We ended up opposite the Continental, at the Café Scala, which is conjoined with a cinema of the same name, a bright white two story art deco building with SCALA in an elegant 1930s typeface above a couple of smooth, abstracted, decorative columns. Entering the café, I pictured the cinema façade twenty years hence, its whiteness stained with smog and muck, crumbling and stone-rotted, the second A in SCALA dangling or gone, leaving behind SCAL, which looks and sounds close enough to scar or skull, either of which would beat out the anodyne “scale” in a default renaming poll or contest. So I ordered my cake and coffee, unable to escape the queasy feeling that I was poking at a scar or picking at a skull.