Niche hobby

There was a guy on my BART train this morning with little round glasses, a tall poofy hat, and a long red beard. He looked like a hybrid of Papa Smurf and a hobbit, minus 20 years and plus a few feet.

But this is San Francisco—we have much weirder people to watch than that, so I didn't pay much attention to him. When we reached my stop, I inched over to the exit and wound up standing next to him for those 10 or so seconds when the train slows down to align with the black door marks on the platform.

He was reading a book called, for real, Hand Puppets. It was open to two pages of line-drawn cartoon diagrams about how to design and build hand puppets from scratch.

There's no real moral to this story, but you have to admit it's kind of awesome. And if you wanted to name your first kid Hobbit Hand-Puppet Guy in memoriam, I'd fully support that choice.