Best...Pizza...Ever

The Boston area has become an embarrassment of riches when it comes to first-rate pizzerias. Cambridge has the crunchiest thin crust neopolitan known to man at di Mio, and the innovative, brashly flavorful grilled pizzas of Cambridge 1. The Back Bay features the clever arrangements of recent British import Croma (try the tandoori chicken pizza!), while the North End boasts unbeatable straight-up cheese pizza at the original Pizzeria Regina's.

So PICCO, Rick Katz's newest South End venture, has some stiff competition. But with a combination of fresh, top quality toppings and perfectly baked, flaky, crispy, puffy, chewy crust, there's no question PICCO has vaulted to the top of my favorites list. The two pizzas I've tried, and recommend:

• The Alsatian, with sharp Gruyere for cheese, sour cream for sauce, and bacon on top. Creamy, smoky and much more delicate in flavor than it sounds.
• The spinach and goat cheese, with a bare minimum of spinach leaves, and much more sauteed onions and garlic. Oh, and the sweetest cherry tomatoes you'll find in the middle of December.

And that doesn't even cover the desserts: PICCO, after all, is an acronym of 'Pizza and Ice Cream Company'. On our last visit, our pizza order was delayed due to a kitchen mixup, and as an apology my girlfriend and I were offered free dessert. I should mention that Rick Katz was formerly the pastry chef at Legal Sea Foods, which explains not only the almost pastry-like pizza crust, but also these heavenly soufflé chocolate cakes. At $6 each, with homemade ice cream on the side, they were superior to those you'd spend almost twice as much for at Finale a few blocks away.

PICCO really does have the best pizza I've ever tasted.

Uno's Amber Ale is made of PEOPLE!!!!

OK, it's really not, but it turns out that my favorite beer to have with Uno's sinfully tasty deep dish pizzas, which they sell as "Uno's Amber Ale" is none other than Samuel Adams' Boston Ale. Neat! The Boston Ale is hard to find, surprisingly, in the Boston area.

The Boston Ale has been one of my favorites since I first tried it. Of course, that was last Patriot's Day while in a financial district bar watching the Sox beat the Yankees, so that might have colored my impression.

Speaking of which, next Patriot's Day I'll actually be at the game. This comes despite the best efforts of what can only laughingly be called the Sox "organization," which was woefully inept at selling their tickets both online and at the park last Saturday. More on this terrible experience later.

MoveOn

Chris Suellentrop writes Slate's most incisive political commentary, probably due in large part to the degree he keeps his political views from coloring his perceptions. See, for example, his honest look at how effective a campaigner George W. Bush was on the trail.

His takedown of MoveOn.org, is DeadOn. MoveOn.org is designed to sate its members' appetites for their own prejudices, not to effectively achieve anything, as Sullentrop's look at their track record makes clear.

We live in the Flickr

As you can tell from the last couple of posts, I've discovered Flickr, which has to be the coolest thing I've found on the web in a while (thanks Slashdot!).

In less than 10 minutes I had my Nokia 3650 posting pictures here...just what I'd been looking for. That is some nice integration work. Does Google own these guys yet?

The Fenway one is from the top row of the right field bleachers this September.

The algae was a neat view from the Longfellow bridge on an unseasonably warm September afternoon.

More absurd pictures to come.

Fenway.jpg

Now smaller with a title!

Image_20.jpg

Testing with algae...123

Stephen Breyer for Chief Justice

I think Stephen Breyer would be an excellent choice as President Bush's nominee for Chief Justice, were Chief Justice Rehnquist to retire, as is widely expected.

Politically, the move would make a lot of sense. Promoting a Democratic appointee who voted with the minority in Bush v. Gore (but notably in the majority of the 7-2 decision in favor of overturning the absurd recount demanded by the Florida Supreme Court) would provide much needed cover for supporting a more conservative nominee for the open seat than he'd get otherwise.

It would also conserve political capital that would be better put to use on legislative priorities than on promoting Justices Scalia or Thomas to the top spot, which is largely an administrative post. This is particularly true when the Chief is in the minority on a case, as the most senior member of the majority gets to assign the opinion. As a not-insignificant aside, were Justice O'Connor to retire, the most senior member of the conservative side of the court would be Justice Scalia.

From a less calculating perspective, of course, Justice Breyer is a smart, pragmatic jurist. Although he doesn't share the court's current appetite for federalism, he hasn't shown an inclination to "legislate from the bench." His contributions to oral arguments are uniquely insightful.

Of course, it's unlikely President Bush would make such an appointment, as it would be seen as a symbolic betrayal of the conservative base. Conservatives, though, should concentrate less on the symbolism and more on the pragmatic gains. Unless the president makes at least a token gesture of reconciliation with the Democrats, it's hard to see how we get through the next Supreme Court nomination without either an earth-shaking partisan battle that stops the rest of the Bush agenda in its tracks, or a mushy-middle appointment that could end up as the next Souter.

The Ukraine is not weak!

On the one year anniversary of the "velvet revolution" in Georgia, similar events seem to be playing out in the Ukraine. Former congressman Bob Schaffer is broadcasting to the blogosphere from the scene, and it makes for fascinating reading. Obviously, reports from the ground should be taken with a grain of salt, but if, in fact, Russian special forces are protecting the current (seemingly corrupt) government, that's a big story.

So what's their excuse?

According to a shockingly irony-free AFP release:

Violence and boycotts could yet stop promised Iraqi elections going ahead on time, Arab ministers said, despite Baghdad's confident assertion the landmark vote would be held on January 30.

No word on when we can expect a non-Iraqi Arab nation to schedule a multi-party election.

The return of the xapping

The clever folks at Google Labs seems to have reinvented the xapping of Connection Machine Lisp fame. Of all the ideas, great and small, that came out of the CM project, xappings stood out to me as the most practical.

Both of these papers are worth reading in their entirety. I think it says something about the fundamental importance of map/reduce as a tool for parallelism that it shows up in essentially the same form in two radically different architectures.

Imperial Hypocrisy

I couldn't agree more with RealClearPolitics' assessment of Michael Scheuer's appearance on Meet the Press Sunday. It's hard to believe this guy was a top CIA analyst when he can make the following set of assertions with a straight face:

• Osama bin Laden doesn't hate who we are, he hates specific U.S. policies.


• We should reevaluate those policies, as they motivate bin Laden and encourage support for him in the Muslim world.


• Changing our policies won't assuage bin Laden.


• We (i.e. President Clinton) should have killed bin Laden when we had the chance, even if it meant the death of Arab princes, damage to a mosque, or other consequences sure to enrage the Muslim world.

The most generous way to thread this needle is to suggest that while bin Laden won't give up the jihad just because we change the policies he doesn't like, the rest of the Muslim world will lose its affinity for him, and he won't have the popular support to keep planning and executing terror operations.

Putting aside the fact that Scheuer explicitly advocates aggressively going after bin Laden in a manner sure to upset even moderate Muslims (his manner suggested he wouldn't mind us carpet bombing the Pakistani border!), does he really think that should we give in to some of bin Laden's demands, he would become less popular in the Muslim world? Wouldn't it just validate his "strong horse" hypothesis and encourage him to make even more "popular" demands (say, Jerusalem entirely in Muslim hands) with the expectation that we'll try to appease Muslim sentiment?

It seems to me that the rational means to remove bin Laden's capabilities are to aggressively go after al Qaeda and other radical groups, while at the same time changing Muslim minds about what's in their best interests (say democracy and pluralism) rather than trying to out-do bin Laden in sucking up to existing prejudices.

Hail Britannia

Via OxBlog, I see that the Guardian has a terrific article on how French women stay thin, despite living in a country whose main contribution to civilization is massively indulgent cuisine. The theory involves a complex combination of with playfully teasing every bite and wearing sexy lingerie, or whatever, but the real news is that you can get Tandoori Doritos in the U.K.!

I always thought we Americans had it good in the snack department until I stepped into a Tesco's while visiting my sister in Scotland.

Mmm... rosemary-chicken-flavored potato chips...err..crisps.

On to the Ides of November

Yes, I'm still alive. However the twin excitement/gut-wrenching suspense shows of the baseball postseason and the Presidential election had my mind on other things than blogging. However since both of those things turned out as I hoped, I can hopefully focus on more mundane concerns.

One thing I'd really like to do is figure out how to make posts (even better with pictures) pictures directly from my Nokia 3650 phone on T-Mobile. Since I got the phone and an accompanying 128MB memory card, I've been snapping an absurd amount of small, meaningless pictures that would go great on my small, meaningless blog.

In booknotes, for the first time (in many attempts) I'm actually getting in to Ulysses, which so far is indeed about as enjoyable (no, really!) as its reputation suggests it should be.

Viva Australia

This account of an Australian-led team's 1830 meter descent into a cave in Georgia is amazing. Check out this map.

I've always had great fun climbing around through dark passages, either natural or man-made. I wonder if there are any big, amateur-explorable caves in the Boston area.... In the meantime, I might give this fantasy version a try.

UPDATE: Here's where the MIT-based Boston Grotto Club goes...

These aren't the droids you're looking for...

Got the new Star Wars DVD set from Amazon the other day. The transfer is magnificent, though the high-contrast colors that characterize many of Lucas's cooler sets and costumes result in some noticeable artifacting.

The movies are facing some tough competition for screen time, though, from Knights of the Old Republic. The role playing game from Bioware is the most fun I've had with my XBox since I finished Deus Ex: Invisible War, and the best Star Wars game I've played since Tie Fighter.

The mechanics are terrific, with every design decision seemingly made to prevent frustration (characters don't die from combat, just knocked unconscious until its conclusion; there are no inventory constraints; saves can be made anywhere, even in combat). There's no question that they got the Star Wars "feel" right. Even the voice acting isn't that bad. And nothing beats crafting your own lightsaber.

The Semantic Web

Good overview article in Tech Review on Tim Berners-Lee's quest to create the "Semantic Web": an interconnected maze of meaningful data that can be mined by software applications much easier than the eyeball-focused WWW.

While it would be great if it worked, fundamental obstacles remain. When asked for an example of a working "phase 2" application of the Semantic Web, Berners-Lee points to the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) RDF format. But follow the link to the form-based FOAF creator and this quote stands out:

The 'discovery' aspect of FOAF (i.e. how FOAF compliant applications find your description) is still an area under discussion.

Isn't discovery the problem the Semantic Web is designed to address? Common, machine-parsible data formats are a solved problem (see XML, or RDF for that matter). No one, however, has yet produced a real-world method for multiple client applications to discover and aggregate multiple data sources without the kind of human-arranged connections that don't scale with either the number of sources or the number of data formats.

In fairness, this isn't just a limitation of the Semantic Web. Much bally-hooed "Web Services" remain just the latest incarnation of RPC (this time over HTTP) until the discovery problem is solved.

In lieu of a real discovery scheme, the FOAF page has several recommendations to ensure your RDF file is properly indexed by Google. Google, arguably the most successful application on the web, doesn't understand a lick of semantics, but does a great job of information discovery purely through statistical analysis of link patterns.

I think the applications that will provide us with the most benefits will be those that, like Google, operate by throwing lots of data at simple algorithms, rather than relying on the holy grail of a scalable, semantically-aware discovery protocol.

I have some thoughts on what one of those applications might look like... stay tuned.

Creepy

A hotel without windows would be an amusement if it weren't in the nightmare that is North Korea.

Kerry is a phony

Put aside plans, rhetoric, and what he did or didn't do (or did and didn't do!) over the last 35 years, it's still blindingly obvious that Kerry is a phony in the Holden Caulfield sense. Nothing makes that more clear than his transparently pandering claims to be a Boston Red Sox fan. Last night, during his midnight rally "wake-up call", he warmed up the crowd by telling them how great it was that the Sox were 2 1/2 games behind the Yankees. If the junior senator from Massachusetts had actually glanced at the box scores, he'd have seen that the Yankees (damn them) had soundly beaten the Indians 9-1, leaving the Red Sox still 3 1/2 games back, despite their sweep of the Wild Card competition Angels.

If this were the only instance, it would not bother me. Politicians like to talk up the home town team. But this is the same John Kerry whose favorite player on the current Red Sox squad is Manny Ortez... or is it David Ortez? The same John Kerry who couldn't take a position on what cap Roger Clemens should wear into the Hall of Fame or getting rid of the designated hitter rule when he was interviewed during a Sox game during the DNC. Real Red Sox fans are nothing if not opinionated. I don't care what you think, but ye gods man, come down for something.

I won't talk too much about how he throws a baseball. If this election were decided on pitching, it wouldn't be a contest.

After watching last night's moving, visionary speech by President Bush, and Kerry's petty response, I'm not sure it'll be a contest for much longer, anyways.

Vodka

Ever since I heard of them, I've thought it would be fun to stay in one of those "ice hotels" ... it's one of those things that probably sounds more fun than it is, and what I really find appealing is the idea of drinking vodka out of a glass made of ice.

Thankfully, Hallsey gave me some Ice Shots for making your own frozen shot glasses. Now that Slate has done some vodka taste-testing, I have to finally give it a try. They rank what's been my recent favorite, Belvedere, pretty low, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing.

On a related note, VodkaPundit has some great RNC coverage.

Retro 1, Metro 0

"Retro vs. Metro" is a book/website/political organization trying to convince voters in swing states to vote for Democrats because they're smarter. Here's how the billionaire behind the operation, John Sperling, puts it:

I would say what Democrats should do is articulate a program that appeals to what I would call the “enlightened citizens” across the nation.

Well, I bet some "non-enlightened citizens" might at least know how to find Tennessee on a map.

UPDATE: They've fixed it. Here's the archived screenshot.

Some good things do end with -ium

I guess I'm not the only one that thinks one of the coolest elements of the Athens games is the stadium.

Though apparently architecture isn't nearly the most exciting thing going on at the Olympics... I always wished I was better at sports.

While on the subject of food...

...let me put in a good word for di Mio on Mass Ave in Cambridge. Their pizza is great (try the Pollo Diablo, or the Pizza di Parma), with a paper-thin but crispy crust. Sandwiches and salads are also excellent: the prosciutto panini I had last weekend was unbelievable, with fresh mozzeralla and roasted peppers.

The restaurant itself is tiny, but it's well-worth getting a table even though they deliver. I don't know too many places you can get stopper-topped Grolsches, and the owner/chef is a common sight, making recommendations and checking on the guests.

Heaven for pizza lovers.

P.S. If you're in Back Bay, you can't go wrong with the Chicken Caesar pizza at Croma. I've been told the sound I made when I first tried it was... uhh...rapturous.

mmm...burrito

Just tried the (relatively) new Qdoba at the Prudential mall. I am a big fan.

The chicken queso burrito was great: incredible flavor (even without the habanero salsa, which I'll have to try next time), fresh ingredients, and four kinds of cheese.

More on my fast food obsession later...

Garden State

Intrigued by the trailer, and always up for a quirky independent film, I saw Garden State last Saturday. It definitely lives up to the promise of the trailer. The script is clever and moving. Natalie Portman is by turns funny, charming, and heartbreaking. The soundtrack is also terrific, matching the mood perfectly (Nick Drake is sure showing up a lot lately...not that I'm complaining).

And how can I not like a movie with an ark and lots of rain?

My criticisms are minor. As a writer/director, Braff is a bit too much in love with his script: some scenes rely excessively on dialog rather than trusting the camera and the (quite able) actors to get the point across. Similarly, Braff doesn't trust himself enough as a director on occasion. A scene between his character and Natalie Portman's in a bathtub (sorry Sid, they have their clothes on!) is wonderfully intimate when close up, but the shot eventually switches back wide, as if Braff is afraid he can't sustain it. He's wrong, he can.

Overall a wonderful movie, well worth seeing.

Astrology

So according to Blogger's Profile, I was born in the Year of the Sheep.

That's somewhat disappointing, even if I do like wool sweaters.

Note to self: eat more lamb.

On the other hand, according to the first match on Google, there's much to be said for the Year of the Sheep. We like material comfort and we complain about things. We also count amongst our number Gene Hackman, one of my favorite actors. If you like him, Morgan Freeman or Bacardi 8, you are missing out if you haven't seen Under Suspicion, an Under Promoted 2000 film with some great performances by all three. It doesn't hurt that Monica Bellucci is in the mix, either.

My favorite word:

"antediluvian"

It literally means "before the Biblical flood." I always look forward to rainstorms. I can't get too much of a good thing. 40 days and nights of a deluge would be just about right.

I also like the way it conjures up images of an ancient era: the kind you can only explore if you're Indiana Jones.

I was disappointed when I learned that it has a negative connotation: outdated, archaic, antiquated. Then again, as Hallsey could tell you, I like "old man drinks".

Next time it rains, I'll have to have a Manhattan.