Today's sunrise was nice.
2026-10-20T18:28:00.803151
I started replying to ActBlue messages mentioning political consultant James Carville by unsubscribing with a note a la "I don't want to give money to a campaign that's going to hand that money to James Carville. I think he's part of the problem." I kinda worried each time. Democrats have a "circular firing squad" reputation. Was I furthering that? Now I'm reminded: I'm just trying to take ammo away from the circular firing squad.
linked article headline: James Carville Says He’d Rather GOP Win House by 5 Seats Than Dems Win by 5: They’d Be ‘Hostage to DSA’
excerpt: “I would be disappointed if it comes in at 225 House seats,” Carville said. “That would almost be – I would rather the Republicans keep the House by five than the Democrats to win by five because if that happens, they’re hostage to the DSA. … Like Hakeem [Jeffries] cannot move. There’s no place for him to go.”
2026-10-19T13:24:46.410083
Some pics from the SF Old Car Picnic today:
2026-10-17T23:27:00.879556
How to Make the Political Flyers Stop
This morning, I shoveled today's batch of political flyers out of my mailbox and into the recycling bin. I'd had enough, so I took action to make them stop. I walked back to my apartment, finished filling in my ballot and turned it in. This trick works in #SanFrancisco, I ?guess? other parts of California and probably other places too.
When the elections folks receive your ballot, they make a note of it. Companies that print+mail political flyers get their mailing list from the elections folks; they send flyers to registered voters who have not yet turned in their ballots. Thus, in a few days, the local billionaires should stop overstuffing my mailbox.
Probably they should have stopped mailing me flyers a while ago. ~Three weeks ago, I was pretty much on the fence between Connie Chan and Scott Wiener. After receiving a metric ton of billionaire-financed political flyers reminding me it was in billionaires' interest for me to vote for Wiener (citing articles in the billionaire-owned news site SF Standard, no less), I made up my mind to vote for Chan.
Anyhow, I guess this is my #GOtV post. Don't risk your mailbox bursting. Turn in your ballot, make the flyers stop.
2026-10-17T16:21:04.243910
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.
2026-10-12T16:27:28.083578
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.
2026-10-08T14:35:14.245817
"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))
2026-10-07T17:12:12.373317
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.
2026-10-04T22:39:15.142143
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.)
2026-10-01T20:16:16.916344
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.
2026-09-27T16:27:55.746341
