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pizza topping theory
Sunday, May 31 2015
I woke up in a hot sweat on the couch on the teevee room couch with a pretty bad hangover, the kind you get when you drink seven or eight cheap beers followed by three or four IPAs.
It was raining a little outside and I felt like maybe I needed to vomit, but I thought maybe I should ride a bicycle down into Old Hurley and retrieve my Subaru from Ray & Nancy's house. But as I was getting ready to do that, Mark showed up the way he does, that is, spontaneously, like a mushroom after a rainstorm. He gave me a ride down the hill, and I hung out for awhile in Ray & Nancy's dining room. Ray had been up until 3:00am and was still asleep, but Nancy was up and so were Lynne (she constantly does macrame these days) and Vivienne. Nancy made me some coffee, which I drank while examining a board game from the 1970s called Bargain Hunter. It came complete with a fake credit card imprinter (from the days before credit cards were processed electronically). Meanwhile Cheddar the Rottweiler was being his usual slightly-obnoxious self, and Mark asked half-jokingly, if I would take him. "No," I said. "Good choice," he agreed. Then Lynne asked what I would do if I saw him on the side of the road. "I'd keep driving," I said.
Dark clouds were piling in, and it seemed like a good idea to get out of there before the downpour began. So I drove back home, where I found Gretchen had started on a french press of decaf. It was too cold and rainy to drink it outside, and temperatures kept on dropping, forcing us to close windows. By this afternoon, I was craving a hot bath (for which there was plenty of solar-heated water).
This evening, Gretchen and I met our friends Eva and Sandor at Catskill Mountain Pizza for some pizza and beer. We ordered the usual: a large regular-crust with mushrooms and banana peppers for Sandor and me and a smaller spelt-crust with olives and spinach for Gretchen and Eva. We had the same waitress we always get, the one with tattoos who was flamboyantly pregant a year and a half ago. She has a terrible memory, but she always makes like her memory is awesome. Today, for example, she said "I know," when we said we were vegan. And then she proceeded to take our order without writing anything down. So of course, when the pizzas came out, the spelt one was slightly wrong. I never care when that happens, but Gretchen (the one mostly likely to get her food spat upon) raised a stink, and, to her credit, our waitress made good on it by having a third pizza prepared for us for free.
Early in our meal, we discussed why it is that one should never order more than two toppings for a pizza. This is due to the fact that each additional topping costs the same increment of additional money, though with each topping added, the pizza maker tends to apply fewer of all the toppings. So you end up paying increasing amounts of money for a non-increasing amount of food. I then suggested a possible idea for a 20/20 expos&eactute; of the pizza industry: ABC could order a range of pizzas, each with different numbers of toppings, and weigh them to determine whether or not the ones with more toppings actually weighed a linear (as opposed to logarithmic) amount more. To be statistically valid, they could order ten of each, and give the uneaten pizzas to a homeless shelter after they were done doing the measuring. Eva suggested they could order ten of each permutation of toppings to determine whether some were more cost-effective than others. At some point I made a quantitative leap in my proposals for the testing, wondering how many toppings could be applied to a pizza without breaking the underlying "regulation restaurant table" upon which it would be set. From there it was a small matter to conjecture at what point a pizza would overcome the Chandrasekhar limit and collapse into a singularity between the legs of the diner. (I was thinking the Chandrasekhar limit was a collapse-resisting limit of atoms, though it's actually a mass limit for stars.)
Out in the parking lot after our feast, Sandor asked Gretchen to answer a question, "What do you think of people who drive BMWs?" Gretchen had an immediate answer, as this had come up several times in the past (usually on the Garden State Parkway): "I think they're douchebags!" With that, Sandor clicked a button on his key fob, and the BMW next to our Prius came to life. It was Eva & Sandor's expansion car, that is, the second car a couple buys after moving Upstate. Sandor went on to explain that a BMW was the best car for his situation; he doesn't really like driving unless it's a really good car, and that he would have gladly bought a Honda Accord, but they all come with leather seats. Still, even if it could be justified, the purchase made Eva a little uncomfortable. By the way, Eva and Sandor get all their cars on leases, so they can't put bumperstickers on them like we do on ours.
On the way home, we stopped at Susan and David's place to borrow some much-needed dog food. But of course we stayed for a couple hours as they plied us with beer, cookies, and even candy. Their dogs were adorable and cuddly, as if to deny the passions with which they hate our dogs.
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