Frank Chu gives special meaning to the word "ubiquitous." This is weird, but it kind of makes me feel at home to know that somewhere on Market Street at pretty much any given time he's wearing sunglasses and holding an inscrutable, vaguely paranoid sign.
Now, to parse this a little bit, it's definitely not the case that I take comfort in the fact that Frank Chu is not well. Far be it from me to offer any sort of diagnosis, but come on though, Chu appears to suffer from a mental illness. What I will say I enjoy, and what I am mostly okay with being amused by, is that Chu's harmless behavior is indulged as eccentric, rather than mocked or scorned as unacceptable, by most San Franciscans. To me, it's a nice lesson in "live and let live" San Francisco: Not only is Chu's "professional protesting" treated as a fine thing to do that doesn't really bother anyone, it's actually even celebrated, because it's so strange and he's so dedicated to it.
That's why, I like to think at least, SFist placed Chu on our list of infamous local legends, and why corporate sponsors even sometimes back his signs. It's also why he did a popular Reddit AMA last year, in which he mentions that he likes it when people say "what's up" to him. I take that as a sign that Chu knows that people know him, and is cool with that: He even has a business card, and advertisers.
Now, while Laughing Squid (an early Chu sponsor) has maybe gone a bit far in calling a Frank Chu-style sign generator "hilarious," it is pretty funny that someone dedicated time to this meme-maker. It's here, on a site called ACME laboratories (they make freeware), and it's called the ChuMaker.
Although this was recently posted as new, it's actually just recirculating, and seems to have been made in 2009. But hey, Frank has been at this stuff for a while, and he's still at it — I saw him just a few weeks back, and I'm sure others saw him more recently. The generator still works great — I gave it a go myself:
