2010 July minutiae

• Nipun Kumar, a student at RISD, wrote a book report on Varicella. I was interested to see what he had to say until I discovered that, of the 1501 words in his report, 1103 of them had been lifted directly from me.

• I made some hot fudge from scratch, and it turned out pretty well. The original recipe said it made eight servings. I'm used to food packages trying to look less egregiously unhealthful by declaring tiny serving sizes — you know, it says a serving is only 100 calories and then you see that one serving is half a potato chip — so I scaled the recipe down to two servings. And as it turned out, what the recipe thought of as two servings I considered more like five. Do other people, like, chug this stuff?

• We don't have BP-branded gas stations here in the Bay Area; instead, we have Arco, which was bought by BP a few years back and put a little "ARCO – part of BP" blurb on its signs underneath the list of prices. I noticed a while back that the little BP logo on the sign at Arco's Temescal Plaza station had been hit with black spraypaint; I figured that it was a graffiti attack by someone angry about the oil spill. But then more recently I saw that the BP blurb at the bottom of the sign at Arco's Bay Fair station had been covered by a rectangular blue patch. So I guess it's deliberate.

• Nick Friedell: I was shocked that the Rockets were willing to give the 34-year-old veteran so much money, but more power to he

• You know how you'll do laundry and somehow a sock goes missing? This month, two days after going to the laundromat, I was driving to work when I noticed a maroon sock tangled in my back windshield wiper. So that's what happens!

• I've been looking at apartment ads and was amused to find that the guy who posted about an "upscle inlaw unit" posted a corrected listing a day later. The unit is now described as "upsclale."

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