I'm done with the Times Union

We still have a subscription because my wife likes a Sunday paper, but my part going forward is picking the newspaper up off the driveway and bringing it inside the house. Maybe.

Chris Churchill is the local opinion columnist. The day after the election he wrote a completely bullshit column about the electorate being informed and very concerned about immigration and the economy. It's not often I write the paper, but maybe still a little groggy in the morning, I did:

I imagine you are going to get a lot of email on this one. Seriously, columns like today's are the reason I stopped reading your stuff regularly.

"He won mostly because of honest-to-goodness issues, inflation, illegal immigration and war above all."

It couldn't possibly have anything to do with a constant shitstorm of unchecked misinformation and racism. It was purely issues.

Piss right off.

 

Chris, that's how he signed his email so we are on a first name basis, wrote back:

 

Thank you, John. Appreciate your thoughts. Dismissing the win as about nothing more than misinformation and racism seems like a way to let Democrats off the hook for their failures, and it ignores that Trump received significant, if not historic, support from Black and Latino communities. Isn’t it more reasonable to think that those communities were concerned about immigration and inflation?

Chris 

 

This response to his email went unanswered. I guess the first response fulfilled his obligation to engage with subscribers:

It is not my intention to say the Democrats should be let off the hook, nor did i say it. There is plenty they have done wrong, especially in the last 15 years. I'm saying misinformation and racism are large pieces of the puzzle left out of today's column.

I became a Democrat by default a little over 4 years ago so I could participate in a primary that turned out to be meaningless. That was after about 25 years of being an independent. I think there is a lot wrong with both parties. Enough wrong to not want to be in either.

I would argue the Democrats shouldn't have run Hillary Clinton- not because she was necessarily bad or unfit, but at that point she was divisive because right wing media made her a villain. After 4 years of Trump they came up with Biden. Worked in the short term, but you can see where that got them now. Maybe,if they actually had a real primary 5 years ago, that candidate would have ran for reelection.

Everyone that was upset about "her email" doesn't care about a bathroom full of classified documents. Is handling classified information the issue or is it something else? We're so tough on crime, our candidate has a sentencing hearing coming up.

Is immigration an issue or are "they coming to eat your cats and dogs?" Have you seen how much "Your body, my choice" men have put online already since Tuesday? Check this out.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCDgEizuFmH/?igsh=MXA0dndiNjdqaDZzYw==

(it's a link to that asshole whose name I'm glad I can't remember, brick ceiling bullshit rant)

That's the new Republican base. And they wonder why they can't find a date. At least they're heavily armed. 

Our current inflation is corporate gouging. Inflation and record breaking profits don't go together. You think companies are going to pay Trump tariffs or we are? When you go to a restaurant and use a credit card, you often pay a 3% upcharge. That's a tariff. You say anything about a Trump tariff raising prices, that's a lie. People don't believe the cost will fall back on them.

You ever watch George Carlin? Instead of believing we have a well informed electorate, I think it is more reasonable to believe a lot of people were duped to believing they are in the club. Sooner or later they will see, they ain't in it.

Jon

 

This is the Carlin piece I was referencing. 

I'm done. One of the head writers at the Times Union is clueless. It is going to be sad watching people be surprised when the Department of Education falls apart and they realize a little voucher isn't enough to pay for a private school education. You think health care is expensive now? Now imagine it with a tariff on absolutely everything in a hospital or doctors office that isn't made in the US. You think your daughters and grand daughters are going to have OB/GYNs? I bet a lot less pre-med students are going into that field when some random person can make a phone call and turn a doctor's life upside down with an accusation. You dumb enough to think the mass deportation concentration camps are going to be safe? Fuck you. I can not stress this enough. Fuck.You.

Just piss off with the well informed electorate argument. The more I think about it, Chris me accused of letting the Democratic Party off the hook. I think the column was more about letting his newspaper and himself off the hook.

RIP, foreplease

foreplease was his pizza forum name. Tony is the name he went by. It was his middle name though, turns out he was a Joseph. I don't recall him telling many golf stories but he was very into turf management. I know he made fairways on several golf courses...and baseball or softball fields, football turf, probably had some soccer pitches in there too. 

Just a really nice guy. Always welcoming to new people online, happy to offer solid pizza making advice and words of encouragement. Tony really loved some traditions, we share that. One of his biggest traditions was meatballs. He made and gave them out at the holidays. Everybody loved them. The list of recipients continued to grow until he got pushed out of the house and found space in a commercial kitchen to make them each year. Thousands of meatballs over the years.

The last 5 or 6 years, Tony was dealing with some pretty aggressive cancer. He got into a few trials and lived his final years as a science experiment receiving new drugs and cancer fighting treatments. On more than one occasion, I believe he was the first human test subject. The treatments worked pretty well for some time. Got Tony some pizza making time with grandkids. He beat 5 relapses. The 6th relapse got him.

Over the years, enough people had asked about him and his treatments so they set up a blog/email list. Every once in a while there would be an Update On Tony. Most were written by Tony describing his treatment and what was going on. I knew another treatment had started in August. When the posts started to not be written by Tony in September, I knew it wasn't a good sign. That was when I started cyber-stalking Tony. He wasn't posting on the forum much, but you can tell when someone had logged on. If Tony was still logging on most days to poke around, I had hopes he was doing OK. I sent a private message to kind of check in and wish him well. It took a few days for him to get back. That hadn't happened the past. Responses came in hours.

Tony passed away last week. His funeral was Saturday. I made a batch of his meatballs.

 

If you want to make a batch of Tony's meatballs, the recipe is in the second page of this thread.

https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,45810.0.html

And Fuck Cancer.

 

Pizza Line Of Sight Theory

There are a few "Theories" or general rules of thumb that seem to hold true. Sam Sifton came up with The Pizza Cognition Theory (basically the first pizza that you appreciate become what pizza is to you, might be Dominoes, or local place you went to aster a game, that's what you look for in a pizza). Angelo Womack has a theory about the quality of a pizza being directly related to how formally dressed like a chef the pizza maker is. If you look like you were just chef-ing it up in a super formal fancy restaurant, the pizza probably isn't very good.

Here's my Pizza Line of Sight Theory:

If you are in a pizzeria and you cannot see anyone making pizzas, the pizzas is not going to be great.

Sure that pizza might be passable and fill you up if you are hungry, but those slices are never going to be in the discussion about great pizza. I tried a family dinner package from a local place I had never tried out before tonight. I had driven past it for years but the last time I looked it up online the photos were of pizza I was pretty sure I was going to hate. When I looked tonight, the pizzas looked like they could be OK. So I got the large cheese, boneless Buffalo wing bites and garlic knots combo, Picking up the order, there was a display case with slices. They looked OK. I was getting my hopes up, even though all things pizza production were in a back room kitchen.

Opened the box and looked at the bottom of a slice. It was cooked on a screen. Another theory: Great pizza is not cooked on a screen. Again, pizza on a screen might not suck, but I don't know of a great one. Tasted it, the crust was bland. The texture was commercial. I'd bet this place is buying dough instead of making it. The boneless wings were clearly premade/purchased. Overall, the pizza looked like it might be alright, but it wasn't.

Anyhow, let me know if you have a place that disproves my line of sight theory. In my experience, it has been rock solid.