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!

In our third episode of Hella Foggy, Greg and Wayne wander through films and TV shows set in the Bay Area, drift into a few stories about local serial killers, and spend an unreasonable amount of time on the Phantom Diner saga, including the part where his real identity finally comes to light. From there it’s Mrs. Doubtfire memories, odd run-ins with George Lucas, and some of the secrets tucked inside the Fairmont Hotel. Ice motorcycle races come up for reasons neither of us can fully explain, as do martinis and a baseball legend’s surprisingly lousy house. The conversation meanders the way these things tend to, following whatever thread catches our attention at the moment.

In our second episode of Hella Foggy, Greg and Wayne dig into the wonders of the It’s-It and try to reverse-engineer whatever went into Diana’s Meat Pie to make it both gross and unforgettably good. From there we tumble into the conceptual futility of those old TV commercial sign-offs promising “Top of the Hill, Daly City,” in a city made of hills, none of them especially definitive. Along the way, we wander through Creature Features, Ultraman, Bay Area Backroads, and whatever else surfaces. The episode moves the way memory does, tracing odd threads and local legends as we overclock our tired memory banks.