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.

sidewalk chalk art: a guitarist sits on an oil drum. there's something mystical about him: he has more arms than you'd expect.

sidewalk chalk art: zooming in on the top part of the guitarist

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.

chart that tracks three numbers over the past couple of months. The green line, COVID-in-wastewater, has wiggled above and below the 'pretty-safe' level. Lately, it's been below the 'pretty-safe' level, yay. The purple %-positive-PCR-tests number starts out at the pretty-safe line; it peaks well above the pretty-safe line a few weeks ago (boo!) but has come down nearly to the pretty-safe level recently (yay). The red number-of-positive-PCR-tests number never got very high; it did peak at the same time as the %-positive-PCR number, as you'd expect.

(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.)

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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?

temporary sign marking the route of the National Alopecia Areata Foundation's Walk for Alopecia (Presented by Pfizer) with exhortation: You are be-you-tiful. The 'you' is underlined and yellow, arguably golden color. The 'be' is blue-gray, arguably steel-y. It doesn't look like the same gray as the beryllium picture in Wikipedia, but maybe that's an artifact of printing. Or the whole thing is a coincidence. Anyhow. The 'tiful' is teal

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

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2026-09-27T16:27:55.746341

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)

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2026-09-25T17:49:53.055557

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

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2026-09-22T13:25:38.934275

Book Report: The Mills of the Gods

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?

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2026-09-19T20:36:35.583665

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

sidewalk chalk art: sidewalk at street corner. chalk art: a big purple flower with things coming out of it

sidewalk chalk art: big purple flower with things coming out of it. a sort of lady. some imps. Daoist-adjacent symbols

sidewalk chalk art: bagua surrounding a triple yin-yang.

sidewalk chalk art: magical lady. she looks up at the sky, with a mask rising off of her face. but the back of her head has another face, a death's head mask, looking down. she has two arms, two human, two kinda skeleton-armor-y, reaching down

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"?))

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2026-09-12T16:52:50.493766

MRW Halowe'en decorations are already up at the supermarket.

supermarket display case above which are some Hallowe'en decorations: skeletons, gravestone, witch silhouettes, etc

image meme. Its base is the Jumanji 'What year is it?' meme. But it has been edited: the word 'year' has been mostly-covered by the word 'month'

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2026-09-07T13:48:15.772289

A couple of things seen on my morning walk in #SanFrancisco:

Apollo's Dog Library, 6th Avenue between Fulton and Cabrillo.
Sidewalk chalk art near Hippie Hill: lemniscankh. uh, infinite life symbol or something

planter area in front of a house with no plants, just dirt. there are a couple of crates, one with tennis balls and one with sticks. there are a couple of signs. One says that this is Apollo's Dog Library. The other says Take One, Leave One, Have a Great Walk

sidewalk chalk art: a couple of ankhs drawn with their loops touching to form a lemniscate, an infinity symbol. also part of another piece, a geometric construction of circles, hexagons, and triangles

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2026-09-05T16:26:44.289412

Rejoice, for I have updated the scored phrase and word lists at https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/frivolity/prog/phraser/, a.k.a. the Phraser project. I fed in recent data from Wikipedia, IMDB, the puzzles wiki, the Spread the Word crossword list, etc so it now knows of recent phenomena, e.g. that the odyssey is a thing. Oh, I guess it already knew about that one? But you get the idea; it has newer, fresher data.

It also has some old data that I couldn't get my hands on for a long time: the administrators of the Grand Theft Auto game fandom wiki exported data after several years of not doing that. Thus this version of the phrase list knows about character franklin clinton. I guess he's kind of a big deal in the game's story? I dunno, I don't play those games, and thus I rely on this phrase list if I want to fill in the blanks for f _ _ _ _ _ _ _ c _ _ _ _ _ _ (football coaches, Filipino cuisine, flathead catfish, Fanshawe College, Franklin Clinton).

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2026-09-04T17:16:44.736247