Priceless is just another word

Eat at the otherwise admirable Pamplona at your own credit risk. My consort’s studio manager, inputting our dinner tab in Quicken, noticed the receipt showed his bare-naked Amex number. Since her other jobs in this booming Bush economy include waitressing, she of course went bonkers and called the restaurant — only to be told by the cretin who answered the phone some nonsense about how the credit card processor was making them do it. I went on the google and immediately turned up a recent LATimes story addressing this same invitation-to-fraud situation and confirmed what we both suspected: Since exactly a year ago [technically since December 2004, my older brother interjects], it is illegal to print out the digits in full. And that only makes the argument that they need the whole number “in case we need to reauthorize the charge” reek even more. As TC Boyle would say, with plenty of notes on the food: “Talk Talk.”