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I’m nearsighted and when I take my glasses off I can see pixels on a “retina” display clear as day.

People who debate about whether or not this or that pizza is the best in the world are missing the point.

Pizza is all about context. It’s different in different places because it needs to be. It reflects the unique lifestyle of a particular area.

Here’s how I see the two styles I’m most familiar with: NYC and Buffalo

NYC

Thin, wide, flat, lots of surface area. Dry, dusty, charred (in places) crust. Fold it, always fold it, but watch out for that grease trough you just made; it’ll get on your favorite sweats and leave a stain; stuff a napkin back there, or better yet, sop up that grease with a few paper towel pats to begin with.

You eat it on the go; you just arrived for a weekend tryst, hungry and cramped from sitting in a plane, then a car, for hours. You need to get to the hotel, arena, playhouse, friend’s apartment, whatever, or you’ll “be late”; there’s always that delay of game penalty you’re running from.

You’re in between things; just been shopping but have some time to kill before the opening. You’re tired; walking all day will do that. You stumble across a glassy exterior with those levels of steamy goodness calling to you from the interior. People are standing in line. In you go, “a slice of plain please”. Whatever the word for pizza chef wields an enormous wooden paddle, slings a cold slice into gigantic steel multitiered cavern, from which emerges your piping hot slice. You shake on a mountain of flavor from the “free toppings tray” as my friend Kip always called it—garlic salt, parmesan cheese, oregano and crushed red pepper—and off you go, back into the maelstrom.

NYC Pizza is NYC. It’s delicious, hot, messy, and made for the constant onslaught of the masses, hungry and late, needing a full, hot belly to keep up.

Buffalo

Fat. Doughy. Thick. Soggy, but with crispy bits strategically implemented throughout; the edges of the pepperoni, the apex of the crust, which when examined resembles the surface the moon.

You’re at a gathering: a party, an event, a celebration, and expecting to eat something. You’re pretty hungry, hangry is more like it. After all, this is Buffalo. People get hangry a lot, driving to and from these gatherings, usually through layers of ice and wind that coat everything.

Eating is a respite. I don’t know how much I want; I just want to dive in. Show me to the party; let me get my party on.

You don’t buy a slice in Buffalo. You buy a pizza. It’s either a party pizza, or a sheet, or a half sheet. It doesn’t come round; if it does, it’s usually kinda squarish, like they are so used to doing angles and can’t shake off the muscle memory for the rare round order.

The pizza is cut up into little chunks. Nothing, really. So easy to grab another one. So likely a perfect bowl of heaven will reside there: that quarter sphere of pepperoni, the rim brown-almost-black, remnants of a combination of olive oil and liquid lard swirled at the bottom, so small it is likely completely uncut, posted there in glory on a field of mozzarella.

What’s that, over there? Wings! Of course. Let’s grab a few of those; some blue cheese as a rule. Oops; my pizza dropped into my dip (or was it the other way around? Queue the old Reeses PBC commercials). All the better; the tang of blue cheese is an amazing complement to the sweet, spiciness of Margherita pepperoni-laden Buffalo style pizza.

Bottom Line

Pizza is too general a term for that staple of our diets, and can’t be compared from one region to another. It’s all about how we eat it.

We see because of light reacting with our crazy eyes and ocular nerves and brains.

But there’s a lot to learn about where that light’s coming from. It’s either being emitted or reflected.

The primary point of emitted light, for most of our existence on this planet, has been very hard, even dangerous, to look at. I’m talking about the sun. Other points are intriguing and inspiring: fire, candles, fireflies, stars, lightning, but they’ve been fleeting. We’ve never stared at them for more than a few moments, dreaming of things.

Our eyes were always concerned with reflected light. Light that revealed the skin of those we loved and feared, the places we lived and travel to, the words that formed our literature. The light that reflected off gardens that enveloped us and blades that killed us.

Our eyes now focus on emissive sources. We’ve harnessed the power of the sun and stars and flames and can represent those things with a single binary point of light. We call those points pixels, and they can be as big or small, bright or dim, red or blue as we want. They can be wherever we want them to be, and change according to our magnificent instructions. They constitute our stories.

 

 

There’s so much great music out there, but I can’t really find any. Problem is, the times in my life when I really discovered music were when I had a little peer pressure –  high school, college, working in an office – and the people around me would play stuff, make me listen to stuff, that at first sounded like dirt but after a few listens and seeing how enthusiastic the proponents were, I’d get into it and start listening on my own. Nowadays, there’s no impetus to listen to a new song more than once, even if someone suggests it on Facebook or Spotify. I need a music pusher.

Hoping to find:

• Renaming blocks (or at least groups)
  • Yes!
• Better font management
  • Yes!
• Native lightbox
  • wawa
• Styling links
  • wawa