If you read the posts in chronological order, you'll realize I went to Kensington Market this morning. Being a lazy guy in the kitchen, I didn't really have breakfast before I headed out, partly because I had visions of the Big Fat Burrito breakfast burrito dancing in my head.

The burrito is undeniably tasty, but at $5.50, is it good value?

Are you getting the same ratio of food weight per dollar spent that you would with a more conventional breakfast or sandwich? In other words, should the burrito actually be priced in the four-dollar range?

I suspect it's more profitable to flog burritos than more conventional fare. Someone should do some research into this burning issue.

There is a cheese shop in Kensington Market that I frequent.

I feel my order has become entirely too predictable. So, apparently, does the staff there.

"Three dollars worth of cheddar, sir?" said the clerk today, clearly ground down by the tyranny of monotony that my purchasing pattern imposes on her.

"You're right: I don't really vary my order a lot," I conceded. But then I added, in faux protest: "I've had the cream cheese. I've bought some feta now and again. I've had the gouda."

"Well I haven't sold it to you," she groused back. "Must be some other store."

Then she said, "We call you 'Cheddar Man'."

So I'm right up there with 'Late Lady' as having a nickname with the shop's staff.

"We call her 'Late Lady' because she always comes in right before closing time, at five-to-six every Saturday," the clerk said.

"You know why? Because she always goes to pray first at St. Patrick's church."

I told the clerk that one of these days, I'm going to come in with a cheesehead hat (in cheddar, of course) just to make everyone in the shop laugh.

Gabriele Torsello was snatched last month, as was his Afghan translator. While Torsello -- whom his kidnappers wanted to trade to Italy at one point in return for an Afghan convert to Christianity -- has been released, the translator's fate isn't known yet.

From the NYT review by A.O. Scott:

(Babel) tells four distinct stories, disclosing bit by bit the chronology and causality that link them and making much of the linguistic, cultural and geographical distances among the characters. The movie travels — often by means of jarringly abrupt cuts and shifts of tone — from the barren mountains of Morocco, where the dominant sound is howling wind, to fluorescent Tokyo, where the natural world has been almost entirely supplanted by a technological environment, to the anxious border between the United States and Mexico. Each place has its own aural and visual palette. The languages used by the astonishingly diverse cast include Spanish, Berber, Japanese, sign language and English. The misunderstandings multiply accordingly, though they tend to be most acute between husbands and wives or parents and children, rather than between strangers.

Surely, something must hold this world — or, at any rate, this film’s vision of the world — together. Whether anything does is the question most likely to fuel the cafe-table arguments “Babel” will surely provoke. The individual scenes are sometimes so powerful, and put together with such care and conviction, that you might leave the theater feeling dazed, even traumatized. “Babel” is certainly an experience. But is it a meaningful experience? That the film possesses unusual aesthetic force strikes me as undeniable, but its power does not seem to be tethered to any coherent idea or narrative logic. You can feel it without ever quite believing it.