This Is Not The First (Nor Last) Post Of Ours About Pizza

On Facebook tonight, we saw a posting from some friends about pizza in Ithaca. Whoa, baby. Getting such a posting past us without comment is like throwing a pork chop past a wolf: tough to do. All the other comments were like 30 words. Not ours. Since we spent so much time with it (actually, not all that much, we write fast about everything, but especially pizza), we figured we'd get double-duty off it by posting it here, too. (There are references to the line of chat you won't get; but the gist, you will.)

Pizza Aroma is indeed Ithaca's best. Also, owner Mauricio and his family are lovely, hard-working people, providing a great product and service in the heart of downtown. I don't know about the Dryden place - I will check it out, on the authoritative word of Mssrs. Dayhart and Hernandez, next time I am so far east - but let me tell you this, do yourself a favor, visit NY Pizza on Main Street in T-burg.

As the name imparts, this is the bona fide city-style joint. Super-thin crust, crack a slice into a V and it stays there, and you eat it one-handed as you drive home. This pizza - the texture, flavor, composition and melt - beats Bensonhurst and Cross Bay Boulevard.

Also, the place has the proper attitude for providing this essentially street comestible. They do not provide mimeographed menus, though this might be good for business: you know, their offerings, prices, hours of operation, phone number, to have in your home? F that. Memorize them. Neither do they open on Sunday, though this is a prime pizza day. Sunday is the day of rest, and family day.

I have accepted many invitations to do things I don't want to do in Trumansburg, in order to visit NYP, have a slice (remarkably gigantic and cheap) in the shop (comfortable, clean, business-like, NYC/Italia painted mural on the wall, soccer on TV) while they bake me a pie to take home. Word to the wiseguy.

Welcome, Internet, Connecting Me To Limbo

The guy setting it up for me said that it "is very weird" that I do not have Internet connection in my house until now.

I never felt the need for it. I have Internet connection at work, to do things like check bank balances and Facebook. I also have it in a small office I have downtown. But now I'm giving up the office space, so I need the connection for protracted projects. (I write, for the local weekly, and other things.)

I always thought it was good, that if I want to go online, I have to go to work - one place or the other - and not have the temptation of sitting around in lounge pants doing it. I have to put on real pants. I have to walk or bike (or, occasionally, drive) half a mile. Good exercise (under those first two options).

So now I have the service here at home. It's good, in that I can write and post this, at my kitchen table, pretty late.

But it's bad, in this. Last night I was writing, and looked up something important. But now I don't remember what. All I remember is that, somehow, I saw something on Google that said, "Sly Stone on piano, Richard Pryor on drums Mike Douglas Show 1972."

Dear reader, you are on the Internet, so you know where this is going, don't you? From that slight submerge, I emerged two hours later, having subsequently perused the Rolling Stones on the Mike Douglas Show; the Wikipedia biography of Mike Douglas (he is from Chicago); an interview with a glassy-eyed Keith Richards from about 1972; Keith Richards trying to work out the lead-in to "Carol" with Chuck Berry in a movie, where they fight; a visit to the website of the session's bass player, Joey Spampinato; an excited look at a Youtube posting of NRBQ, Spampinato's old band, at the GrassRoots Festival in 1993, where I myself, a worker at the festival, am seen sitting on stage enjoying the performance behind the piano player, with pigmentation in my hair, which no longer exists, beneath a "Brooklyn Gum" bike-racing hat from Italy, that I'd forgotten I ever had; then, somehow - I guess it was just in my head - a version of "I Don't Know" by Sonny Boy Williamson, from 1960's French TV, in black-and-white video.

Then I shook my head, as if to clear it of cobwebs. What was I first looking for?

I couldn't remember. So I closed my notebook and went to bed. Sorry, whatever I wanted to write about.

Tonight, this is it - writing to you before bed. No monkey business, no Youtube, no footage of John Lennon playing ping-pong with Miles Davis, no that nice song by Magnetic Fields, no Senor Wences, no nothing. Just this, to you, then bed.

Well, maybe Senor Wences. One second. Or Fyvush Finkel. Fyvush Finkel!

Karan Casey Concert to Support Anti-Drone Protests - Ithaca Times : News

Press 'n' read. (And come to the show on Monday!)

Karan Casey Concert to Support Anti-Drone Protests - Ithaca Times : News

Time For A New Doctor

I started thinking about my health care with all this talk about Obamacare, even though the act doesn't affect me, and I decided to look for a new doctor. My old one was okay, because at my check-ups he never asked if there was anything wrong with me, but on the couple of occasions that there was, and I told him and said I did some research online, he'd say, "What did you find out?," and start taking notes.

He has a diploma on the wall but it does not say where he graduated, class level, thus me looking around.

I had a recommendation from a friend about a different office, so I went over there last week. But the exchange was disconcerting.

When I explained my situation (without so much detail), the office manager smiled sweetly. "I'm sorry," she said. "We're not taking any new patients at the moment. Try back in a month or so."

Which basically made me wonder what was happening this month. Are they expecting some patients to die?

I imagined myself as their patient, and a new one coming around. "Well, we've got a guy named Steve Burke who might die. Check back with us in a month. It might be sooner if he forgets to call us back on this report."

Forget that, you know? I want a place that will either take me right now, or tell me come back in a year. That they've got some people who might die, but they're scheming on saving them.

"Luckily, The Olympics Are Boring"

Possibly the only thing more "impenetrably boring" (quoting ourselves) than the summer Olympics is the winter Olympics. Here's a reprint of a posting on the summer, '08 gamut.

Luckily, the Olympics Are Boring

As a big baseball fan, including televised baseball, I don't need any more reasons to waste my time, so it is lucky I find the Olympics impenetrably boring.

As far as I can tell, the Olympic games take place every day, all day, for an arbitrary period of time, once every four years. An untold number of athletes, more than you can imagine exist, participate in a cavalcade of games, races, and other events that are not that easy to categorize. The best three people in a competition stand on a box at the end of it, and get a medal on a string to put around their necks.

The Olympics reward excellence, which is part of the problem. Excellence is not as engaging as failure.

Baseball is based on failure. Even the greatest hitters fail two times out of three. A championship team can be one that only wins 4 times out of 7, which is just one better than coin-flipping.

There's a lot more to talk about with failure. And of course, more to anticipate. Maybe next time the ballplayer will get lucky. Luck doesn't play much part in the Olympics.

As a result, there's not much to say about an Olympic champ. How did Michael Phelps do? He swam very fast. Really? Did anyone swim faster? No. Okay. Anything else? Well, he did it 8 times. No kidding. Could he have done it 9? Yeah, maybe.

Horse racing is good because you can bet on it. Also, it is very difficult to predict who will win. Nobody wins 8 races in a row, ever. And of course, you don't know if the horse really knows what's going on, so there's an air of mystery.

Baseball is less like the Olympics than it is like soap operas. It's on every day. Nothing much happens. The interesting thing is the foibles of the players. Listen to baseball fans talk sometime. It's like they're talking about Melrose Place. "What the hell is wrong with Billy?" "Do you think Willie is going back to the Yanks?" "These guys got no chemistry."

What baseball and the Olympics have in common, of course, is the aspect of much ado about nothing. But baseball is a lot lighter on the ado. Not so much flags and fervor. Certainly, no surveillance and military. In the 7th inning, you all get up and stretch together, and sing - not an anthem this time, but a sort of lullaby. Soon you go home, and hope tomorrow will be about the same, if you had a good day, or maybe a little better, if you didn't. And that maybe Billy will work out his problems, soon.

Next Year: A Flu Shot

It is sort of a macho joke with me, or maybe an anti-macho-mindset joke, that guys never get colds, we only get the flu. Macho or not, you will never hear of me calling in sick to work or complaining about a mere cold.

But the flu is different. I'm just getting over a big bout.

The trouble is, at first you can't tell which you've got. You just feel poorly. By the time aching muscles set in, you have an idea, but you use optimism to thwart it. This works as wonderfully well as denial, which is the same thing.

Bed and the onset of hallucinations are the peaknockle and the epitoam. Now you know it is the flu, because you don't know anything else besides the profusion of heat in your body and brain. Time is buried in sand as it takes you 15 minutes of thinking of how possibly to move from bed to the bathroom. Your body doesn't work anymore, too bad, and the reality occurs to you that you are actually the outlaw Jesse James and have been shot and left to die here. This is as plausible a reason for your demise as anything else, and if you weren't so hot, you could think. Think, Jesse, think.

By day two your identity (Stephen Burke) has re-established itself, and you recognize your surroundings, by the grace of God, whose name you've been intoning since you resumed brain function, and realized you might run out of Poland Spring pretty soon, and need divine intervention.

By day 3, you start to contemplate the day you will be able to shower without physical collapse, and you swear you will never complain about shaving again, anymore than you would about moving or breathing.

By day 4, you are recovering, and you have to check the news online to see if all those stories you heard, or think you heard, on the constantly-playing radio (tethering you to reality) were real. (They were. I'm glad about the Super Bowl; sorry for Philip Seymour Hoffman and his family.)

I just checked my records from work. I hadn't had a sick day since this exact time last year. I see I wrote a message to my boss in the middle of it that I would need to stay home from work because I had turned into a poisonous reptile. Jesse James is a step up, I guess, but guess what: next year, a flu shot.

Pete Seeger, Forever

Pete Seeger to the House Un-American Activities Committee, in 1955:

"I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this."

The congressmen indicted him on 10 counts of contempt. He was sentenced to a year in prison.

The conviction was overturned. The congressmen are long-forgotten. Pete Seeger is remembered forever.

Fab Four And Publicity, Then And Now

There was a big, two-page ad in the NY Times recently with archival photos and newspaper clippings of the Beatles' arrival in America 50 years ago. It was to promote a new re-release of some kind. The Beatles were always good at publicity.

Here's our attempt to be the same: an excerpt about them from our new book, "Brooklyn 3, New York", about the life and times in the borough back then . Available at Buffalo Street Books or from me directly.

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Our dad ran the print shop at Pan Am - a pretty big job. They generated a lot of paper at the biggest airline in the world.

Along with all the other copying, they created a memo packet each morning that amounted to a daily newspaper. Trucks ran it out to LaGuardia and Idlewild every weekday. The Pan Am building itself was a town, going up instead of out.

Our dad started working there at age 16. He knew - and cared - a lot about the place.

One winter day, he came home with a record album in a Pan Am bag. "Ever heard of these guys?," he asked.

It was four guys called The Beatles. They looked strange.

Never, we said.

"You will soon," our father said.

They were from England, which we associated with wars, not music. But apparently they were popular there, and coming to America. They would be flying on Pan Am.

They would be on the Ed Sullivan Show, our father said, and if they became as popular in America as in England, it would be good publicity for Pan Am, having carried them.

That seemed strange to us, that Pan Am would care about publicity from flying four guys in weird suits and haircuts, but our father said so.

"Listen to it and see what you think," he said.

They didn't look like musicians. Musicians had straight teeth and hair piled up high. Like the Everly Brothers. That's who we liked.

Apparently, though, the Beatles liked them, too. That's what we found out when we listened.

They sang like the Everly Brothers. Those kind of harmonies. Except louder.

It was all loud, but we liked it. Every song on the record was good.

Soon, you started hearing the Beatles on the radio. The two songs they played the most were the ones we liked the least. But they were as good as anything else on the radio, or better.

Before you ever heard them on the radio, you would see bumper stickers on walls, saying "The Beatles Are Coming." Who?, kids asked. We knew, but failed to generate much interest when we explained they were a music group from England who were flying on Pan Am.

When they arrived in New York, two days before the Ed Sullivan show, they were met and interviewed at Idlewild by a mob of reporters and photographers. The Pan Am logo was behind them, on the wall above their heads. Job well done, somebody.

Wise Pizza

Pizza Aroma is still number one in our booklet, but we also like Casablanca's pizza on the Commons. It is only about a 6.5 (a 7 when we are really hungry), but it is right downstairs from the Ithaca Blog office, and that counts pretty nicely for them with us.

We also like that they are weisenheimers down there, in true New York fashion. The guys (they are all guys) do not seem New York-born, and maybe not U.S.-born, but wherever they are from, they have that NYC thing of joking with you, if they feel like it. Recently I asked for the only thing I ever get, "Two plain slices to go, please," and the guy said to me, "Plain slices, or cheese slices?," and did not smile, but did not have to, because I know a wise remark when I hear one, so I said, "Give me one plain and one cheese." Then he cracked.

Currently, the place is closed for renovations and has a handmade sign on the door. "Closed for renovations. Sorry for any convenience," it says, and because these guys are so wise, I can't tell if they made a mistake or not.

Smoking In Brooklyn 3, New York

I heard on the radio this morning that it's the 50th anniversary of the Surgeon General's report on smoking. I remember it. I wrote about it in my new book about growing up in East Flatbush, "Brooklyn 3, New York".

Here is that story. "Brooklyn 3, New York" is printed and will be available at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca soon.

In Brooklyn 3 New York, cigarettes weren't bad for you.

Everybody smoked. All adults, and lots of kids.

People smoked indoors and out. In cars with the windows closed. In supermarkets. While pregnant.

The only adults who didn't smoke were sick, frail, or fussy. People smoked on TV. TV had a million cigarette ads, with sayings and songs.

It was the ads that disinterested me in cigarettes. The songs were lousy and the sayings made no sense.

The things I knew were good, like bagels, didn't have ads on TV. So I had the vague idea somebody was kidding with these cigarettes.

Suddenly, they decided cigarettes were bad for you. Just like that. Not just bad like to stunt your growth - which had always been a rumor, but clearly untrue, as many tall people smoked plenty - but like to kill you.

Now on TV, new commercials said that the Surgeon General, who was like the sheriff of health, said that cigarettes could give you lung cancer.

Lungs. I knew what they were. They were disgusting. You didn't want anything to happen to them. You didn't even want to know you had them.

These health commercials didn't have songs. They had pictures of hearts beating slow, slow, slow, then stopping. Announcers talked low and scary.

But they still had the ads telling you to buy cigarettes. So which was it?

I asked my mother and she said cigarettes are rotten and you should never smoke.

So why do you?, I asked.

Because I started young, she said, and it is a very hard habit to break. Maybe I will someday but it is better never to start.

Why did you start?, I asked.

Because my friends smoked, she said. Isn't that stupid?

I could never think of my mother and stupid in the same sentence, so I didn't say anything.

She smoked a lot. She would send me to Mickey and Sarah's luncheonette sometimes to buy her a pack when her carton ran out. It was hard for her to leave the house, with my little brother Paddy and baby sister Maryann.

I would tell Sarah they were for my mother, not me. She would make me hide them and tell me, run home. Don't get caught. She must have laughed as I scrambled. I never liked this errand.

I don't remember the first time I tried one. I must have fairly young, as they were all around. But I don't remember it. My older brother, Eddie, started early - at age 11, about a year after the surgeon general's report. It was a secret I didn't know. He told us when he was 16. He wanted to be able to smoke at home. There was a big argument, maybe the worst ever in our house. He got his way. Sadly.

We Thought About It

But did anybody actually do it?

Wear gloves to bed last night?

Bob Proehl Moves From Books To THE Book

Bob Proehl is the Director of Operations at Buffalo Street Books, but not for long. On 31 December, Bob announced (on Facebook) that he is leaving the job to take on the full-time work of writing a novel.

Bob is the kind of guy who gets 41 comments and 167 "Likes" for news such as this on Facebook. Lots of people know him from the bookstore - he was instrumental in keeping it alive, in the face of demise a few years ago - and lots more know him from events he hosts outside the store: dance parties, trivia contests, and competitive story-telling.

I'll be meeting with Bob this week for an interview for the Ithaca Times. The paper wants to get the story of this public and private guy who means a lot to Ithaca and, with hard work and some luck, might mean a lot to the larger literary world soon.

Whence Or Wherefore, Recurring Nightmares?

We had a splendid New Year's Eve, except we drank nothing to interfere with a good night's sleep, which turned into a bad one, as it often does for us, with recurring nightmares.

We don't know if Jung endeavors to explain them. We have one that we can, and one we can't.

The easy one is the dream where you are in school, but forgot you were carrying a particular class, until the day of the exam. We know a lot of people have this dream, and it is obviously related to (old) academic anxiety: not much mystery. Not much anxiety, either: technically, it's probably not even a nightmare.

But we have another one which is a mystery, and troubling. It has variations, but basically features our immediate family, and sometimes friends, and we have been relocated from our homes to stay together in a domicile that, generally in the dream, is large, but always is forbidding, with holes in the floors, water leaking and sometimes running through the house, and not much furniture, and everyone lying on mattresses on the floor.

Creepy enough, but the troubling part is that, in the dream, I'm the only one who realizes the situation is bad. The dream's action usually involves me saying we don't belong here, and everyone saying yes, you don't, and I realize everyone has a space staked out, as if satisfied to stay, and there is no ordained space for me in the house, and I am being encouraged to leave, sometimes with shouts and threats. I wake up before being attacked.

Bad enough having these once in a while, but last night I had it twice. I have the feeling understanding the dream might help me shed it. Is that worth reading Jung for?

WNYY's Recurring Nightmares: Its Public Service Announcements (All 3)

WNYY is a left-of-center talk radio station in Ithaca. It's good to have one here, as most talk radio in the U.S. is dominated by conservatives, and dim-witted or dishonest ones, at that.

"The Stephanie Miller Show" is the show we like best, as it has a minimum of lunk-headed callers-in, and features pretty pointed political satire and generally good comedy. Sometimes it is barely PC or PG. If you listen to it, you know this.

And you also know this: WNYY has a problem with recurring public service announcements.

The station runs a lot of them, we guess for a lack of paid advertising. The problem is, they run the same three. A lot. And they are poorly-crafted: abhorrently written and acted. They would be annoying heard even twice in your life. Sometimes, the station will play the same ad twice in the same station break. This is when we take a day-long station break.

We can't figure out the reason for this torturous lack of imagination or effort, unless the station actually pays for each different ad it plays. This seems unlikely, but there must be some good reason it risks driving off viewers who can't take "Stop the texts, stop the wrecks" again.

Happy 2014 (We Bet)

Each December we get a lot of hits on Ithaca Blog with the search words, "Ithaca New Year's Eve," and we feel bad, as we don't keep up with New Year's Eve, and have nothing to report.

We never did quite get New Year's Eve. People drink a lot, but you can do that any eve. Beyond that, you are staying up till midnight to see if 2013 will be followed by 2014.

We would definitely hang out if there was a chance it wouldn't, and it was like the Twilight Zone, and it could be any year, but that has never happened, so we go to bed.

In recognition of the thing, though, here is a reprint of an Ithaca Blog public service announcement from a previous auld lang syne:

It's the most bibulous night of the year, and an evening of joie de vivre will turn into a day of woe for many, but we are here with sound advice.

To avoid hangover, do this: pour a glass of club soda. Hold it and occasionally sip it. Eat whatever foods you like, but take no other liquid.

The trick is in the timing. Start this process at about 9:30 p.m., and continue it until bedtime.

May the morning be your friend, along with each day of the new year.

Christmas Shopping Swinging Local?

We remember doing a posting a few years ago at this time about a trip to the mall, and how wicked it was, with parking lot traffic reaching to Route 13, frustrated people in cars and out, and then nothing we wanted in the mall, anyway.

When we were asked by a friend to take a trip there last night, we declined. She went anyway, and we wished her luck. In 20 minutes we got a message she was there, with "NO TRAFFIC, NONE," and a photo of an empty food court. "Maybe 30 people in Target," she wrote.

We're not saying this is good, but downtown tonight, we noticed a dearth of parking spots at around 6:30, which happens when there's a show at the State Theater, but there is none tonight, so it possibly means Christmas-time-in-the-city. Is the Local First group making its mark, and the shopping pendulum swinging?

And I Will Read "War And Peace" Before Christmas

The Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle was tricky this week. I know because I went to the post office today.

"Ice Cream Social: The Struggle For The Soul of Ben & Jerry's", New Book by Brad Edmondson

Ben & Jerry's ice cream was always an Ithaca kind of company: deliciously radical, with a Peace Pop and "Cherry Garcia," and a scoop shop operated by youths as a social project in the heart of our downtown.

Then, in 2000, the company was bought by Unilever, one of the world's largest food corporations. What happened to Small Is Beautiful?

Brad Edmondson, a local author, tells the tale in his new book, "Ice Cream Social: The Struggle For the Soul of Ben & Jerry's."

The book originally started as a collaboration between Edmondson and Jeff Furman, who lives in Ithaca and helped write Ben & Jerry's first business plan in 1977. Jeff has been called "the '&' in Ben & Jerry's." He still serves on the independent board that monitors Unilever's operation of Ben & Jerry's.

After some months of work, Edmondson and Furman decided the story was too big to be too much Jeff's. He supplies the epilogue and serves as a source. The book has a list of over 40 "Main Characters" (an actual list, in front of the book).

Edmondson said that despite the scope of the story, he wanted to write "a book that could be read in one sitting." We are reviewing the book for the Ithaca Times and told him that's exactly what we did, and that it reads at times like a soap opera. He said, "Really? That makes me happy.

"It's not a normal business book," he said. "It can serve as a reference book for certain business practices, and it tells a business story, but unlike many business books, it doesn't pretend to be a road map. It's a story. A story people can learn lessons from, I hope, but I don't tell you what the lessons are. I put the story between the covers and the lessons are for you to determine."

The book's release is imminent and there will be an event at Buffalo Street Books. The tentative date is 13 December. Please look for our full review in the Ithaca Times of Wednesday 11 December.

Celery And Things Such As Celery

Three days before Thanksgiving, our favorite holiday. What's not to like about a holiday where celery is so central? Even if you don't like celery? We do, but we especially like the idea of simple pleasures, like those stalks (salted, standing together in a glass of water), cider, pie, and time with people you love, whom you see all too seldom.

We wish you a happy Thanksgiving with, as a wise and happy friend of ours says, whomever your "we" are.

A Good Clout

Neither of my parents were hitters, though they often were forced to threaten it.

My father, like many fathers of the time, I guess, had the role of punisher when he came home from work, and heard all the bad things we did that day.

If hitting was warranted, he would discuss it first, in a way that was so rote, and comical to me, the hardest thing was trying not to laugh.

"I'm gonna take off my belt," he would say, "and...I'll hit ya; and you'll cry..." and his voice would trail off in the sad inevitability of it all.

So I would say I was sorry, maybe crying a little for authenticity, thus avoiding any smacking, and then I would rush off and imitate the ritual for my siblings. It got us every time.

My mother also would allow us the chance of an out through words. Caught at something, or simply annoying her, she would turn and say, eerily deadpan, "Do you want a good clout?" - our introduction to the rhetorical question.

Once and only once she ever hit me. There was no question first. It was when President Kennedy died.

He was shot and killed on a Friday. I was in first grade. They didn't tell us at school. I remember getting off the school bus, and all the mothers were there. That was unusual, as they usually took turns meeting us.

They took our hands, which was also strange.

I remember coming home, and the news on TV - all day, and into the night.

When I woke on Saturday, my mother was up, standing in front of the TV.

I stood next to her. She wasn't speaking and might have been crying.

Personally, I was wondering what was happening with cartoons. I was a big fan of a new show, Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales.

"Is this going to be on all day?," I asked.

"Of course," my mother said, and not kindly. "The president is shot dead."

It sank in. I shook my head - at the thought of the morning ruined; and said, as I gazed at the TV:

"Why did stupid President Kennedy have to get shot on a Friday?"

Wham, came the answer, a swing of my mother's arm, with the back of her hand to my face. She was crying now, and I sure knew why.

I found my footing, and looked up at her with tears in my eyes. She looked shocked, and sad, but she didn't say she was sorry.