Frank Figurski: In the late 1990s, Figurski gravitated toward Palo Alto, drawn to the transit stop on El Camino Real in front of the posh Stanford Shopping Center where Theodore Streleski had calmly boarded a bus in 1978 after hammering to death his mathematics professor. Across El Camino and down an embankment, along the usually-dry San Francisquito Creek, Figurski joined the core of Palo Alto's burgeoning homeless population. Near the turn of the century, extreme weather caused by climatic conditions El Niño and La Niña combined with extreme wealth caused by Silicon Valley dotcom fever and stock-option glut to precipitate several confrontations between the homeless and Palo Alto's ever-richer citizens. In the summer of 2000, the irrepressible Figurski appeared before the City Council with a wool-knit cap over his shaved head and dropped his pants, then organized a shopping-cart and cardboard-sign blockade of El Camino during rush hour that shocked the local populace and made national headlines. Soon after, Figurski ducked out of the public view once again, selling occasional batches of his accumulated technology stocks to finance his continuing travels in pursuit of the Holy Grail of Automatons, Rosellini's 1737 mechanical pig, which he had been forced to divide into thirds with two competitors in October, 1997. His ongoing, unpublished memoir, Constrained Utopia, had swollen to some 345 manuscript “pages” by the 21st century.

Figurski at Findhorn on Acid