Larry Hosken: New

2026-10-12T16:27:28.083578

New to me,* part of the #SanFrancisco Big Art Loop: Seed of Self by Kate Raudenbush, Golden Gate Park panhandle near Stanyan. Kinda tough to photograph; I dunno how to convince my clever clever smartphone not to freak out over the artwork's lights and got tired of hunting through the UI for manual controls.

Someone who is good at pranks should steal that Kezar Stadium equine vine thing, plunk it down next to this "Seed of Self" and label the new agglomerated artwork "Steed of Self."

*but its documentation says it was installed back in May, six months ago.

2026-10-08T14:35:14.245817

Email I got to send just now (details redacted):

Hello, excellent Department of Elections people!
I live at [address] [apartment number]. A few days back, I received my ballot (yay) and also the ballot for [someone else] [different address] (whoops) [same apartment number].
I put [her] ballot in a mailbox. When I checked my mail this morning, [her] ballot was there again, d'oh.
If it was once, I'd figure "accidents happen." Twice makes me wonder: uh, is some garbled scan code confusing some USPS autosorter or something i dunno
Anyhow, I'm gonna try writing a note to our postal carrier in hopes of getting this ballot delivered to the correct building. I'm attaching a snapshot of the envelope in case y'all want to look it over for things that might confuse a mail sorter.
-Larry H.

In tangentially-related news, it turns out that Louis DeJoy is no longer the head of USPS and hasn't been for some time. I'd grown comfortably accustomed to blaming him for all USPS failures, but apparently I should be shaking my head at David P. Steiner nowadays.

2026-10-07T17:12:12.373317

"It's just that your turn signal has been on this whole time."

(the joke: a sailboat captain says "hard alee" to say the boat's about to turn (and that the crew should be careful because the boat's about to tilt, sails+heavy pieces of wood are going to shift over, etc))

2026-10-04T22:39:15.142143

Things I saw walking in #SanFrancisco Thursday:

20th and Judah: "weird" graffito. You might think I jiggled my phone while taking this pic, but: The graffito was painted to look blurry.
20th and Irving Kal Zakzouk sidewalk chalk art: Guitarist trickster sits on an oil barrel.
19th and Irving: No Kings sticker. There was no flyer attached, but you probably already knew there were events planned for October 17th.

2026-10-01T20:16:16.916344

I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to decide whether to stop in a little bodega on the way home from an errand to pick up a professionally-made sandwich with 💕everything💕 or to go home and made an OK sandwich with the few ingredients I can be bothered to keep on hand. Lately, the numbers have been OK. The last time I blogged, the numbers were sorta-OK but, annoyingly, not agreeing. Lately they've been agreeing! I've resumed going places.

(Meanwhile, there was stuff going on. For a while, the numbers continued to disagree; according to the PCR tests, things were getting bad; according to the wastewater, things were getting better. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the numbers suddenly started agreeing (yay). Alas, they agreed that the numbers were high. I stopped going places (though I made an exception to get my COVID and flu vaccines). You might ask: Why didn't I blog about that, warn my neighbors? Because these numbers are so "noisy," I don't blog about this stuff until things have been consistent for a week. And a week later, the numbers had come down to overall-safe, yay!. And they stayed overall-safe for a week, so now I'm blogging.)

2026-09-27T16:27:55.746341

Saw this sign and wondered: The letters replacing "au" are gold color and the atomic symbol of gold is "Au". Coincidence or visual wordplay?

When I got home, I looked up the color of beryllium (atomic symbol "Be"), and it's steel-gray. Whoa, nice.

2026-09-25T17:49:53.055557

Aw, I miss having a functioning federal government.

"Data from participating sites in the CDC NWSS commercial testing contract will be temporarily unavailable on the dashboard, while CDC transitions to a new contract. Historic data for these sites remain accessible . These sites have been temporarily excluded from state and regional summaries."

–Cal-SuWers (where I get SF COVID-in-wastewater data)

2026-09-22T13:25:38.934275

Oh, neat. The Vitalant blood donation people ask a lot of questions about your health history. E.g., they ask about some medications; I guess depending on what's swirling around in your veins, they may or may not want to give your blood to someone else. New to me: They translated their questions into Spanish. That makes sense; there are probably plenty of people who'd like to donate but whose knowledge of English doesn't include words like "lungs" or "transfusion".

[Update to add: oh hey hang on. Following that link leaves you "stuck" in Spanish. Like, if you close the tab and then attempt to fill out the form in your usual language, it errors out. Following an old link to the form gives you Spanish. But I figured out how to get it "stuck" back in English again: the Spanish link, but substitute es_MX with en_US

Book Report: The Mills of the Gods

2026-09-19T20:36:35.583665

It's yet another speculative-history fantasy novel by Tim Powers. In this one: Of the famous creative folks living in Paris after WWI, why were so many interested in bullfighting, of all things? One might guess "It's just a coincidence" or "This was before we had video games, so they didn't have better choices." But: What if it's because they were mixed up in the cult of the pagan god Moloch?

2026-09-12T16:52:50.493766

Some new-to-me sidewalk chalk art by Kal Zakzouk:

If it got you thinking "What's up with that triple yin-yang in amongst the eight trigrams?" Wikipedia had some related ideas: Tricolored Taeguk, Tibetan Gankyil. (or could be artist noodling around with designs, who knows (Making fun of wanna-be billionaires in search of "three commas"?))