The Lunatics (have taken over the asylum)

Welcome, unhinged reader. Palo Alto often seems like a place which is at least a little bit eccentric. Halloween is fast approaching; it's the season when that eccentricity can be given free reign to do all sorts of bonkers things which you just wouldn't really see in the UK.

So for instance, I give you this chap:

Halloween is of course also the season when the folks at the end of our block put up their massive inflatable dragon, and hold a naming competition. It's weird that having been here just over two years, this now seems familiar, comforting and even normal. The whole neighbourhood has been covered in large spider webs, skeletons and pumpkins this year, with Halloween looking much more like 2019 than 2020. As documented previously here, the Americans love Halloween so, so much.

It's also highly noticeable that our local Stanford University students are back in force, in numbers much greater than they were last year. With a large local University comes its own cadre of craziness, including what seems to be some sort of arts festival in the main street this week:

So here is some sort of installation, where you press one of the buttons on stands, and the pyramid thing does some combination of noises and lights which look a bit like a 6th-form film student version of Close Encounters. Richard Dreyfuss is presumably wandering the aisles at Whole Foods, looking lost. Notably, this street is about to reopen to traffic, having been closed to allow outdoor dining during the pandemic, so perhaps the installation will end in a glorious fusion of wood, sound and... car. But perhaps not.

This weekend, we're once again braving Amtrak, travelling up to Portland to take a week out in a truck in Oregon, bandanas at the ready. While we do that we'll be keeping one eye on the baseball - the Giants did indeed end up winning the division by winning their last game, and have already won the first game in a five game series against the Dodgers to get to the next phase of the rather complex baseball post-season. Until next week!