Check it out, an altered McDonald's billboard in the Haight, including an actual moving animatronic Ronald McD. The tagline is from a Golden Age (1953) SF story by Damon Knight (later adapted for The Twilight Zone) where some aliens arrive and say they're here to serve man, and they're herding people into the giant mothership to go to a better world, and they have this special alien guidebook called To Serve Man and then someone figures out that it's a … cookbook.

Details at Laughing Squid.

Here’s the cute glasses case that one of my daughters knit for me years ago. Glasses are alive, they have legs so they can run and hide. [New info: It was Georgia who knit it, it was the first thing she ever knit, she made at “Big Three Days” at Seven Hills School in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the 7th grade.]

Yesterday we went to a party to celebrate Rudy and Penny’s engagement at this great people’s park called the “Albany Bulb”.

This is a spot in the SF Bay behind the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. It was once a dump, but now hipsters assemble art there, people walk dogs, and wild vegetation rules.

A bunch of Rudy and Penny’s colorful friends were there; we carried in loads of food and beer.

August and Laird have banana-shaped cell-phone holders that Laird invented.

And I think Rose said she’s a belly-dancer.

I gave Penny a plastic jellyfish that bounces on a string.

The dogs were retrieving sticks from the water. I love how the one on shore is being a spectator.

Mighty Slug was there, and I got a great little 1 Meg MPEG movie of him shaking. Click here to view movie.

I’ve always been fascinated with Diane Arbus’s pictures, of how the subjects are always kind of looking askance at Diane as she takes the picture. I managed to get a photo somewhat in this style of Shannon and her tattoo; I put it in black and white to enhance the Arbus look.

It was a great party. Yay Rudy and Penny.

My better half and I spent the night in San Francisco the other day. In the morning we walked down California Street to the Ferry Building. The hills of SF always give you such nice views.

There’s a lot of great old buildings on lower California. The Union Bank Building near Battery Street has some cool stone walruses set into its wall, remnants of the Alaska Commercial Bank.

All these complicated machineries. Vaguely like the cityscapes in Star Wars III, which I just saw. That traffic in the sky in Star Wars really bothered me. Who’d want to live under that? Terrible to see, also. Like having dinner in a restaurant next to a freeway with the headlights streaming by. You feel temporary and rushed. Not that I felt rushed in the spot behind the Ferry Building where I took this picture. Calm there.

And here’s an elephant graveyard of dead mufflers. Let’s suppose that Yoda the green attack-chihuahua is hiding underneath. I used to like to hate Yoda, but now I give up, I love him. His ears are so beautiful in the new movie. Like segments of conch shells. Slightly twitching. Remember in one of the old Star Wars when Yoda rises up from near a swamp and you just see his ears? I used to tie my handkerchief around my hand with the ends pulled out to make two Yoda ears for the kids.

Cameras and bots are everywhere, lurking. But where's Jar Jar Binks? I love him even more than Yoda. I never understood the public vitriol against the fellow. He got like one second in Padme's funeral this time out.

I picked up a bit of an anti-Patriot-Act message in Star Wars III, which was good to hear. But Lucas wrote the script? He can't afford to hire a professional SF writer? What is this with writer-directors? They don't try and create their own computer graphics, do they? Or build their own sets, or sew the costumes. But, hey, anyone can write…

Thanks, Narrenschiff, for the new add_coment_cgi.php. I put it on my site and tried to post a message with the p-word and it wouldn't go up.

Exciting to get help in this odd global way. Like we're white blood cells.

But then I couldn't post any comments at all, even though I replaced Narrenschiff's file with a fresh version 4 SPHP add_comment_cgi.ph. Probably the problem was actually that I'm using an older version of the SPHP ware, and I've edited that so would rather not change.

So then I went and told Rudy Jr., owner of my host www.monkeybrains.net , and he had a similar fix that worked, based on the same version of SPHP that I have installed, he uses it on his First Twins site.

Here's the fix, with the red disk standing for an OR-separated string of dirty words, and the pointy-bracket-enclosed letter b being the HTML tag for boldface, which is a style that sp*mmers like to use.

Onward through the fog.

Talking this over with Rudy at the new Monkeybrains World Headquarters in San Francisco, it was funny, he said “Don't use the p*oker word too much, or talk about c*mments, or even about bl*g, or the BOTS will notice, they'll 'hear' and they'll come swarming.” Peeking in like attack dogs.

Reminds me of how people sometimes are reluctant to say G*d's name or S*tan's.

The Web is seething with artificial life.