I was at a pizza barn with Ellie when some guy came up to our table and said something that, to my ears, might as well have been “Ogg-bla-bla-blah”.  I said something like “Hm?” and he went away.  Ellie told me that he had actually been asking to buy a slice of our pizza, which had just arrived.  This particular pizza barn cut the pizza into twelve thin slices instead of eight more traditional ones, so when we were done, we still had three slices left.  I got some foil and started packing them up.  The guy, who had sat at the table behind ours, said, “Hey, ya never answered my question! Can I buy a slice a’ yer pizza?”  The slices were now cold, and one of them was actually fairly burnt, so since it seemed likely that we would have ended up trashing that one anyway, I sold it to him for a dollar.

Succinct version: “Receipt?”

Straightforward version: “Want a receipt?”

Polite version: “Would you like a receipt?”

What this receptionist actually said: “Can I offer to provide you a receipt for today at all?”

At all?  Well, maybe just a little bit.  Give me half an offer to provide me two‑thirds of a receipt.

Here’s something I had never seen before on the signs listing when the next BART trains were due to arrive.  At first, they said:

SF DALY CITY 3 MIN
RICHMOND 6 MIN

Then:

SF DALY CITY 4 MIN
RICHMOND 5 MIN

Then:

RICHMOND 4 MIN
SF DALY CITY 5 MIN

I was pretty thrown⁠—was the Daly City train traveling backward somehow? how could one train overtake another when they were listed as traveling on the same track?⁠—but since I needed to get on a Richmond train, I thought that whatever the situation was, apparently it was my lucky day!

Except it is never anyone’s lucky day on public transit.  What actually happened was that no trains arrived for forty minutes.

Many years ago I was nearly an hour early for an LSAT tutoring appointment in Davis.  Across the street from the student’s apartment complex was a Cost Plus World Market, so I went inside to kill time.  There I discovered that Cost Plus sold those chocolate oranges.  I filed this fact away in the back of my mind, and over a decade later, when I wanted to buy Ellie a chocolate orange, I went into a Cost Plus.  This time I made an even more exciting discovery: Cost Plus carried Clearly Canadian, which had been a staple of my high school and college years, but which I had not been able to find in the 21st century.  (It wasn’t just a staple of my college years, either: I remember Karen and Caryn used to peel the stickers off Clearly Canadian bottles and attach them to the overhead light in their dorm room.)  While only four of the original dozen flavors are back, the return of Clearly Canadian has been a welcome development in our otherwise largely dystopian times.

Then, this month, a similar development!  If, at some point over the past 35 years or so, you had asked me what my favorite mass-market candy bar of all time was, I would have told you that it was the Bar None, introduced in 1986.  I remember buying a huge box of them at the Price Club and taking it with me to a debate tournament when I was in high school.  But in 1992 Hershey’s changed the formula and discontinued the Bar None shortly thereafter.  So imagine my surprise when a box of Bar Nones popped up as a recom­mendation on Amazon!  Apparently a boutique company is producing knock-offs.  Naturally, I bought a box, and I’m happy to say that the new Bar None is pretty much identical to the original!  Of course, it is still only a mass-market candy bar, and is nowhere near as good as even a Lindt bar or a Ritter Sport, let alone something from a high-end chocolatier.  But I no longer have to envy my debate tournament self for having that box!

My razor had developed some black cruft around the little grip pads along the handle, so I decided that if bleach could get the black spots off my cutting boards, it could get it off my razor too.  I filled a small bottle with bleach and popped the razor handle in.  Five minutes later I went back into the bathroom to check on it.  The black cruft was 90% gone.  I decided to give the bleach another couple of minutes to finish the job.

Then I completely forgot about it.

A day later, I went back into the bathroom to wash up, and discovered the razor sticking up out of the bottle of bleach.  I pulled it out… and the handle was caked in a thick layer of black cruft.  The bleach solution itself had turned black.  I was able to chip some of the cruft off the handle, but yeah, that razor is ruined.  And since that type of razor hasn’t been manufactured since 1993, a replacement would appar­ently run me $75 to $150.  I have tried other razors over the years, but these are the only ones I like.  I do have another one, but yikes, now it’s my last one!