Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to a Hump Day (“수요일” in Korean): October 22, 2025, and National Tavern-Style Pizza Day. As Wikipedia notes, this is a thin pizza with a crunchy crust and is cut into squares rather than slices. It’s popular in Chicago and other parts of the Midwest. Here’s one. I don’t like it: pizza should be in SLICES (do you eat pie in squares), and a square is not a substantial amount:
Shsilver at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Ahead of the past weekend’s No Kings rallies across the country, the Trump administration and its congressional allies warned that protests would be ugly.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that they would feature the “most unhinged in the Democratic Party.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said they were “part of antifa.” Press secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson wrapped up this bill of particulars with a prediction during a press conference last week. “We call it the Hate America Rally that will happen Saturday,” Mr. Johnson said. “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you you’ll see Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see antifa types, I bet you’ll see the Marxists in full display, the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.”
The speaker lost this bet. That isn’t what I heard when I talked with rally attendees from my synagogue, not exactly a nest of Marxist Hamas sympathizers. That isn’t what I saw when I drove by rallies in my neighborhood. For the most part, that isn’t what America saw. Instead, we saw millions of Americans exercising their First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This right is pretty central to a constitutional democracy. You might even call it foundational.
The administration’s supporters seem to believe that if you criticize President Trump, you must “hate America.” If so, a solid majority of Americans hate their country. They turn their thumbs down on his job performance, overall and on specific issues, and they believe that he is acting in ways that exceed his constitutional authority.
Before the rallies, Sen. Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) predicted on Newsmax that No Kings would be paid for by George Soros, and that “agitators” would show up to demonstrate. “We’ll have to get the National Guard out,” he said. Wrong again. The rallies were almost completely violence-free, as Mr. Johnson acknowledged during an ABC interview the day after the protests.
This was no accident. The nonviolence resulted from the organizers’ message to, and training for, rally attendees. The No Kings website includes this warning: “A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events.”
It was peaceful in Chicago, too, and even humorous in places, as demonstrators dressed up in animal costumes and offered doughnuts to the cops. I am very glad about this: the demonstrations that really make a difference have always intended to be peaceful (Vietnam, the Civil Rights marches, etc.), and they make even more of a difference if the cops or National Guard brutalize the demonstrators (Bull Connor, Kent State, etc.), for that shows the immorality of the powers that be. However, I wouldn’t want the “No Kings” demonstrators to be attacked, as that wouldn’t, at least to me, do much towards getting rid of Trump. The massive scale of the demonstrations conveyed the public’s message clearly, a message reflected in Trump’s low approval rating.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.
The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.
The reductions — detailed by five faculty members and in emails obtained by The Crimson — stipulate smaller Ph.D. admissions quotas across dozens of departments. Departments were allowed to choose how they would allocate their limited slots across the next two years.
Departments that would only have one new Ph.D. seat after accounting for the percentage reductions will not be allowed to admit any students, according to a faculty member with knowledge of the matter, who added that there might be some narrow exceptions.
The German department is currently projected to lose all its Ph.D. student seats, according to a faculty member familiar with the matter. The History department will be admitting five students each year for the next two years, down from 13 admitted students last year, according to two professors in the department.
The Sociology department has opted to enroll six new Ph.D. students for the 2026-27 academic year, but forfeit its slots for the following year, according to an email from the department’s chair.
The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.
The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.
The reason, then, is this increased tax on endowments and research funding, which involves not just the Trump administration’s cuts to Harvard’s grants but also a general reduction in the NIH and NSF budget (Harvard is apparently looking over the long term, as Trump will be gone in three years).. It’s a shame, but the OEB cuts are the hardest for me, because I was in OEB when it was thriving (1973-1978). Now it is a meershaum of what it was then. In other words, it doesn’t smoke. Still, Harvard has an endowment of $57 billion, and isn’t now the time to use it?
*Two bits of news from the NYT. First, VP Vance in Israel, would not give a deadline for Hamas to surrender all its weapons, and also waffled on other questions.
Vice President JD Vance, in a visit to Israel, declined to give a deadline for Hamas to disarm, and sidestepped questions of how officials would guarantee several critical planks of the fragile U.S.-brokered cease-fire in Gaza. While Vance echoed President Trump in saying Hamas would be “obliterated” if it refused to disarm, he said he didn’t know if the militant group would play of a role in the territory’s future governance — a prohibition that is explicit in the plan agreed to by Israel and Hamas.
Also:
Kushner just said the United States and its allies were considering beginning the reconstruction of Gaza — much of which has been reduced to rubble — in parts of the enclave currently held by Israeli forces. That’s about half of Gaza, according to the Israeli military.
“No reconstruction funds will be going into areas that Hamas still controls,” he added, even as the cleanup could commence in a “new Gaza.”
That would “give the Palestinians living in Gaza a place to go, a place to get jobs, a place to live,” Kushner said. He added that this was just one proposal under consideration, and left unclear whether the area in question would be under the control of the Israeli military or an international force that has not yet been created.
Kushner has been a lot more savvy about things than Vance, who basically knows nothing about what to do. His failure to say explicitly that Hamas will NOT play a role in the future governing of Gaza shows what a dumbass he is. If there is to be peace, Hamas must not be a part of governing, as it would metastasize into more terror no matter what its role was. Kushner’s decision is, to me, far more sensible, and provides a Hamas-free way for Gazans to reclaim their homes, jobs, and lives.
The second is that countries that should be able to send troops to Gaza to control it until a proper government is set up are waffling:
The fragile cease-fire in Gaza that came into force last week rests on some key assumptions: that Hamas militants give up their weapons and that an international troop presence keep the peace as Israel withdraws its military from the enclave.
But the countries that might make up that force are skittish about committing soldiers who could potentially come into direct conflict with Hamas while it is still an armed group, diplomats and other people familiar with the deliberations say.
President Trump’s 20-point plan, which led to an Israel-Hamas cease-fire and an exchange of hostages for prisoners and detainees, envisioned the immediate deployment of a “temporary International Stabilization Force” in Gaza. The idea was for the international corps to secure areas where Israeli troops have withdrawn, prevent munitions from entering the territory, facilitate the distribution of aid and train a Palestinian police force.
The creation and deployment of an international force in Gaza could determine whether the current cease-fire has a chance to evolve into a lasting agreement, and whether Israelis and Palestinians move toward the broader aim of a durable peace.
Diplomats and other officials from several countries who are familiar with the situation say there has been little progress on when the force might be assembled because of confusion over the force’s mission, which appears to be the most serious stumbling block.
This is going to delay things farther, and will be harder on the Gazans than on Israel. Gazans deserve to start normal, non-terrorist lives NOW, and we need a peace force in the area.
*Trump has ordered (and I didn’t know he had the power) that large portions of the East Wing of the White House be demolished to make way for an unnecessary ballroom, one larger than the working portion of the White House itself. The demolition has started, but it’s a mystery about who’s paying for it. The President has said it will be covered by private donations, but of course that could lead to organizations donating to curry favor with Trump.
As construction begins on President Donald Trump’s new, $250m (£149m) White House ballroom, mystery continues to swirl around the identities of the wealthy donors and corporations paying for it.
Groundbreaking for the ornate 90,000 sq ft (8,360 sq m) project began on Monday, with excavators and construction workers tearing out portions of the East Wing.
The US president has said that he personally will pay for significant portions of its construction, and suggested that some still anonymous donors would be willing to spend more than $20m to complete the project.
The funding model has sparked concern among some legal experts, who say it may amount to paying for access to the administration.
“I view this enormous ballroom as an ethics nightmare,” Richard Painter, a former chief ethics lawyer in the Bush White House between 2005 and 2007, told the BBC.
“It’s using access to the White House to raise money. I don’t like it,” he added. “These corporations all want something from the government.”
A dinner for potential donors held at the White House on 15 October included senior executives from prominent American companies including Blackstone, OpenAI, Microsoft, Coinbase, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
. . .The White House had originally said that the gigantic structure would have a seated capacity of 650 people. This week, Trump said that it will be able to hold 999.
Only one contributor has so far been revealed.
Court documents show that YouTube will pay $22m towards the project as part of a settlement with Trump regarding a lawsuit over the suspension of his account following the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
Also, the Wall Street Journal reports that employees if the Treasury Department (right next door to the White House; my dad used to work at Treasury) have been ordered not to show any images of construction of the ballroom, as parts of the White House are being demolished. Here’s a video, and the demolition is more extensive than nearly everyone suspected.
*You may have heard that “away” fans from the Tel Aviv soccer team Maccabi have been banned from a scheduled Nov. 6 soccer match between Aston Villa and the Israeli team. That caused a huge fracas, with cries of antisemitism, but it looks as if this isn’t antisemitism, but a way to prevent violence, which has broken out between even British teams (there’s a lot of nastiness in British footy). The website The Empty City goes through the issue and concludes that the ban on “away” fans (mostly Jews, of course) is justified as a way to protect public safety.
Indeed, banning away fans or even cancelling matches for public safety reasons happens a lot.
. . . . Indeed, in Israel itself, a match has recently been called off on public safety grounds:
Many have strong opinions about whether teams from Israel should play in European competitions – but the public safety issue is not and should not be a proxy for that issue.
The away fans of Legia Warsaw were not allowed at Villa Park in 2023 because of public safety concerns, and two years later the away fans of another team were not allowed on the same basis.
But whether it is Legia Warsaw or Macabbi Tel Aviv or any other club the issue of public safety must be paramount.
Further, according to the Guardian, history shows that “Maccabi fans were considered likely to be the perpetrators of trouble.”
Matthew agrees, writing this to me:
As you may have heard, Maccabi have decided they will not accept any tickets so there will not be any Israeli fans coming officially to the match.
This blog post [above] is by David Allen Green, a very smart lawyer, a Villa fan and a Jew. It is, as you might imagine given his profession, very precise. The whole situation has become a complete mess, largely because politicians have got involved, but this is clear. DAG (as he is known) emphasises that the police decision was simply about security, not to do with antisemitism. It got turned into a political row by politicians interfering, both for and against. As a regular match-goer he is very aware of the dangers and his article emphasises the problems there have been when the police have not emphasised public safety (not simply because of a threat hooliganism but when they did not take heed of the crowds (eg in Paris in 2022 wheee catastrophe was narrowly avoided).
This seems sensible to me, and you won’t hear me crying anti-Semitism. It’s not justified given the fact that non-Jewish fans have been banned in several games to avoid violence.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, both cats are checking up on Andrzej:
Hili: What is he doing?
Szaron: I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s what he’s supposed to be doing.
In Polish:
Hili: Co on robi?
Szaron: Nie wiem, ale chyba nie to, co powinien.
Kangaroo Breaks Into Grow Farm Held 4 Days Until He Sobers Up. Farm workers in Australia were stunned this week after discovering an unexpected intruder inside their grow operation: a kangaroo that had broken in and helped himself to the crop.By the time authorities arrived, the marsupial was stumbling, glassy-eyed, and clearly not his usual self. Rangers said he had been feasting for hours before anyone realized. The kangaroo was safely detained and placed in custody for monitoring. Officials reported it took nearly four full days before he fully sobered up.
You can guess what the crop was! (In Australia, cannabis is grown for medicinal purposes.) I am assuming this is true, as there’s a YouTube video about it.
Masih has a nine-minute report on the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime. It’s in Farsi, but there are English subtitles (it’s intended for Iranians, but worth watching).
Watch my investigative report. The children of Iran’s regime, the same people who jail women for showing hair throw luxury weddings, then move to America to enjoy freedom and wealth. Hypocrisy at its peak.
Crush freedom at home, then cash in on it here. pic.twitter.com/GRj5jDkGTIhttps://t.co/HvWwxPX2H5
From Luana. Yes, cellphones should be banned in school and now we have some evidence:
New evidence on the effect of cell phone bans in schools just dropped.
“Enforcement of cellphone bans in schools led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the short-term … but disciplinary actions began to dissipate after the first year, potentially suggesting a… pic.twitter.com/cgXpzTmW3s
The president-elect of the Oxford Union has lost a no-confidence vote after he was criticised for comments appearing to celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk.
The motion against George Abaraonye had met the required two-thirds threshold to oust the student from his position, the society has announced.
The Oxford Union is way woke, but I’m actually surprised at this vote:
Mr Abaraonye is disputing the no-confidence vote, telling the BBC people campaigning to oust him had “unsupervised access” to the email account collecting proxy ballots.
George Abaraonye has lost his vote of no confidence at the Oxford Union in a landslide, with 70% voting to remove him as President-elect.
Today is a good day for Britain. At last, we can say goodbye to this nasty little thug and his gang of bullies.
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death along with her three siblings, all soon after their train pulled in at Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be ninety today has she lived.
Two from Dr. Cobb, soon to be back in the UK. First, a reprise from above:
Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%- Social Sciences by 50–70%- History by 60%- Biology by 75%- The German department will lose all PhD seats- Sociology from six PhD students to zero
And a lovely murmuration, whose significance is unknown (it gathers birds together before nightfall, but why all the flying about?). Click the screenshot to go to the original because for some reason the video won’t embed:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
All one’s life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It’s a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible. -Doris Lessing, novelist, poet, playwright, Nobel laureate (22 Oct 1919-2013)
I like tavern-style. When we first moved to Chicago, when I was 12, I thought it was weird. In my experience it’s pretty common in Chicago, except for national chains like Pizza Hut or Domino’s. There always seems to be a fight over the “corner” pieces (the little triangles of crust pieces left by the cut).
I thought you were a Floridian Dr. B. I always imagine you writing from there.
best,
D.A.
NYC
(a strange psychological tick of mine is trying to “locate” people when I read them.)
I am now. But I lived in Chicago about thirty years.
Great photo of the cats (on Jerry’s couch maybe?). Lovely expressions.
Isn’t Oxford Union the once venerable, but recently sham organization that held a put-up debate on Israel late last year at which, against all loaded odds, Natasha Hausdorff and her mates shined so brightly? See url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rZS4tD_BWY
Maybe they can get back on track.
Finally, the serious loss of support for long term or basic research, especially in the sciences as shown in the cutting of Harvard and UChicago PhD student positions and the recent firing of more than 1000 people from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is the canary in the coal mine of loss of U.S. prestige in an increasingly competitive world and indeed a loss of future knowledge that would positively impact humanity.
On your last paragraph, yes indeed. It is depressing to see.
For a moment I thought that stoned kangaroo was a picture of me! 🙂
On Gaza… NO Arab country will send any kind of peacekeepers to Gaza. Nurses maybe.
The reason is that Hamas is conducting a jihad, as demanded in the Koran. So any Arab who conflicts with Hamas is in opposition to a jihad. This means they (the Arabs sending in troops) will be fighting Allah himself. And that’ll never do.
Further, try being the soft Emir or President greeting the flag draped coffins of your boys at the airport who have come home after fighting on Israel’s side.
D.A.
NYC
Hopefully you’re not also an AI™ fake — I’ve heard of red kangaroos, but red-eyed goofy-smile kangaroos seem wildly unlikely. Is there a zoopsychopharmacologist in the house? And do kangaroos even have the musculature for such a smile?
My mother would occasionally make pizza on a rectangular sheet pan. The pan was rectangular because, well, the oven was rectangular. The pizza was passable. Several local establishments also offered rectangular pizza. Usually it was thinnish crust, but sometimes thick. The problem with the thick crust pizza was that the crust was thick, but the goodness on the top was still thin. It was basically a thick slice of bread with cheesy ketchup on top. Awful (but cheap). Square pizza could be good if only the chef would adopt the same recipes as round pizza. In my case, the association of squareness with badness does bias me against square pizza. I eat my pizza with a knife and a fork, so I’m probably not the target demographic for pizza of any shape.
I’m with Jerry. Tavern-style yields too many pieces without the mouth feel and mechanical integrity of a thicker edge crust. After all, Dr. B., isn’t that why people fight over the corner pieces, which at least resemble normal radial slices?
The proper way to eat a slice of pizza is to start at the pointy end. Then as you approach the circumference you can drift off line and start eating the corners created by your bites. Toward the end you start munching along the crust “rind.” If you try to eat a square by sticking a 90-degree corner in your mouth, you get sauce and pineapple juice all over both cheeks. And the thing droops because it has no edge crust, especially if the crust is thin, as it must be.
When we moved to Ontario — I was about your age of moving to Chicago — we encountered Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Pizza in a Box as well as many other America-adjacent wonders of the Space Age. It fit my mother’s baking sheets better to press the dough out into a rectangle and so we cut it tavern style. It suffered the deficiencies listed above but it was still pretty amazing.
Do you eat all the rind? It’s usually too thick, the topping is gone, and we are left with a box of pizza bones to throw away. Tavern pizza sounds pretty good to me!
The powerful cheese smell of the Pizza in a Box is a strong childhood memory, and my frugal mother even bought a round baking pan for it. It was my brother‘s favorite.
We also use the term “pizza bones”!! I thought that was unique to our house. Anyway, yes I do eat them, but generally later when a good night nibble is called for. Dipped in ranch dressing at times.
Yes, we do. The trick is to shift the eating direction from radial to circumferential while there is still topping with each bite as you proceed along the rind. Not like eating a slice of watermelon.
I was fortunate growing up that my local pizza joint was Ledo’s Pizza, the original in Adelphia, Maryland, just down University Blvd from the University of Maryland campus. It was baked in rectangular pans and cut into squares, and I don’t think any of us who loved it would have imagined that it would have been better in slices. They sold out a number of years ago to a chain operation that produces an inferior pizza, I suppose a nearly inevitable consequence of franchising an outstanding original.
Which reminded me that during my own years in Chicago, we would often journey from Hyde Park to Pizzeria Uno, which remains my all-time favorite. The tavern-style pizza in Chicago is OK, but I still think of Uno’s whenever I think of the best pizza I have had. And, once again, the franchised Pizzeria Unos that sprung up don’t really make the grade.
Of course, if you get pineapple juice all over your cheeks when you are eating “pizza” you are not really eating pizza to begin with…. 🙂
I don’t really eat pineapple on pizza. I just put that in to see if anyone was paying attention, and as homage to the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, whose chef invented “Hawaiian Pizza” around the time we moved there. I can’t remember ever even seeing pizza of any kind in the rural boondocks we came from. Mind you, you discover a lot of things for the first time at that age no matter where you are….
During the pandemic, we discovered a local take-out place that does Indian fusion pizza (as well as more traditional Italian themes) and have been enjoying it two or three times a month ever since. No pizza bones. One-offs are treasures to be cherished and supported, yes.
I’m here late, as is often case, paying attention and I don’t care if people know I like “Hawaiian” pizza. I’m not telling anyone else to eat it. It’s quite good with chanterelles added, though that’s a seasonal dish.
I assumed that you tossed in the reference to pineapple juice as a humorous comment for people who believe that Hawaiian pizza is an abomination. The oddest I have had was in Nigeria, were a variety of local fruits and vegetables were heaped on — it’s both the curse and the beauty of “pizza” that you can throw anything on to a pizza crust and call it pizza.
I suppose that modern “pizza” was invented and introduced globally recently enough that the term has been widely applied, while rice dishes such as biryani are never confused with local variations such as paella.
“Further, according to the Guardian, history shows that “Maccabi fans were considered likely to be the perpetrators of trouble.”
That’s an interesting take, considering that in Amsterdam in 2014 – the scene of a premeditated coordinated “Jew Hunt” after the game – the team the Maccabi played made a public statement praising the behavior of Maccabi fans.
Also, the linked video of the game recently cancelled in Israel because of incendiary devices that were “thrown”, shows a sea of red-shirted fans within an arm’s throw of those devices, and the color of the smoke those devices discharged were red and white – the exact colors of the team the Maccabi was playing. Maccabi colors are blue and yellow.
So where is the evidence that “Maccabi fans were considered likely to be the perpetrators of trouble” at a soccer match?
Perhaps they were referring to an incident hours before the 2014 Amsterdam soccer match where pro-Israel rowdies, some of whom wore blue and yellow, tore down Palestinian flags and assaulted people? Well, that happened hours earlier and 7 kilometers away from the stadium, where Maccabi fans were peaceful.
Is the Guardian, and other media, giving an accurate account of this mess? Not according to this article in Times of Israel:
I have trouble finding unbiased information… resorted to CoPilot
Yes, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have been notably more disruptive than many other football fan groups in recent years, particularly in international fixtures. Here’s a summary of the incidents and comparisons:
🔥 Documented Disruptions by Maccabi Tel Aviv Fans
1. Amsterdam (Nov 2024 – vs Ajax)
2. Athens (Mar 2024 – vs Olympiacos)
3. Cyprus (2023)
4. Tel Aviv Derby (Oct 2025 – vs Hapoel Tel Aviv)
⚖️ Comparison to Other Clubs
While fan violence is not unique to Maccabi Tel Aviv (e.g., Legia Warsaw, Eintracht Frankfurt, and some English clubs have had bans or incidents), the frequency, intensity, and international nature of Maccabi’s disruptions stand out.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
All one’s life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It’s a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible. -Doris Lessing, novelist, poet, playwright, Nobel laureate (22 Oct 1919-2013)
I like tavern-style. When we first moved to Chicago, when I was 12, I thought it was weird. In my experience it’s pretty common in Chicago, except for national chains like Pizza Hut or Domino’s. There always seems to be a fight over the “corner” pieces (the little triangles of crust pieces left by the cut).
I thought you were a Floridian Dr. B. I always imagine you writing from there.
best,
D.A.
NYC
(a strange psychological tick of mine is trying to “locate” people when I read them.)
I am now. But I lived in Chicago about thirty years.
Great photo of the cats (on Jerry’s couch maybe?). Lovely expressions.
Isn’t Oxford Union the once venerable, but recently sham organization that held a put-up debate on Israel late last year at which, against all loaded odds, Natasha Hausdorff and her mates shined so brightly? See url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rZS4tD_BWY
Maybe they can get back on track.
Finally, the serious loss of support for long term or basic research, especially in the sciences as shown in the cutting of Harvard and UChicago PhD student positions and the recent firing of more than 1000 people from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is the canary in the coal mine of loss of U.S. prestige in an increasingly competitive world and indeed a loss of future knowledge that would positively impact humanity.
On your last paragraph, yes indeed. It is depressing to see.
For a moment I thought that stoned kangaroo was a picture of me! 🙂
On Gaza… NO Arab country will send any kind of peacekeepers to Gaza. Nurses maybe.
The reason is that Hamas is conducting a jihad, as demanded in the Koran. So any Arab who conflicts with Hamas is in opposition to a jihad. This means they (the Arabs sending in troops) will be fighting Allah himself. And that’ll never do.
Further, try being the soft Emir or President greeting the flag draped coffins of your boys at the airport who have come home after fighting on Israel’s side.
D.A.
NYC
Hopefully you’re not also an AI™ fake — I’ve heard of red kangaroos, but red-eyed goofy-smile kangaroos seem wildly unlikely. Is there a zoopsychopharmacologist in the house? And do kangaroos even have the musculature for such a smile?
My mother would occasionally make pizza on a rectangular sheet pan. The pan was rectangular because, well, the oven was rectangular. The pizza was passable. Several local establishments also offered rectangular pizza. Usually it was thinnish crust, but sometimes thick. The problem with the thick crust pizza was that the crust was thick, but the goodness on the top was still thin. It was basically a thick slice of bread with cheesy ketchup on top. Awful (but cheap). Square pizza could be good if only the chef would adopt the same recipes as round pizza. In my case, the association of squareness with badness does bias me against square pizza. I eat my pizza with a knife and a fork, so I’m probably not the target demographic for pizza of any shape.
I’m with Jerry. Tavern-style yields too many pieces without the mouth feel and mechanical integrity of a thicker edge crust. After all, Dr. B., isn’t that why people fight over the corner pieces, which at least resemble normal radial slices?
The proper way to eat a slice of pizza is to start at the pointy end. Then as you approach the circumference you can drift off line and start eating the corners created by your bites. Toward the end you start munching along the crust “rind.” If you try to eat a square by sticking a 90-degree corner in your mouth, you get sauce and pineapple juice all over both cheeks. And the thing droops because it has no edge crust, especially if the crust is thin, as it must be.
When we moved to Ontario — I was about your age of moving to Chicago — we encountered Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Pizza in a Box as well as many other America-adjacent wonders of the Space Age. It fit my mother’s baking sheets better to press the dough out into a rectangle and so we cut it tavern style. It suffered the deficiencies listed above but it was still pretty amazing.
Do you eat all the rind? It’s usually too thick, the topping is gone, and we are left with a box of pizza bones to throw away. Tavern pizza sounds pretty good to me!
The powerful cheese smell of the Pizza in a Box is a strong childhood memory, and my frugal mother even bought a round baking pan for it. It was my brother‘s favorite.
We also use the term “pizza bones”!! I thought that was unique to our house. Anyway, yes I do eat them, but generally later when a good night nibble is called for. Dipped in ranch dressing at times.
Yes, we do. The trick is to shift the eating direction from radial to circumferential while there is still topping with each bite as you proceed along the rind. Not like eating a slice of watermelon.
I was fortunate growing up that my local pizza joint was Ledo’s Pizza, the original in Adelphia, Maryland, just down University Blvd from the University of Maryland campus. It was baked in rectangular pans and cut into squares, and I don’t think any of us who loved it would have imagined that it would have been better in slices. They sold out a number of years ago to a chain operation that produces an inferior pizza, I suppose a nearly inevitable consequence of franchising an outstanding original.
Which reminded me that during my own years in Chicago, we would often journey from Hyde Park to Pizzeria Uno, which remains my all-time favorite. The tavern-style pizza in Chicago is OK, but I still think of Uno’s whenever I think of the best pizza I have had. And, once again, the franchised Pizzeria Unos that sprung up don’t really make the grade.
Of course, if you get pineapple juice all over your cheeks when you are eating “pizza” you are not really eating pizza to begin with…. 🙂
I don’t really eat pineapple on pizza. I just put that in to see if anyone was paying attention, and as homage to the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, whose chef invented “Hawaiian Pizza” around the time we moved there. I can’t remember ever even seeing pizza of any kind in the rural boondocks we came from. Mind you, you discover a lot of things for the first time at that age no matter where you are….
During the pandemic, we discovered a local take-out place that does Indian fusion pizza (as well as more traditional Italian themes) and have been enjoying it two or three times a month ever since. No pizza bones. One-offs are treasures to be cherished and supported, yes.
I’m here late, as is often case, paying attention and I don’t care if people know I like “Hawaiian” pizza. I’m not telling anyone else to eat it. It’s quite good with chanterelles added, though that’s a seasonal dish.
I assumed that you tossed in the reference to pineapple juice as a humorous comment for people who believe that Hawaiian pizza is an abomination. The oddest I have had was in Nigeria, were a variety of local fruits and vegetables were heaped on — it’s both the curse and the beauty of “pizza” that you can throw anything on to a pizza crust and call it pizza.
I suppose that modern “pizza” was invented and introduced globally recently enough that the term has been widely applied, while rice dishes such as biryani are never confused with local variations such as paella.
“Further, according to the Guardian, history shows that “Maccabi fans were considered likely to be the perpetrators of trouble.”
That’s an interesting take, considering that in Amsterdam in 2014 – the scene of a premeditated coordinated “Jew Hunt” after the game – the team the Maccabi played made a public statement praising the behavior of Maccabi fans.
Also, the linked video of the game recently cancelled in Israel because of incendiary devices that were “thrown”, shows a sea of red-shirted fans within an arm’s throw of those devices, and the color of the smoke those devices discharged were red and white – the exact colors of the team the Maccabi was playing. Maccabi colors are blue and yellow.
So where is the evidence that “Maccabi fans were considered likely to be the perpetrators of trouble” at a soccer match?
Perhaps they were referring to an incident hours before the 2014 Amsterdam soccer match where pro-Israel rowdies, some of whom wore blue and yellow, tore down Palestinian flags and assaulted people? Well, that happened hours earlier and 7 kilometers away from the stadium, where Maccabi fans were peaceful.
Is the Guardian, and other media, giving an accurate account of this mess? Not according to this article in Times of Israel:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-big-lie-from-amsterdam-to-birmingham/
I have trouble finding unbiased information… resorted to CoPilot
Yes, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have been notably more disruptive than many other football fan groups in recent years, particularly in international fixtures. Here’s a summary of the incidents and comparisons:
🔥 Documented Disruptions by Maccabi Tel Aviv Fans
1. Amsterdam (Nov 2024 – vs Ajax)
2. Athens (Mar 2024 – vs Olympiacos)
3. Cyprus (2023)
4. Tel Aviv Derby (Oct 2025 – vs Hapoel Tel Aviv)
⚖️ Comparison to Other Clubs
While fan violence is not unique to Maccabi Tel Aviv (e.g., Legia Warsaw, Eintracht Frankfurt, and some English clubs have had bans or incidents), the frequency, intensity, and international nature of Maccabi’s disruptions stand out.
Details and citations available