The List

Here's the list of memorable places I've eaten pizza from (in no particular order):

1. Pepperoncino's (5th Ave)

2. Patsy's (118th & 1st)

3. Patsy's (11th & University)

4. Totonno's (26th & 2nd)

5. Totonno's (81st & 2nd)

6. Totonno's (Coney Island)

7. Ray's (2nd & 94th)

8. John's (44th & 8th)

9. John's (Bleecker)

10. Bleecker Street Pizza (7th Ave)

11. No. 28 (near Bleecker)

12. DeMarco's (was on Houston, CLOSED)

13. Joe's (near Bleecker)

14. Abitino's (Bleecker)

15. Lombardi's (Spring St.)

16. Una Pizza Napoletana (12th & 1st; CLOSED)

17. Waldy's Wood-Fired Pizza (6th Ave.)

18. Luzzo's (1st Ave)

19. Nick's (94th & 2nd)

20. Nick's (Queens)

21. Sac's Place (Astoria)

22. Grimaldi's (Dumbo)

23. Angelo's (57th & 6th)

24. Di Fara (Midwood)

25. Franny's (Flatbush)

26. 5th Ave Pizza (5th & Union St.)

27. La Villa (5th Ave)

28. Anthony's (7th Ave)

29. Li'l Frankie's (1st Ave)

30. Gino's (Washington Ave)

31. Nino's (Franklin Ave)

32. Vinny Vincenz (1st Ave)

33. Monty's (Montague St.)

34. Two Boot's (Bleecker)

35. Two Boot's (Grand Central)

36. 33 (23rd & 8th)
37. Fornino's (Bedford Ave, Williamsburg)
38. La Pizza Fresca (20th & Broadway)
39. Graziella's (Vanderbilt Ave & Dekalb Ave)

40. Famiglia (Crap. Don't ever eat pizza from here.)
41. Lazzara's (38th b/t 7th & 8th; Square pie)
42. Serafina (somewhere in Midtown)
43. Celeste (Amsterdam Ave b/t 84th and 85th)
44. The Alligator Lounge (Metropolitan Ave., Williamsburg)

45. Pizzatown (5th Ave., Park Slope)

46. Isabella's Oven (Grand St., LES; CLOSED)

47. Dean's (85th St. & Broadway, UWS)

48. Lucali's (Henry St., Carroll Gardens)
49. Toby's Public House (South Slope/Sunset Park)
50. South Brooklyn Pizza (Court St. & 3rd Pl., Carroll Gardens)

51. Co. (24th & 9th)
52. Kesté (Bleecker)
53. Artichoke Basille (14th & 1st)
54. Pizza Mezzaluna (W. Houston; MacDougal)
55. Motorino (Graham Ave., Williamsburg)
56. Motorino (East Village)

Plus a number of other corner slice shops that dot the cityscape.

To do list:

Best Pizza
Totale
Olio e Piú
South Brooklyn Pizza (Manhattan)
Artichoke Basille's (Westside)
Rose & Joe's Italian Bakery
Donatella's
Roberta's
San Marzano
Paulie Gee's
L&B Spumoni Gardens
Arturo's
Leonardo's
+ more!

My current top 10 (in order):

1. Di Fara (excruciatingly long waits for works of edible art)
2. Motorino (wood oven, crisp and tensile crust, delicate buffalo mozzarella— and excellent gelato!)
3. Grimaldi's (coal oven perfection, quality pepperoni, and root beer)
4. Anthony's (homemade cheese, amazingly delicious crust like fresh bread)
5. Nick's (wood-fired, crust quality varies, excellent pepperoni, all in the exotic locale of Queens)

6. Artichoke Basille (the square. really. it's' that good. crisp, rich, oily.)

7. Totonno's (the most consistently made pizza, paper thin crust, smokey coal oven)
8. Pizza Mezzaluna (wood-fired, Neapolitan-inspired)

9. Lombardi's (America's first licensed pizzeria)
10. La Villa (the DOC is wood-fired new york-italianess; bonus!: delicious house salad)

What?

Ridiculous.

Cigarettes and Pollution

Below are some statistics I looked up. I don't have anything to compare cigarette pollution to yet (except for the segment from the Italian Institute for Higher Health), but I'll see what I can come up with. I think my math is right, but I welcome corrections.

According to a study conducted by the the Italian Institute for Higher Health, three smouldering cigarettes produced a 10-fold increase in air particles compared to those produced by an idling 2002 Ford Mondeo turbo diesel with a two-litre engine, fuelled with low-sulphur diesel. (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6312)

The mean average of milligrams of CO per cigarrette is 11.5mg (taken from data corresponding to 103 different kinds of cigarettes, a sampling of the statistics found here: www.ftc.gov/reports/tobacco/1998tar&nicotinereport.pdf , a Federal Trade Commission report).

Estimated number of cigarettes smoked in U.S. in 2005 by the U.S.D.A.: 389 billion
Estimated number of cigarettes produced in the world in 2004: 5.662 trillion

Approximately 4.5 million kilos or 9.9 million lbs of carbon monoxide released into the atmosphere via smoking in the U.S. (11.5mg x 389,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = # of kilos x 2.2 = # of pounds).

The 465 billion cigarettes smoked in the United States in 1998 translates to a total of 176,250,000 pounds of discarded butts in one year in the United States alone.
(http://www.longwood.edu/cleanva/cigbutthowmany.htm)

The average diameter of a cigarette is approximately 10mm or 1cm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette). One football field is approximately 110m x 50m (http://www.ncaa.org/champadmin/football/football_field.gif). If you stood each cigarette on end, like a chimney stack, you would need 55 million cigarettes¹ to cover an entire football field. It would take about 7,072 football fields, or slightly over 15 square miles², to house all of the cigarettes produced in the U.S. Now imagine those cigarettes burning.

1. 110m = 11000cm; 50m = 5000cm;(11000cm*5000cm)*(1 cigarette / 1cm^2) = 5.5x10^7 cigarettes

2. 1m = 0.000621371192 miles; 110m = 0.06835083112 miles; 50m = 0.0310685596 miles; 7072*0.06835083112 miles*0.0310685596 miles = 15.017829547194793606144 miles^2

from nature.com

Puzzle of leaping liquid solved
Physicists explain how shampoo streams can bounce.

Philip Ball

Dutch researchers believe they have cracked the physics behind a mysterious bouncing behaviour of liquids, first seen more than 40 years ago.

British engineer Arthur Kaye first noticed this weird phenomenon in 1963, while experimenting with a mixture of obscure organic liquids. When he poured his viscous mixture on to a surface, the down-going stream would suddenly throw up a jet that merged with the incoming stream.

Continued...

Videos of the phenomenon.

Di Fara Strikes Back

Monday night Haley "the Nomad" Malm was in town on the second to last leg of her whirlwind east coast tour / Ryan Greene Yale Interview Support Group Field Trip. Of course, we did the same thing I do with everyone who visits--we went out for pizza. This was the first time I'd returned to Di Fara Pizzeria since August, when my dad, cousin, and I did our pizza tour, and was only the third time I've ever been there. This time I though, I feel I'm finally able to articulate what's so great about this pizza and what makes it perhaps less than perfect in my eyes.

First, of course, as mentioned in previous posts is the whole process of actually getting your pizza. There's no line, per se, just a random smattering of people gathered around a counter, behind which Domenico DeMarco makes the pizza. Slowly. There's some charm in that. It kind of a ritual. You stand. You try and make eye contact with either Dom or one of his kids, who by comparison is a blur of activity. You wait. You try and maybe wave a little bit, hoping that like that T. Rex in Jurassic Park, movement will attract the attention of one of them. Eventually, you get in your order, after which there's more standing and waiting. A half hour passes. Others, who have been waiting for what seems to them like an eternity, finally receive their pies and slices. There is rejoicing. Then forty-five minutes pass and an hour and five minutes. You notice that the girls in the corner are finally called upon to pick up their slices. As one of them walks past, pizza in hand, you can't help but comment on how good it looks and smells. You find yourself oogling the slices, rather than the girls, who under other circumstances might be oogle-worthy themselves. Finally, after an hour and fifteen minutes, your pie is out of the oven. It's done. Almost. At this point drool is peaking through the sides of your mouth and your stomach is attempting to digest itself, but Dom--still in slow motion--is cutting fresh basil directly onto the pie and then is off to grate parmesean cheese. You realize that this is your chance to pick up an IBC root beer or two out of the fridge so everything can be added up and paid for by the time the last of the cheese has been sprinkled on and the pizza cut into eight unevenly sized slices. This way no time is wasted and pizza consumption can begin as soon as it can be carried over to a table, if not before.

Okay, so maybe some of the above is just me, and not the general public "you." Regardless, there's a lot of waiting and lot of anticipation. By the time Haley and I got our half pepperoni/half green peppers, mushrooms, sausage, and onion pizza we were starving, but goddamn, did that pizza taste magnificent--all fresh ingredients, including three kinds of cheese (fior di latte, mozzerella, and paremsean), a simultaneously sweet and savory sauce, fresh basil, and thickly sliced, beautifully seasoned pepperoni, which made for a knockout combo. And the crust was nicely charred to boot. There was also great variation to how the toppings are spread on the pizza--a little collective of pepperoni over here, an island of cheese over there, and little ponds of sauce dotting the landscape made for distinctive mouthfuls of pizza each bite. So delicious.

Now for the critical portion of the review. Here are what I think holds back Di Fara pizza from being perfect: it all comes down to the foundation--the crust. (1) The crust can't support the toppings. The cheese, in its pooling, is laid on thick and the toppings are generously sliced. It's too much for the poor, defenseless thin crust. The front half of slices are often overpowered and completely soaked through, making it difficult to pick them up without half of the toppings sliding off. (2) The crust's thickness is often uneven. This wouldn't necessarily be much of a problem if it weren't for #1 above. However, there are some places in the crust that are so thin, it just gives way. I actually had a slice that had a hole in the crust. As you can imagine, this makes it difficult to handle slices. It gets pretty messy, and dropping hot sauce or cheese on your hand can burn. (3) The crust, while pretty flavorful, is a little bland in comparison to say, Franny's or Lombardi's. I'm not sure if this is related to the use of a gas oven rather than a wood or charcoal one, or more related to the ingredients, but it could certainly use a little extra oomph, like maybe some seasoned olive oil brushed around the cornichone (the edge or lip of a pizza... thank you sliceny.com glossary). It's just a bit of a let down to have the last part you eat be not quite as pheonmenal as the rest of the slice.

Really though, that's some pretty nit-picky stuff. The pizza is so worth the wait and is definitely some of the best I've ever had. Thank you, Haley, for your excellent company and an excellent meal. I hope my next visit is as enjoyable.

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Us? Like those savages in the middle east? Never...

According to a Washington Post article, John Bolton said of Iran, "It is not just that the regime is seeking to develop nuclear weapons, but that it is also the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism and is working to destabilize the region to advance its ideological ambitions."

Hey, Bush administration, what's so bad about destablizing the middle east in order to advance your own ideological ambitions? I wonder...