[
"Sorry, we're fresh out of pineapple today.",
"All the toppings just went rogue and are currently answering to no god.",
"Our bicycle delivery guy is out today for ska band practice.",
"Doughpocalypse now. Pizza's off until further notice.",
"Mamma mia! We're outta the cheesa.",
"The sauce of our youth ran dry. Pizza is off the menu for now.",
"There was this pizza place in Portland called Lonesomes that taped burned CDs of local bands to the pizza box. It was pretty dope.",
"No dough, no go, sorry joe.",
"I'll be right with you after I figure out how to center a div in CSS.",
"The pizza gods demand rest. Are the hunger pangs interrupting your game?",
"Our pizza chef currently has the high score on the Road Kings pinball machine, you dare disturb him?",
"Today's special: disappointment. Pizza unavailable.",
"Our last pizza became a perpetual motion machine, left the atmosphere and is flying through the heavens.",
"Ran out of oregano and optimism. See you next time.",
<<~TEXT
WAR AND PEACE, BY LEO TOLSTOY, BOOK ONE: 1805, CHAPTER I
“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.
But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend
the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist—I really believe he is
Antichrist—I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend,
no longer my ‘faithful slave,’ as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have
frightened you—sit down and tell me all the news.”
It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pávlovna Schérer,
maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Márya Fëdorovna. With these words she
greeted Prince Vasíli Kurágin, a man of high rank and importance, who was the first
to arrive at her reception.
Anna Pávlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from
la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the elite.
All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered by a
scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:
“If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect of
spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be very
charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10—Annette Schérer.”
“Heavens! what a virulent attack!” replied the prince, not in the least disconcerted
by this reception.
He had just entered, wearing an embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and
shoes, and had stars on his breast and a serene expression on his flat face.
He spoke in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but
thought, and with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance
who had grown old in society and at court.
He went up to Anna Pávlovna, kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald, scented,
and shining head, and complacently seated himself on the sofa.
“First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend’s mind at rest,”
said he without altering his tone, beneath the politeness and affected sympathy of
which indifference and even irony could be discerned.
“Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times like these if
one has any feeling?” said Anna Pávlovna. “You are staying the whole evening, I hope?”
“And the fete at the English ambassador’s? Today is Wednesday. I must put in an
appearance there,” said the prince. “My daughter is coming for me to take me there.”
“I thought today’s fete had been canceled. I confess all these festivities and
fireworks are becoming wearisome.”
“If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would have been put off,”
said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did
not even wish to be believed.
“Don’t tease! Well, and what has been decided about Novosíltsev’s dispatch?
You know everything.”
“What can one say about it?” replied the prince in a cold, listless tone.
“What has been decided? They have decided that Buonaparte has burnt his boats,
and I believe that we are ready to burn ours.”
Prince Vasíli always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale part.
Anna Pávlovna Schérer on the contrary, despite her forty years, overflowed with
animation and impulsiveness.
To be an enthusiast had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she
did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the
expectations of those who knew her.
The subdued smile which, though it did not suit her faded features, always played
round her lips expressed, as in a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her
charming defect, which she neither wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary,
to correct.
TEXT
].freeze