying a new color scheme? Eclair Bandersnatch going ichthyic? I dunno, I just snap pics.
- Haight Street: Infinite love! sidewalk chalk.
2026-07-10T14:57:59.356217
We sometimes forget to pass along the classics. I posted this old word puzzle on a discord today and it got more of a reaction than I expected; I guess the kids today don't know:
I think I first saw it back in the 1980s. Maybe clued with something like "caused more conflict than anything else in history"?
Games Magazine published puzzles like this called "Wacky Wordies." @Algot@mastodon.art occasionally posts them, calling them "Wicked Wonderful Wordies."
Here are rot13'd clues and solution in case you're stuck:
Ubj jbhyq lbh qrfpevor Z'f cbfvgvba eryngvir gb gur bgure cvrprf? Gur nafjre vf bar jbeq. Gur jbeq raqf va vat. Nf va: gur Z vf "va t". Gur nafjre vf z vf haqre fg naq va t.
2026-06-28T15:31:50.170654
Book Report: 😂 Face with Tears of Joy 😂
It's a history of emoji. Quickly moves past early pictographic writing on up to little pictures on early Japanese pagers and smartphones. I was kinda familiar with a lot of this history. For a few years, Unicode emoji changes would make the news; I remember reading about such things at the time. But reading about them all together shows some trends that weren't so obvious year-by-year.
Reading the first couple of chapters, I was kinda worried. I read this as an e-book. The first few bits talk about ancient pictographic writing systems. The book talks about various specific characters… which my e-book reader's font apparently doesn't support. So the book would say something like "The ancient Sumerian squiqqle П which evolved into a similar Hebrew character () and as well as an Egyptian glyph (◻)" and I couldn't make sense of it until I realized it was failing to display not-often-used-and-thus-omitted-from-the-font symbols. On the one hand, it's kind of a shame: I bet the author had to do an hour of research to figure out each of those symbols, and I couldn't see the result on that research. OTOH, what are the chances that I'd actually retain memory of those specific symbols a day after reading about them? (darned low) Can I imagine a Hebrew character that could have evolved from a kinda-arch-looking symbol? Sure.
Kinda sad to learn that lately many apps have been so eager to expand their choices of emoji, stickers, etc, that they've largely left the Unicode set behind. On the one hand, it's nice when a Discord lets me react with a little "thank you" graphic instead of an ambiguous 🙏. (Did he mean "thanks" or "praying for you" or…?) On the other hand, it's a pity that there's no way to copy-paste that little "thank you" graphic from Discord to anywhere else, instead just leaving around little unsupported-character graphics (◻).
Now I wonder if I keep using the phrase "on the one hand…on the other hand because I was thinking about the 🙏 emoji. Anyhow.
2026-06-23T17:15:45.774453
While waiting for the supermarket to fail-to-open-for-mysterious-emergency-reasons on Saturday, I stopped by 20th and Irving in #SanFrancisco to check for new Kal Zakzouk sidewalk chalk art and was not disappointed: some sort of demon-hunter magician contemplated a couple of imps.
2026-06-22T14:54:00.054550
Today, as part of my continuing quest to figure out where to buy long-sleeved shirts now that 🎯Target is imploding, I visited Macy⋆s on San Francisco's Union Square. That might not seem super-interesting, but I mention it because: When I told people about my plans, more than one said, "Wait, didn't Macy⋆s close?" Behold: SF Macy's still exists:
They don't occupy as many buildings as they used to. So if you remember seeing some news articles about them closing stores downtown, you remember correctly. But they didn't close all their buildings, consolidating in the block just south of Union Square.
2026-06-18T21:06:57.195081
Things I saw in the Upper Haight in #SanFrancisco while walking home from the bagel shop this morning:
The house at Page & Cole that's been covered in scaffolding ~forever is now instead covered in Edwardian-style (?) [Updated to add:] Victorian Stick Style greebles. Also the orange boxy-looking thing in the street: Local stoner fans of The Dick van Dyke Show can now trip over the ottoman (until it's cleared away).
Some colorful chalk art where Haight St. meets Golden Gate Park, sadly scuffed by the time I saw it. But you can still recognize Sonic the Hedgehog and Tails the fox.
2026-06-09T18:43:11.155103
Some sidewalk chalk art I saw on my roundabout grocery shopping trip this morning:
- Dragonrider by Kal Zakzouk, Irving St at 20th Ave. The big dragon has a ☯ yin-yang on their head.
- Scribble by kids, Irving St at 8th Ave. I'm not sure if this was an attempt to draw a dragon with a ☯ on its head or if that's just some bullroarschach that my brain projected onto a scribble.
2026-06-07T17:02:37.914243
This morning I ate some tortilla chips made mostly of corn flour but also some nopal flour, which I didn't even know was a thing. Now I'm wondering how many times I've heard "cactus flower" but was supposed to hear "cactus flour." OK, it's not an important mystery compared to What billionaire crimes are redacted in the Epstein Files? but it meant I could eat tortilla chips for breakfast and call it Vital Blog Research.
2026-05-30T15:47:44.983544
