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You know what they say: April showers bring May flowers…and our fabulous Los Altos Farmers’ Market!

This Thursday (May 5) marks the return of the weekly Farmers’ Market to downtown Los Altos. Each and every Thursday afternoon/evening from now until September 29 (at a new time this year: from 4:30 PM to 8:00 PM), come out and enjoy the plethora of locally-grown and produced foods and other goodies.

The Farmers’ Market will take place on State Street in the heart of downtown, between Second and Fourth Streets. For more information, visit the Los Altos Village Association’s website by clicking here.

M O R E:

• Downtown Los Altos : Events
• Chanukah Songs

M O R E EVENTS:

• December 4: Tree Lighting Ceremony
• December 5: Breakfast with Santa
• December 15: Hanukkah Celebration
• December 11-27: Holiday Carriage Rides

In a studious, point-by-point analysis, the board argued, “why not shop and spend downtown and in our other shopping districts? The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. For starters, there’s available parking.”

“Shoppers may choose from 11 women’s clothing stores, eight jewelry stores, five children’s stores and a toy store,” the Town Crier writes, “the downtown also has two shoe stores and two pet stores.”

The decision of where the town’s residents will shop may have impact on retailers from Stanford Shopping Center to as far as the Gilroy Premium Outlets.

“We’re beyond humbled,” said Phyllis Dreer, 78, of Main Street Antiques. “It would have been easy for the Los Altos Town Crier to have urged Los Altos to do most of its shopping outside of Los Altos.”

The editorial also reiterated one of its long running themes: Los Altans have more money than some other people who live nearby. “Residents from our communities will be shopping and spending more than other areas,” writes the editorial.

After reading this, 36-year-old Mountain View resident Miguel Sanchez (pictured at right), an illegal immigrant living with 13 of his illegal immigrant relatives, could only cartoonishly shrug as he pulled out the insides of his pant pockets to reveal that they were completely empty.

This supposed “tradition” of reserving spots has quite a few problems: it encourages private individuals to monopolize public space (for longer and longer periods of time), it creates a lot of litter, and it smacks of Los Altos’s embarasingly recent efforts to exclude the poor and the brown through an unconstitutional and costly ordinance that forced day workers to cross the street and stand on the sidewalk in Mountain View.

Another letter writer, Honor Spitz, raises one other concern I didn’t think to include. It makes downtown Los Altos look like “one great big outdoor emergency shelter.” (Isn’t “Spitz” a Jewish name? I guess Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the only Member of the Tribe who wants to ruin Christmas.)

Next year, I’m going to kidnap somebody, blindfold them, drive them around for a while, and drop them off in downtown Los Altos, just to see if they think they have arrived at an emergency shelter.