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I was in a restless and irrational mood, so I ended up walking from Middlefield station up to NASA / Bayshore, arriving just after the southbound train went through, and just before the northbound train pulled up. I took this as a sign and hopped on to visit downtown Mountain View. After walking down to El Camino and taking note of the cafés that were open, I got a chocolate croissant at Le Boulanger (subtitled, in neon, as "The Baker"), a currant scone at the Dana Street Roasting company, and a ham and tomato croissandwich at Bean Scene, along with 2 soy milk lattes.
In retrospect, the heaping helping of coffee and the chocolate may have combined to make me even more irrationally restless, but at the time I just figured I should work off some of the morning's triple pastry extravaganza by walking over to the farmer's market in Sunnyvale. It's doable, but it's a pretty long way, and I was getting close to footsore after I got off the bus that I took home.
It occurs to me that in the summer I can switch from freezing a batch of strawberries every week to putting fresh peaches and nectarines on my morning oatmeal. I don't recall any fondness for fresh fruit when I was a kid, but somehow knowing that it's not available all year 'round makes me somewhat more interested in trying it.
The morning's excursions added up to about 11 kilometres, which atones for rather less than a third of my buttery-wheaty-chocolatey indulgence. Everything's so different now, after the reformation.
The Dog Said Bow-Wow, Michael Swanwick, Tachyon:
I finished reading this collection in the various coffee shops this morning. Aside from the title story and its sequels, featuring the exploits of two con artists on a post-singularity Earth, the most memorable is "The Bordello in Faerie", about the unique set-up of the one and only house of ill repute of all of the realms of fantasy which ordinarily falute too high to get into things like prostitution. There are also two stories more or less excerpted from The Dragons of Babel, and a new story in the same universe, "Urdumheim", telling of how Babel came to be.
Burn #1 and 3, Camilla d'Errico and Scott Sanders, Arcana Studio:
I was all excited about this after reading Make 5 Wishes and Nightmares and Fairy Tales, and then I was annoyed because somehow I was missing #2, and then I read it and I was less annoyed. A comic featuring an unstoppable killing machine as its premise mostly makes me start working out whether the manshonyaggers in Corwainer Smith's stories would make a dent in human population growth. (They could, but they'd have to keep busy.)
5, Becky Cloonan, Fábio Moon, Gabriel Bá, Rafael Grampá, and Vasilis Lolos:
Well, that was different. I think Grampá's art is the most distinctive, even if the profusion of detail makes me worry that the artist might be on amphetamines.
Fat Chunk Volume One: Robot, Jamie Smart, ed., SLG:
There were so many 2-3 page microcomics in this that I laid a ruler across the table of contents to count them; looks like 86. Among the swarm, 3 stuck in my mind:
Bizenghast vol. 5, M. Alice LeGrow, Tokyopop:
Dinah spends the entire volume grieving over Vincent, and if nothing else the cumulative effect is convincing even if the individual incidents aren't all that persuasive.
Furrlough #180-183, Various, Radio Comics:
Richard J. Smith's stories continue to fail to make me regret reading them.
Amelia Rules #20, Jimmy Gownley, Renaissance:
Includes some of Harold Buchholz's Apathy Kat, which I saw one issue of over a decade ago and remained intensely curious about ever afterwards, in colour.
Ghost Pirates vs. Ghost Ninjas, Wight Hutchison, Antarctic:
Two great tastes that.. don't really go together.
