Larry Hosken: New

2026-07-04T22:24:20.159953

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.

2026-07-02T16:57:59.805464

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.
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.

2026-06-28T15:31:50.170654

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.

Book Report: 😂 Face with Tears of Joy 😂

2026-06-23T17:15:45.774453

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.

2026-06-22T14:54:00.054550

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.

2026-06-18T21:06:57.195081

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.

2026-06-09T18:43:11.155103

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.

2026-06-07T17:02:37.914243

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.

2026-05-30T15:47:44.983544

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.

Book Report: Matching Minds with Sondheim

2026-05-28T23:09:49.916380

It's a book about Stephen Sondheim, focusing on his puzzles and games rather than on the stuff he's most famous for, theater. Of course, it's the puzzle-y and game-y parts that I'm interested in, because I played The Game, a variety of puzzle hunt in which teams drive around from puzzle to puzzle over the course of a weekend. Thanks to Scott "Puzzalot" Royer, I'd learned a bit about The Game's history—and Stephen Sondheim's name kept popping up. I even buckled down and used a microfiche reader at the library to read (and transcribe) a 1969 London Times article about Sondheim's puzzle hunts and games.

Matching Minds with Sondheim sums it up:

An exploration of all the vastly different, creative offshoots of Sondheim's Murder Game can seem to go on forever. … the Los Angeles moviegoer who watched [The Last of] Sheila in 1973, was inspired to design his own multicity scavenger hunt, which inspired Disney's 1980 film Midnight Madness, which inspired one of its moviegoers to create a similar game, which he eventually took to Microsoft, …

Everything I found out hinted that there was plenty more to know: Sondheim ran puzzly treasure hunts at friends' parties; he ran public treasure hunts for charities, he brought british-style cryptic crosswords to the US, he… Anyhow, this book gets into a lot of that. I'm glad I read it.

It was slow going for me. I think this book expected to be the second Sondheim bio read by a Sondheim fan, not necessarily knowledgable about games or puzzles. E.g., here's how Oscar Hammerstein is introduced in the book: "Hammerstein". I read that and thought "Oh, right, uh, I think he worked on Oklahoma! and some other stuff important enough that I'm going to smack my forehead that it slipped my mind over the years." On the other hand, noted board game expert Sid Sackson gets two pages of introduction. In a gathering of nerds, I'm probably not the biggest board game fan, but even I know about Sid Sackson. But if you expect your reader to be already-knowledgable about Sondheim's theater-stuff but new to gnarly games, allotting two pages for Sackson's introduction makes sense, as does assuming that the reader already knows Hammerstein mentored Sondheim and worked on The Sound of Music, how could you forget that? 😳

This book delivers the goods. E.g., there's a version of Sondheim's Murder Game puzzle as presented in Games Magazine. There are snippets of puzzles from later Sondheim hunts, albeit maybe just enough to get the flavor. Like, I tried solving a rebus and got nonsense—only to read on and find out the book just showed the top ⅓ of the puzzle. I, avid puzzler, was miffed: why only show the top bit? But this was probably sensible for the audience; most folks probably weren't trying to solve the puzzles they encountered in the book. No, really. I was kinda surprised to find an erratum in the fourth printing of the book, especially in a puzzle; shouldn't eagle-eyed puzzlers already have spotted+reported all of those? But of course, it makes sense if most readers aren't slowing down to solve the puzzles. (Also, that puzzle was a reprint of a cryptic crossword by Mark sHalpin; so you can bet that the truly serious puzzle-nerds probably chuckled "ah yes, I remember solving this delightful trifle back when it first appeared," instead of, like me, struggling through with nice-but-not-amazing cryptic crossword skills.)

It's kind of weird the way that celebrities keep popping up, but I guess it makes sense. If I wanted a puzzlehunt to involve a fax machine clue, I'd ask my friends to find out who had a fax machine they could loan out for the weekend. Same with Sondheim, except in his case, the friend was Stephen Fry‽ So random.