It’s happening again this morning, but this time the stuck truck driver can’t blame an illegally parked car, as was the case in January.

With the recent advent of the five-bladed “Fusion” razor, the Economist predicts that the fourteen-bladed razor should appear no later than 2100. Their analysis would benefit from that of Dave Barry’s several years ago, which explained the intricacies of the razor industry’s R&D:

Mine was a lonely adolescence.

The razors of that era had one blade, and they worked fine; ask any older person who is not actively drooling. But then, in 1971, a very bad thing happened: Gillette, looking for a way to enhance the shaving experience (by which I mean “charge more”) came out with a razor that had TWO blades. This touched off a nuclear arms race among razor companies, vying to outdo one another by adding “high-tech” features that made the product more expensive, but not necessarily better. This tactic is called “sneakerization,” in honor of the sneaker industry, which now has people paying upwards of $200 a pair for increasingly weird-looking footwear boasting the durability of thinly sliced Velveeta.

Soon everybody was selling two-blade razors. So the marketing people put on their thinking caps, and, in an astounding burst of creativity, came up with the breakthrough concept of: THREE BLADES. Gillette, which is on the cutting edge (har!) of razor sneakerization, currently has a top-of-the-line three-blade razor — excuse me, I mean “shaving system” — called the “Mach3Turbo,” which, according to the Gillette Web site (www.gillette.com) has more technology than a nuclear submarine, including “open cartridge architecture” and an “ergonomic handle” featuring “knurled elastomeric crescents.” That’s right: It has elastomeric crescents, and they have been knurled! By knurlers! No, I don’t know what this means. But it sure sounds technological.

Which brings us to today’s exciting news, which was brought to my attention by alert reader Jake Hamer. Gillette’s arch-rival, Schick (maker of the Xtreme 3 shaving system) has announced that it’s coming out with a new razor that has — prepare to be floored by innovativeness — FOUR BLADES. Yes! It will be called the “Quattro,” which is Italian for “more expensive.”

Of course it will not end there. I bet an urgent memo has already gone out in Gillette’s marketing department. “Hold some focus groups immediately!” it says. “Find out what number comes after four!”

Yes, the razor-technology race shows no signs of slowing. And who knows what lies ahead? Razors with 10 blades? Twenty blades? A thousand blades? Razors that go backward in time and shave your ancestors? Exciting times lie ahead, shaving consumers!

A few months ago I came out in the hall to find a woman sitting on the floor, cell phone in hand. She was calling for backup—or a replacement. Our neighbor had asked her to feed the cat while she was gone on vacation, but this woman was afraid even to go into the apartment.

Tonight, someone set off the fire alarm again. Soon a fire truck pulled up out front, sirens blaring. I couldn’t see what happened, but about a minute later the truck left, the alarm still chirping away (it continued at least for another twenty minutes). Seems like an unusual thing for the fire department to do, but it’s understandable. “Bob, that’s the apartment with the cat.” “That cat? Let’s get out of here while we can!”

You can see the video on CNN.com’s home page. The U.S. attorney stops mid-sentence as everyone spins to look at the commotion. About five seconds later a half-dozen officers swoop in, guns drawn.

What do you do if you’re a semi-trailer driving through the narrow streets of a residential neighborhood, and you can’t make a turn because of an illegally parked car? (The white Cirrus shouldn’t be parked on that side of the sign.)

First, you try having the people across the street move their cars.

When that doesn’t work you call a tow truck, who drags the car to the side . . .

. . . so he can tow it away.

Coke to the people!

At great risk of arrest, I took this picture on the subway tonight.

But the question is, can it pay the bills?

Feinstein said she believed Alito was sincere.

She said they discussed Row v. Wade, the landmark case that legalized abortion . . .

Yeah, Row versus Wade. A couple of times I’ve actually had to make that decision in a swamped canoe.

That’s probably the CNN.com intern’s doing, but it’s not the first time Senator Feinstein has been associated with a little Roe goofiness. A couple of months ago she had this to say:

“It would be very difficult for me to vote to confirm someone to the Supreme Court whom I knew would overturn Roe and return our country to the days of the 1950s,” the 72-year-old Democratic senator said.

I think the reporter tacked on her age to remind us that when you’re in your seventies, the decades all blend together.

In an informal conversation after the lecture, one of the students asked [Paul] Tillich what it felt like to be famous. “Famous?” he responded. “I’m not famous. My idea of being famous is that I get into a New York taxi and the driver turns around and says, ‘Aren’t you Professor Tillich?’ That has never happened to me.” Some years ago I got into a taxi and the driver asked, “Aren’t you Father Neuhaus?” Ah, I thought, this is it. Then the driver explained that his sister-in-law is a parishioner at Immaculate Conception, the church where I regularly say Mass, and she had complained to him about my too long homilies. Sic transit gloria.

A little humor via my friend Greg. Or, “I feel like we were destined for each other.”