BreadTalk, a little baked goods chain, is celebrating its 5th anniversary. As part of the celebrations all its normal snack foods are S$1.00 each, resulting in enormous lines forming right ahead of me. They also offer S$5.00 off on cakes to people whose birthday (day, month, year) has a 5 in it, or whose age has a 5 in it. Remarkably this misses me. It seems almost like a mathematical puzzle to see what combination of numbers have to be ruled out of dates and ages to pin down a single day.
Inside, too, they're playing that disco-ey ``Happy birthday to you/ happy bir-r-r-thday/ happy birthday to you/ happy birthday ...'' and on and on. It grows softer and louder, but it keeps repeating. I hope the promotion ends before the people working the store go insane. I had about enough of the song in the time it took to get an An Pan and Coke Light.
That's not as bad as it could be, of course. A while ago the poor people at Best Denki, a consumer electronics store, were forced to listen on the TVs to The Eagles in concert doing a very long version of Hotel California, on a similar endless loop, making one think the store clerks were trapped in the end of a cruel Twilight Zone episode.
Not relevant but amusing me: the Delifrance, offering more or less French food, has a new sandwich of Le Crab Wasabi Baguette (a la carte, S$2.95). I'm fascinated by the combination of tastes and of languages involved (if the Translation widget doesn't fail me, it should be Le Crabe, to start), but didn't get one today.
I got a note on a mailing list that today is 70 years since Variety editor Claude Binyon wrote the only memorable Variety headline, ``Sticks Nix Hick Pix.'' That's not relevant, but when else am I going to get to mention such a thing?
Trivia: The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary listed 9,249 main words which begin with the letter E. Source: The Meaning of Everything, Simon Winchester.
Currently Reading: The Pencil, Henry Petroski.