Restaurants, or the long, dimly lit theater of appetite, status, memory, and mild gastrointestinal regret. We settle into the cracked vinyl booths and low-stakes grandeur of old man restaurants, where time slows, portions don’t, and a chilled fork arrives like a small, unnecessary miracle. Is it luxury, or just a habit that refuses to die. Either way, it becomes a kind of thesis. Wayne, sensing an opening, drags in Star Wars with the confidence of a man who knows the bit will land whether it belongs or not. 

There’s a prolonged, faintly adversarial inquiry into whether a prime rib house is meaningfully distinct from a steakhouse, or just a specialized dialect of the same language. Greg recounts a self-inflicted Christmas lunch disappointment, a slow-motion collapse that could have been avoided with even minimal foresight. Wayne offers a poignant glimpse into a life without proper toys, featuring one of his many cousins.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Greg gets punched in the head. The story is told with the clarity of someone still slightly surprised it happened. Wayne, undeterred, drifts into a near-religious meditation on the best fried chicken in the city, as if describing a place that may or may not exist anymore. There’s ice cream. There’s a bar in the Lower Haight that feels like it was designed after someone misremembered *Alien* during a fever dream. Tiki bars surface, as they always do, equal parts escapism and residue.

No reservations. No conclusions. Just the check, eventually.

Transit, or the promise that the Bay Area briefly makes to itself before stalling between stations. We descend into Bay Area Rapid Transit, where the trains are real, the delays are spiritual, and the dream of a glass-walled Transbay Tube, equal parts aquarium and civic optimism, never quite materializes. There’s a passing nod to Star Wars—inevitable, given tunnels, empires, and the faint sense that someone, somewhere, miscalculated the scale. We surface onto the unexpectedly worldly F Market & Wharves, a rolling archive of other cities’ past lives, and revisit a historic and slightly surreal interval called the “Muni Meltdown” when San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency more or less stopped functioning, and everyone quietly recalibrated their expectations downward.

Friend of the podcast Francesca delivers a critique with edges. A friendly stranger from Reddit suggests the theme of this episode. We consider, briefly, the absence of absurdly short flights between San Francisco International Airport, Oakland International Airport, and San Jose International Airport—a missed opportunity for both convenience and farce. Ferries, as ever, remain the only mode of transport that seems to understand the assignment. Various historical efforts to sabotage or derail BART are noted, then dismissed with the weary recognition that the system hardly needs the help. All routes considered. Few resolved.

Episode 11 moves like a coastal loop, all salt air and structural creaks, drifting through Bay Area amusement parks as if they’re unstable memories rather than fixed places.

It starts with the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and the Giant Dipper, still clattering along with a kind of stubborn physicality. No metaphor needed. It works, so it persists. Then inland to California's Great America, which feels like it’s been revised into blandness. A theme park that forgot its theme. Greg drops in a memory, a teenage kiss, and suddenly the place has more meaning as a private container than a public attraction. Wayne breaks the mood with a genuinely surprising origin story for the It's-It ice cream sandwich, which lands as exactly the kind of practical indulgence the region would invent.

From there, the wreckage. Failed 1970s parks, half-hearted visions, one oddly brushing up against the early orbit of C++ programming language. Big systems, loose intentions. The Wooz comes up as a kind of phantom concept. A good idea that never quite found form. Then Children's Fairyland, still standing by staying small and specific. The question shifts from how to why. And, briefly, a half-serious attempt to seed a rumor involving Charles Manson, just to see how easily a place can be bent by story. By the end, the parks blur. What lasts isn’t the rides. It’s the uneven way meaning sticks, or doesn’t.

Episode 10 of Hella Foggy goes animated. We talk about Pixar and the Bay Area’s down low reputation as an animation hotbed, the kind of regional oddity where world-shaping studios coexist with foggy hills, strange little subcultures, and people who casually know someone who worked on some iconic animated feature that changed the industry.

Greg debuts a new microphone, purchased after a brutally honest comment from one of Wayne’s many cousins. Unfortunately, the microphone does not fully rise to the moment. Audio technology remains humbling.

Wayne, meanwhile, spends a frankly heroic amount of time talking about Star Wars. More than warranted, probably. But that’s part of the charm.

Elsewhere: Bay Area pride during the Winter Olympics, including Alysa Liu bringing a properly Hyphy energy to the proceedings. We drift through kelp forests, Wayne’s encounters with elite Uber-nerds, and a brief marine-biology sidebar asking the important question: are cephalopods actually the jerks of the sea?

And, it cannot be stressed enough: a lot of Star Wars crap. Honestly, kind of a weird amount.

Happy Lunar New Year. Episode 9 of Hella Foggy heads into San Francisco’s celebration of the holiday, starting with a long-ago comment from Greg that Wayne has preserved like a cultural artifact—and weaponized accordingly.

From Chinatown fireworks to quiet cemeteries in Colma, the City’s famously overpopulated necropolis suburb, we trace the strange overlaps of festivity and mortality that feel uniquely Bay Area. There’s more fog, naturally. There are dreary childhood memories of mandatory language school (Chinese for Wayne, Russian for Greg), and a detour into romance, obscure and slightly unhinged foot races, and the Golden Gate Bridge in all its engineered grandeur.

We also revisit a wayward humpback whale that once turned the Bay into a spectator sport. David Letterman drops in. Freemasonry surfaces. The thread loosens early and rarely tightens again. As always, we start with a plan. And as always, we don’t stick to it.

Episode 8 of Hella Foggy is thick with Bay Area mythology. Greg and Wayne take a head-eyed, debunking walk through the stuff people get wrong about the Bay Area: wine and cheese culture, the omnipresent haze of pot, hippie residue, gothic baseball energy, burrito doctrine, and yes, snow. Call it a field guide to the regional misunderstandings we all inherit.

They detour through boba tea economics, the Little Man, a regrettable teenage incident involving a movie marquee, and a bleak family story featuring cod liver oil. Also, because tradition matters, there is more bread bowl discourse.

Like always, the episode drifts the way memory drifts. Local legends blur into half-facts, stupid opinions, personal folklore, all wrapped up in a pretty little bow of memory fog. 

It’s a juicy one. Buckle in.

In Episode 7 of Hella Foggy, Greg and Wayne drift into the soft, slightly embarrassing pleasures of San Francisco tourism, both real and imagined. Along the way they encounter a mysterious time traveler named Biff, remember the late Doug McConnell, and try to make sense of the City’s wild parrots. There is bread bowl talk. There is the story of the day San Franciscans nearly broke the Golden Gate Bridge. There is Wayne’s disappointing brush with stage magic, and Greg’s reluctant admission that he loves a good tourist trap.

As usual, the episode wanders the way memory wanders, looping through local legends, half-remembered facts, and personal embarrassments, in search of whatever truth hides inside the kitsch.

Episode Six of Hella Foggy and our first one of the year. We ease back in by talking about things that definitely shaped the Bay Area and possibly us as people: video game arcades, roller skating, vomiting while roller skating, and the dark arts of three-card monte. From there we wander into everything we don’t know about the South Bay, address some audience complaints, and spend a surprising amount of time on Wayne’s cousin’s clearly superior BMX bike.

Programming notes: Greg’s audio is weird in this episode and we genuinely do not know why. Apologies in advance. Also, we’re moving to an every-other-week schedule because Wayne misses his family. Wayne is our heroic editor, and frankly this podcast does not exist without him. Yay Wayne.

Happy New Year, friendos. It’s the last Hella Foggy of the year. Granted, we’ve only been doing this for a month, but still.

This time around, Greg and Wayne dive into Bay Area Auld Lang Syne–adjacent territory, then drift into desk calendars, Y2K, cursive writing, the Twist, and the nutritional downsides of Irish coffee. We also seriously entertain the possibility of Wayne wearing a blonde wig at some point in the future.

Happy New Year / New Years / New Year’s to everyone. Let us know in the comments what you think the correct name for this holiday actually is. And please Follow us, if you’re so inclined.

It’s the special holiday episode of Hella Foggy! That time of year when it’s unusually easy to pick a theme for a podcast episode. Greg and Wayne dive into Bay Area holiday antics, and take an unreasonably long detour into topics like Kristi Yamaguchi, the Bay Area’s underwhelming version of the Hollywood sign, and the ecclesiastic politics of the Russian Orthodox Church.

We also reference a charming song by Vic Damone, Christmas in San Francisco (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrH3AVsm2A), and Silver and Gold, as sung by Burl Ives in the Rankin/Bass classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrpLh7N67m0). We nearly sang Silver and Gold during the episode. Hopefully, that won’t get us sued.

Happy Holidays, everyone!