Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts

It's a puzzlehunt drama, with the emphasis on the drama. The hunt's designer says "And the true prize, the jewel at the end of the journey, is the discovery of the self." I kept trying to emphasize the puzzlehunt; but this book ain't Winston Breen.

The story's a mystery; this book report contains, uh, converse-spoilers. That is, I kept reading the book in puzzlehunt-mode and thus anticipated things that don't happen. I guess they're minor? (If you were hoping for a plot synopsis or discussion of the (interesting!) characters, probably you want someone else's review. If you're reading my blog, I assume you're here for puzzly stuff.)

Our protagonist reads a note from the puzzlehunt designer, noting there are typos. I, of course, reached for a pencil and a piece of scratch paper to jot down the typos to see if they spelled out a secret message. They do! You think that's a spoiler, but: Nobody in the book ever notices. The secret message is an easter egg for the reader.

So that got me thinking about other places the puzzlehunt designer might leave overlooked easter eggs. There's a coded message made of dingbats: ☥☈⚰…many symbols…♀♛. I wondered about the choice of the [spoiler redacted] and [spoiler redacted]: those symbols seemed like they could relate to the plot. I wondered what meaning the puzzlehunt designer assigned them in the code. But when I read the decoded message, it mostly but didn't quite match up to the coded message. Maybe some editor decided to to re-word the coded message but then didn't go back to insert a couple of new dingbats? Anyhow, I gave up on that one.

image meme of that kid asking about a butterfly "is this a pigeon?" but the text "pigeon" has been replaced with "puzzly easter egg"

At one point, a secret message says "Seek well," a reasonable phrase to use in instructions to puzzlehunters. The main characters really fixate on the phrase. I wondered: is this an "easter egg" from the author to readers that we should be on the lookout for a sequel? It's been years since this book was published, and no sequel has appeared. I think I was once again barking up the wrong tree.

It's a fun book. I probably would have had more fun if I hadn't hared off chasing down mirage "easter eggs" though. (But maybe not? I am kinda wired for that?)

BTW, if you "view source" on the blog post version of this here post, below you'll see a kinda major spoiler: my notes on the dingbat message. If you want a head start on analyzing and don't want to figure out how to enter weird characters like ☈, it could come in handy. (I'm guessing "you" are me, five years later.)

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2025-09-14T15:46:44.662677

A neighborhood mystery solved: Some weeks back, I walked past as someone in a forklift repeatedly rammed into the side of a UCSF building at Arguello and Irving, poking a big hole in the wall. Since then, the room thus entranced has been under construction. Like the guy in the Tom Waits song, I wondered "What's he building in there?"

As I walked past today, a forklift stood by for the delivery of a big ol' medical scanner (MRI?).

a big ol' medical scanner barely fitting through the whole in a wall. off to the side, a forklift stands ready. (could a little forklift handle a big ol' medical scanner? idk. anyhow

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2025-09-13T18:02:24.248781

It's a vax selfie.

dude with his t-shirt arm rolled up to reveal a couple of band-aids. also it looks like he did a pretty haphazard job of shaving last night, lotsa stray whiskers. oh well

Normally I'd wait a month for the COVID vax so it would be full-strength for mid-January. But I worried that some worm-eaten snake oil huckster might find a way to ban all vaccines in the next few weeks, so got it early.

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2025-09-12T17:55:25.134533

#SFHellscape a couple of far-away big orange construction cranes loom over the new UCSF Parnassus hospital going up. They're framed by some buildings and trees that are closer, this photo having been taken from a hilly street several blocks away

a couple of far-away big orange construction cranes loom over the new UCSF Parnassus hospital going up. They're framed by some buildings and trees that are closer, this photo having been taken from a hilly street several blocks away

a flotilla of rubber duckies and similar plastic bath toys sits atop a fountain in the form of a sort of Japanese stone lantern maybe? I'm not a garden decor expert

that t-shirt shop at the corner of Haight/Ashbury in morning light. closer to the camera, some tourists mosey around, realizing they've arrived at this tourist site too early to see hustle and/or bustle

sunrise-y clouds behind the intersection of 17th St and Uranus, where a bodega nestles in shadow

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2025-09-10T15:14:29.935681

Some things I saw on my morning walk in #SanFrancisco, mostly:

The San Francisco Dahlia Garden is doing its thing.

A Golden Gate Park coyote. (Actually, this photo is from last weekend, but I didn't post it, distracted when I finally learned Kal Zakzouk's name. I was glad to see that coyote; I hadn't seen any since large areas of the park were fenced off for concerts. I thought maybe the coyotes had fled all the hubbub? If so, they didn't flee permanently; more likely, they were fenced in while I was fenced out. Anyow, I saw a coyote this morning, so I guess I'll post this photo now.)

Some sidewalk chalk art at 20th and Irving. Because of the location, it might be by Kal Zakzouk, but it doesn't look like his usual style, maybe it's by someone else? Some interesting fish chimerae. (Sorry I couldn't get a better picture from the other side to give a clearer view of that fish-panda; I dunno how to make my phone compensate for pointing into the sun like that.)

some brightly-colored flowers growing amidst stakes

coyote ambling along a road in front of some trees. pretty blurry. I asked too much of my phone camera's zoom

sidewalk chalk art. There's a lot going on here. There's some Chinese text I don't know enough to translate, sorry. Nearby, there is a sort of dog-goldfish chimera swimming; the dog head exhales some bubbles. Further back, there is a fish-cat chimera, also blowing bubbles. Furthest away, a fish-panda chimera.

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2025-08-31T16:18:02.015807

It's spelled "fascists," kid. You got the important parts right, though.

stenciled graffito on yellow crosswalk paint on asphalt. It reads: Facists wont stop until you [picture of crossing guard's handheld stop sign] stop them

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2025-08-25T14:17:41.542976

For years, I've enjoyed the sidewalk chalk art at 20th Ave and Irving (or, earlier, Judah) street in #SanFrancisco. Today, there was no sidewalk chalk art, so I looked up… and thus spotted a window sign telling me who the artist is: Kal Zakzouk. Apparently, he even got written up in the neighborhood paper, but I didn't notice (perhaps distracted by the many many unhinged letters to the editor that dominate that paper's feed)..

He has a gofundme for legal fees. If you've enjoyed his art and can spare it, maybe toss a few bucks his way.

sidewalk chalk art. There's a cute anthropomorphic beat wearing headphones with text 'let the beet drop'. There are four monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and wearing headphones and staring at mobile phone oblivious to real world (no evil). There's Chinese text I can't translate, alas. And more.

faded sidewalk chalk art. There's a lot going on here. Text in the background: We the sheeple. Text at the bottom: What they hate in you is missing in them. Depicted: A weightlifter lifts a barbell. He's standing on an upside-down wok that has one eye (which is looking up at the weightlifter). The weights on the barbell are peace signs.

sidewalk chalk art: hexagon filled with a grid of triangles constructed from circular arcs rendered in colored chalk with a gradient heading out from the center.

sidewalk chalk art. pretty surreal. an anthropomorphized egg has climbed a ladder and addresses a few neighbors. text below reads ¿dónde están los huevos?. text above is in Chinese which I can't read, but when I plugged 'where are the eggs?' into Google translate and tried a few dialects, I noticed the Traditional Chinese translation had a few characters in common. The neighbors... Well, there's a lady with a cloud head carrying a turnip. There's a caftan-wearing rainbow-headed figure carrying a chard? kale? leaf. There's a ✳-headed figure carrying a loaf of bread. There's a potato-bodied person covered with human eyes. The potato-eyes thing makes me wonder if I'm overlooking puns in the other figures. Off the the side, mostly out of frame: a snake (Happy New Year!)

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2025-08-25T13:58:38.316301

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: David Hill writes about gambling nowadays; but back when he lived in Hot Springs, Arkansas he was kind of a big deal in their Midnight Madness puzzlehunts. So maybe it's not surprising that he ran a puzzlehunt for serious sports bettors in Las Vegas recently https://davidhill.substack.com/p/not-fun-at-all-really

nerdy-looking David Hill is dealing blackjack, but the cards are weird: one has just a big star on it. Another, a triangle surrounding a star. Another has an arrow in a circle? Weeeeird

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2025-08-22T15:36:38.271780

A couple of things I saw on my roundabout walk to the supermarket in #SanFrancisco this morning:

Some sidewalk chalk art by Kal Zakzouk from Irving at 20th Ave. The art features four monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and wearing headphones and staring at mobile phone oblivious to real world (no evil, I guess)
A storefront advertising "AI integrated PoS system." Merchants and normal people can't agree on whether PoS stands for "Point of Sale" or "Piece of Shit." But thanks to AI integration, both can be true! Seen on north side of Irving St near 15th Ave.

storefront window painted to advertise: AI integrated PoS system

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2025-08-24T15:56:05.777877

Book Report: Hella Town

It's a history of Oakland, California viewed through the lens of physical construction: buildings, roads, infrastructure, etc. I learned some things.

E.g. Why did San Francisco take off, population-wise, while Oakland stayed a sleepy set of farms for such a long time? OK, the Portola expedition stuck to the coast, so it makes sense that they'd establish a mission in San Francisco; and San Francisco had an OK port. But Oakland has a great port; and it's better-connected to more arable land. Why didn't Oakland become the hub?

Nowadays Oakland has a great port. That's the the result of a lot of dredging. Back when the Spanish first invaded, the waters around Oakland were shallow and marshy. If you convinced a seaship captain to sail into Oakland instead of San Francisco, that seaship would get stuck in the mud.

Nowadays, a lot of big businesses make stupid mistakes all together. One imagines an echo chamber of CEOs at their parties and group chats, talking each other into the most asinine schemes. Maybe that's not new. I read about Oakland's Mahogany Eucalyptus and Land Company planted a lot of trees in the Oakland hills, planning to use them for timber; but they chose a kind of tree that doesn't grow into good timber. I pinched myself: was I reading a book about San Francisco? Adolph Sutro planted a lot of eucalyptus around San Francisco, which turned into a nuisance; the trees grew fast, which would have been good from a quick-timber-harvesting point of view; but, alas, they didn't grow into useful timber.

Anyhow, sympathies, Oakland. Sorry about that big fire up in the hills some years back.

Back before BART, there was no commuter rail system from the east bay to SF; but before that absence, there was a different such commuter rail system: the Key System. When the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge was first built; one deck was for cars and one deck was for the Key System. But then the Key System wasn't working so well anymore. Train tracks were dismantled, replaced by buses; eventually taken over by AC Transit.

I always assumed this was some anti-train conspiracy of oil companies and auto manufacturers. That was a fine guess; oil companies and auto manufacturers have ruined many other things. But this book pointed out that I'd overlooked another wellspring of conspiracies: land speculators. The Key System itself was a sneaky ploy by real estate developers.

The Key System wasn't exactly an economically sustainable business. It often lost money. But it was owned by a real estate developer who was selling homes in Oakland. You could sell houses for much more money if homebuyers had an easy commute to their San Francisco jobs. So a little subsidy to the Key System meant making much much more money selling houses.

But when he had sold all those houses, he was no longer motivated to keep subsidizing the Key System. And thus it fell apart, and those homebuyers found out that they were going to have to figure out how to drive to San Francisco (and park there) after all.

Pretty sneaky.

Do sports fans in your cities try to attract teams by building massive sports complexes? Do they claim that these are wise investments that will, long-term, bring revenue to the city? The Oakland Coliseum had nine profitable years from 1966-1991; mostly it needed subsidies.

Oakland's politicians in power were pretty eager to tear down houses in not-white neighborhoods to build highways and BART tracks. This wasn't insane; racist whites had voted in Oakland's government. "Those people" in the torn-down neighborhoods already weren't happy. Surely Oakland's racist whites would appreciate the shorter commute times to their San Francisco jobs; surely they would re-elect Oakland's politicians for life, surely. And maybe that happened to some extent.

But many, many of those racist whites thought, I know I can tolerate a commute of N minutes. And thanks to this new highway/BART line, that N-minute commute could carry me further east, to one of these new developments in Contra Costa county. In the end, those highways and BART lines sped up white flight; and new politicians rose to power in Oakland.

Ha ha, kinda funny until you remember that those houses aren't coming back. Ah well.

A welcome bright spot: Eichler, as in "Eichler home," was willing to sell to minorities even before laws forced sellers to do that.

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2025-08-17T00:28:22.049770