Where are you seeing that she stepped on it? The allegation is that she pressed it with her thumb, and she doesn’t dispute that she pressed it on purpose—she was checking the firmness, which is a weird thing to do to a bun but I don’t think it’s worth chasing her down over. If you really can’t sell it with a dent in it, telling her not to come back seems like a proportionate response. But honestly if I were the owner, I’d probably just eat the dented bun and call it a wash.

The owner followed her out of the store and restrained her over ¥180? Where do people even find the energy to turn these kinds of petty disputes into full-blown confrontations?

Oh phonics is the old one (although it’s making a comeback). The “new” one that they’ve been promoting for a couple decades (and have recently realized isn’t very good) is cueing, the one where you just show kids words and encourage them to use context clues to guess what they mean, and hope that they eventually learn to read by doing that. Phonics is the one where you start with letter (and letter group) sounds and learn to sound out words by reading out loud.

She hated the concept of… teaching what sounds letters make? Was she a big proponent of cuing, or something else?

Yes, I think so. I also did Hooked On Phonics with my grandfather before starting kindergarten which meant I could already read by the time we started school. This was in Texas in the early '90s.

I thought our eyes worked by projecting some kind of energy beam that scanned objects, like how Superman’s X-ray vision is sometimes drawn.