- >>
Here are three popular blog posts from 2024: "I see the NYT Tech Guild went on strike, so this might be a good time for me to post links to my list of daily puzzle pages…" "The Page Slow Str...
- >>
If a puzzlehunt nerd happens to spam nutrimatic, does that mean they apply something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ham to something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea? This semi-coh...
- >>
It's a semi-new mural on Irving Street: ...
- >>
I continue to check my little dashboard of San Francisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether visiting the nearby university food court for a burrito is a pleasant convenience or the even...
- >>
I bought a new broom today. I chuckled over its brand, "Libman"—do they sell better in "blue states" than in "red?" Curious, I googled [libman broom]. I noted the ads at the top: Which adverti...
- >>
Today I saw a coyote in Golden Gate Park at 0745. This throws cold water on my "I haven't seen coyotes lately because I've been going out later and they're snug in their beds by 0630" theory. Maybe i...
- >>
I have updated the Phraser word and phrase lists. Those of you who find these lists handy for solving/designing word puzzles, rejoice! This update incorporates an epiphany! (It also has updated co...
- >>
I'm not sure how this graffito started out, but it turned into a good explanation of the science behind those online personality quizzes. ...
- >>
Utility box decorated by Marc Wagenseil aka @_leaf_litter@instagram. Irving at 4th Ave, #SanFrancisco ...
- updated phraser again
While investigating the question "Why doesn't phraser know about [[Redacted MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle solution Redacted]]?" I found a bug: When reading Wikipedia, if there was an absurdly long paragrap...
- >>
Seen on Haight Street, San Francisco, USA; applies in all geographries. ...
- >>
I continue to check my little dashboard of San Francisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether getting together with a dozen nerds in someone's house to solve puzzles is fun weekend plans ...
- >>
I saw mention of another movie database. I already knew about IMDb, a pretty-good example acquired by Amazon some years back. New to me: TMDb, The Movie Database. I previously figured out how to use ...
- >>
A little over a year ago, the 9th and Irving Starbucks unionized. That's why became a regular. I guess that's also why Starbucks is shutting down this always-busy store. Considering the con...
- >>
I found out about GroceryDB, a data set of grocery ingredients sold at some big chain stores (via the excellent Data is Plural blog). Thus, future versions of the Phraser phrase list will know about ...
- >>
I moved my backups off of Google servers. Many months ago, April 2024, Google fired workers protesting Project Nimbus, a Google-Amazon-Israel project, during an intense period of the Gaza Genoci...
- Book Report: Empire of the Sum
It's a history of arithmetic technology leading up to (and after) the pocket calculator. I wasn't expecting to learn much; but I did learn some. Why wasn't I expecting to learn much? I've read a lo...
- >>
Chalk art at 20th and Irving in San Francisco: ¿dónde están los huevos? ...
- Richmond District Onion Domes
Walking in #SanFrancisco 's Richmond District, I saw a new-to-me (but actually almost a year old) mural by Sorrell Raino-Tsui of the ABG Art Group and/or Athen B. Gallery. Celebrating immigrants who ...
- Book Report: Under a White Sky
Elizabeth Kolbert, science writer, visited scientists trying to undo some of humanity's damage to the ecosystem and perhaps avert the end of all human life. E.g., trying to keep a very-efficient sn...
- >>
Every day, I play the puzzle game Collections. It starts out kinda like the game show Wheel of Fortune: You're looking at three sets of blanks. You ask about some letters. The game shows you where th...
- >>
#SFHellscape ...
- >>
It is once again March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "flow". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish ad...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "staff". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish adviser Elon...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "psychic". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish adviser El...
- >>
It is once again March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "heart". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish a...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "trap". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish advi...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "turn". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish advi...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "link". There's no story or secret message today. This is just a word ladder....
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "quarter". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish a...
- >>
So long, Dana King's Rooted (In) Justice statue on San Francisco's "Golden Mile." You were nice while you lasted. ...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "ship". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adv...
- Book Report: The Mother of all Questions
It's a collection of feminist essays by Rebecca Solnit. There's a lot of good stuff in here. E.g. advice on what to do if someone asks you a strange question and your Spidey-sense thinks they might ...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "hollow". Hmm, does "hollow" have any interesting synonyms? Oh yeah, gulf. Oh...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "house". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump lives in the White Hous—o...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "flag". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adv...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "point". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish ad...
- Book Report: The Westing Game
It's a kidlit mystery. I read it back when I was a kid, and liked it plenty then. I wanted to re-read it to see if/how it held up, especially after reading Chuck's review (in his case, reading it for...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "joker", as in "clown." Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "star". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adv...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "bow". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish advi...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "lucky". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (and similarly his buffoonish ...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "pause". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish a...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "machine". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish a...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "case". As in, "In case of fire, break glass." Here, "case" describes a a cond...
- Book Report: Steve Kerr, a Life
A few years back, someone told me: Keep an eye on that Steve Kerr basketball coach guy; he could be governor one day. Thus did I, not really a sports guy, find myself reading a sports biography. Peo...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "combine", as in "consolidate." Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged o...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "board". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adv...
- >>
I made a new page for my site: Bonobo Lexigrams. I was looking over the Ape Initiative's lexigram sheets that they use when working with bonobos. I thought maybe someday I'd want to have a searchabl...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "ring". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish advi...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "search". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish ad...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "random". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish ...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "play". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump and his buffoonish adviser Elon ...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "loop". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adv...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "draw". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump, back towards the end of his dis...
- Book Report: Thinking Inside the Box
It's about crossword puzzles: history, current bigshots, the author's personal experience attending ACPT and a crossword-celebrating ocean voyage, … You are not shocked to learn that I a...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "compass". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish a...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "route". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adv...
- >>
It is March and the lovely EnigMarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "puzzle". Oh no! The USA clown President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish ad...
- Book Report: True Blue Kangaroo
It's the third book in Curtis Chen's Kangaroo sci-fi/spy/comedy series. It continues the tradition of witty banter, action, and intrigue. Of course, I was mostly focused on looking out for the puzzl...
- >>
I'm sufficiently vain to set a Google alert so I find out when I'm mentioned someplace new on the World Wide Web. Thus I found out I'm in the Acknowledgments section of a recent academic paper. Oh, ...
- >>
USA folks over 50 years old: Some months back, the CDC started recommending that people 50+ years old get pneumococcal vaccine, against pneumonia, which you don't want. (Previously, they recommended...
- >>
Some photos from my morning exercise walk. Shot of the Golden Gate Bridge to be a home screen for my new phone Today's chalk art on 20th and Irving: Ha ha, so appropria— oh wait, she got...
- >>
Some pics from my San Francisco morning exercise walk: A new-to-me little free library in the shape of its accompanying house (kind of a thing in the Sunset District) at 14th Ave and Quintara (a.k....
- >>
Seen on my morning exercise walk in San Francisco… A new-to-me little-house-model-in-front-of-house, Waller St at Del Mar (a few houses down from the four seasons Victorians on Masonic) A myst...
- >>
Some pretty impressive sidewalk chalk art on Irving St at 20th Ave in San Francisco this morning: ...
- >>
Several months back, some loon started posting hate-flyers on the stretch of Irving Street from 9th Ave to 19th Ave. At the time, I blogged about it, saying it was the work of a "hate group," but in...
- >>
Some pics from this morning's walk in #SanFrancisco The newly-open Bay Area Young Survivors Breast Cancer Memorial Garden An outdoor foosball table. I didn't know that outdoor foosball was a thing....
- >>
New/old signage up at the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart, a.k.a. Twitter HQ for many years Ready to try again & make new mistakes ...
- 47 Million Hits, COVID fluctuations
Wow, it's the site's 47 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
- >>
I snapped a couple of pics on my morning exercise walk today: Wondering why a normally-open section of pavement in the Golden Gate Park panhandle was fenced off with some strange angular shapes insi...
- >>
As I walked around the corner of the California Academy of Sciences on my morning exercise walk, I was surprised by a roar. There was an animatronic dinosaur (T-Rex?) swaying in the side yard. This w...
- >>
A few things I noticed on my #SanFrancisco exercise walk this morning. The Whale's Tail, a.k.a. the summer weekend beer garden in Golden Gate Park is set up again, sorta. Looking for info, I found a...
- >>
This SMRT COW "smart cow" smart car impressed me. Yep, that's a nose ring. [Update: When I saw this car again in late June, it no longer had the Texas SMRT COW license plate, but a message-less Calf...
- >>
Still wrapping my head around the new reality: My cousin quit his job with the federal government and went to work at a startup, thus increasing his job security. ...
- >>
Some photos walking around #SanFrancisco 's Marina District (and the bus ride back home): Someone tried to tear down a flier, but instead just spotlighted the important part of the message Some ten...
- Book Report: Show me a Hero
It's a history of the struggle to build and inhabit public housing on the white side of Yonkers, NY, USA in the 1990s. (If that sounds familiar but you're sure you didn't read the book, maybe you sa...
- >>
As I walk around the city for exercise and errands, I like to play walking-around games on my phone: games that that use GPS* to move my little guy around in the game. I just wrote a new such game. I...
- Book Report: The Swimmers
A swimming pool develops a crack. A mother develops dementia. Everything you ever cared about, everyone you ever cared about will wither, decay, and fade away. You will wither, decay, and fade away. ...
- >>
Arty things I saw on my #SanFrancisco walk this morning: Cement infrastructure for the "Naga" sea serpent statue going in at Rainbow Falls. The statue is sinuous but it's easier to make rectangular ...
- >>
[Update: Though this blog post says the test% is above the "pretty-safe" line, as more data trickled in, that was no longer the case. As of a couple of weeks later, data about late June was still tri...
- >>
Today, I walked to El Polin Spring in San Francisco's Presidio and looked in a hidden Field Note. Thus I completed ⅒ of one of 22 Fun Things to do in your National Park. While in the area, I glimpsed...
- updated phraser again
I have once again updated the phraser word and phrase lists. They use fresher data from Wikipedia, fan wikis, crossword constructors, and the chat transcript from Houthi Small Group; so if some futur...
- >>
Things I noticed on my mid-day outing in #SanFrancisco: The Krakenwagen art car ambulance was parked across the street from the DMV. It was spewing soap bubbles, though there didn't seem to be anyo...
- >>
I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether it's safer to socialize at a bar vs an outdoor softball field. You might recall that a couple...
- >>
I found some more of those "Field Notes" little boxes in the #SanFrancisco Presidio like I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. My friends were very patient as I dragged them from our strolli...
- >>
I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether I'm okay drinking coffee inside a cafe with friends or should insist we take it outside. Some...
- >>
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 Europea...
- >>
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 Stan...