Some more urban strip

On my way to the Cinco de Mayo party in Dolores Park, I had a good surprise; at the corner of 19th and Guerrero, I found another stencil on the sidewalk, which belongs to the series of small stories I had begun to follow. I had hit a dead-end and was stuck without indication as to where to look for, and was very glad to find this one out of sheer luck.
I could still not fully decipher it, any Champollion-esque expertise is appreciated!

An owl ...
a mouse [checks?] ...
and ... Dolores Park.
a. Compelled, she follows
b. ...

b. leads to the illegible one, and then to this one.

Tres de Mayo

Yesterday was May 3rd, also known as Tres de Mayo. Tres de Mayo is a date of some significance in the history of Spain, and, apparently, of Poland and Lithuania. On the other hand, from a Mexican perspective, Tres de Mayo isn't particularly memorable; what matters is Cinco de Mayo, which commemorates one of the numerous times the French army got smashed, this one taking place in Mexico in 1862...
This year, Cinco de Mayo falls a Monday (tomorrow), which isn't that convenient to party and celebrate, so the Mission Neighborhood decided to celebrate it on Saturday in Dolores Park. It was pretty nice, albeit a bit windy, and I think the discrepancy between Cinco and Tres may have confused some people, because the park wasn't as packed as I expected it too be. Anyways, it was fun, and I got a few nice sunburns.

Keep your distances

Technology tells me that what people like most about this blog are UFO Response Team cars. I wish I could specialize in this area, and become the official photographer of this outfit, but unfortunately, it has all the known characteristics of your standard-issue government agency, and information is hard to come by. On top of that, it's a competitive market, cornered by well-established UFO news agencies and blogs.
Of course, I'll keep hunting news about the alien plot to invade the US, and what the Government is doing about it. In the meanwhile, this reminded me of a picture I had taken a while back, and never published, so here it is. Yes I know, except for the fact that it displays a car in California (with a sticker), there is really little to no relationship with UFOs.

The mysterious Netflix queue

I have been a (very happy) Netflix subscriber for a while now. For the obvious reasons (I hate going to a movie rental place, finding out they don't have the movie I like, getting another movie and paying late fees), and for less obvious ones - like being regularly surprised at how my queue, which contains only movies I picked, looks so random to me, as if a complete stranger had done the selection.
The principle of Netflix is simple: you select on the web movies you want to see, put them in a queue, and one by one, the movies are mailed to you. Nothing random about that. And yet, when I look at my queue, for quite a few movies I have no clue when and why I put them in there. I guess it has to do with this: I tend to put movies I really want to see ahead of the queue, so obscure movies I added for odd reasons linger at the end of the pile, and spend enough time there that I forget all about them and why they are there. I was reassured to realize that it happens to others as well; L too regularly receives mysterious movies.
Anyways, in the end, I kind of like this harmless form of schizophrenia, where my doppleganger selects movies which I then watch. It's a nice chaotic process, where a deterministic process dissipates information and ends up looking random.
Well, as a result, I watched a great movie yesterday: Onibaba. You should add it to your queue.

(Image from www.shillpages.com)
Do you have this same experience with your Netflix queue?

To the beach!

The weather was fabulous for three days in a row. I have been complaining about the cold in my place for weeks, but even though it was actually too hot, I am not ready just yet to get unhappy about that. The nicest part of all this was possibly that everyone I see in the streets looks happy and smiling. On Saturday, L. got a stroke of genius, and suggested that we go to the beach, which we did. We got our feet wet, we saw a three-mast ship - life is good!