Levittown in the fifties.
Jon Stewart’s great pizza debate has been funny. It started with his rant against Chicago deep dish. A casserole, he called it.
Twitter and Facebook took over the New York/Chicago pizza rivalry.
A Facebook friend from Philly chimed in about Philly hot dogs.
Something about Italian dogs. Italian dogs?
Don’t even talk to me about anything other than a Chicago dog.
Unless it’s Pink’s in LA.
Last night the owner of Chicago’s Lou Malnati’s made a Daily Show appearance and shared a slice of their deep dish with Stewart. Steward tried to fold it in half like a New York slice.
Cracked me up.
Then they both joined in to mock California Pizza.
The fact is we love our local stuff. Whatever it is.
Sure. Some like the standardization of the chains. Me too. Finding a Starbucks at a rest stop on the Ohio Turn Pike reassured me that the coffee will not have been sitting in a pot for the last four hours. But I also know it won’t be as good as New Wave or Inelligentsia, my local coffee bars.
One of my Brooklyn daughters once took me to De Fara Pizza. Both Anthony Bourdain and Mayor-elect De Blasio say it is the best in the city. The owner, Domenico DeMarco makes each pizza himself. He claimed that nobody is allowed to make the pie but him. They can’t open another. No De Fara in every city. In every mall. De Fara’s pizza can’t be standardized.
I like Taco Bell. But it’s not Mexican food.
For a great fish taco I go to El Cid up by the Square. They tried opening another place a few years ago. The second one closed. I don’t know why. But I think that they couldn’t standardize it and have it come out as good. They could have both been the same. But not as good.
Did you ever look at pictures of post-war housing when it was first built. Little boxes, the folk singer Malvina Reynolds once called them. Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes all the same. Her song was protesting the standardization of our lives.
But the funny thing about the Levittown’s of the fifties. People added a room. Grew a tree. Changed the color. Half a century later, each house is different.
Standards are tough to sustain. And not just in a bad way.
Also in a good way.
Fred Klonsky 
Try Seraphona pizza in Bedford-sty
A reader of your blog suggested a write-in campaign for Ralph Martire. I know that there has to be some sort of preliminary registration, petition or something done for a write-in to actually have the votes counted. But maybe that would actually be a good option. That way we don’t have to be limited to either not voting or voting for Quinn or whoever the republican challenger is. If petitions are needed, maybe they are available in a pdf format that could go out with your blog and others. If every public employee, retired and active would participate in a write-in campaign, at least we would be laying the groundwork for four years from now.