Friends, I'm a risk taker. I take my life or the comfort therein into my very hands on a regular basis. When you read these fine entries that I dare to place before you do not forget this gentle reader. My whole life could change. I could be looked at differently at family gatherings and be expected to answer all manner of questions about things I know nothing about, like body piercings or tattoos. I could be misinterpreted as being a member of a sub-culture or something by people who really don't have much gauge as to what makes up such sub-cultures. By "people" I am referring to my family, kind reader. My previous entry began with mention of my fear that my own mother might come across photographs of me spanking blonde-haired hussies on the web (that blonde is actually a very nice woman, but what would my mother think other than "hussy"? "I don't know! I don't know what to think!" she would say while trying to remain calm and open minded.) And yet, patient reader, I write these words this very moment on my mother's laptop. Believe it. And while I believe that she has gone off to bed in the other room, she did walk back in here into what was at one point and sort of still is my grandmother's living room and she could perhaps come up behind me and say "Blogger? What's a Blogger?" and then thanks to that goddamn fruitcake who lost out on getting the Democratic nomination my mother might say "Oh like that goddamn fruitcake who lost out on getting the Democratic nomination right? What's your blog about?" "It's all about pizza mom. Pizza, and ass slappin'. As much ass-slappin' as I can get my sweaty palms on."

Okay the interesting part of this entry is over friends. I just thought that since I'm up here in Canada with some of my family members and after a long day my mother declared "We're ordering pizza tonight" I should probably get some kind of entry in. It's not every day that I get to report on Canadian pizza. Sadly even though I might take some photos I can't very well add them here because I don't have any way of getting them out of my camera. But if you're looking at a version of this entry and there are in fact pictures, whether pictures of my grandmother with an oxygen tube up her nose (unlikely) or a picture of the empty pizza box, you're behind the times. Get with the times kid, and write me and tell me you want to be on the e-mailing list so that you'll be notified whenever a new entry is posted. (The e-mail address is at the bottom of this page).

Yeah so my sister and my mother and my Aunt Carol, who flew in today all the way from Rome are here in Toronto in my grandmother's old apartment because my grandmother's in the hospital. She had to be rushed to the hospital on Friday night because she had contracted a viral pneumonia and was having difficulty breathing. She's doing better now, hasn't had a fever for more than three days and they're planning on releasing her on Thursday, but it's still pretty tough to see her. Her breathing is labored and it's hard to tell if she can't really talk so clearly because she's out of it or because she doesn't have her false teeth in or because she has an oxygen tube up her nose. Or some combination of the three. She's ninety-six, God love her, and it was only a couple of months ago that she started living on her own in an assisted living community. It's not as bad as it sounds though, this is Canada you know, and they've got that socialized medicine and everything up here. If I can figure out how to do it I might even try and get some of that socialized medicine myself, nothing too involved, maybe just check up or a chin-tuck or something. I mean, I don't want to take advantage but I figure if it's free, right? Ya know in the supermarkets up here you have to pay for your shopping bags! How great is that! If you want them you've got to buy them just like everything else. I mean, they're like a nickel a piece but wouldn't that stop people from getting their tube of toothpaste and their avocado double bagged?

The apartment has been sold (three balconies, two looking straight out onto the park that's a block away), dw, w&d, two baths, three bedrooms (or two bedrooms and a study if you prefer) in a building with underground parking, a gym and a swimming pool, half a block from the subway, and it sold for about what it'd cost to get a studio in New York!) but it's not going to be cleared out entirely until the end of the month, so we're all staying here. But with three bedrooms and two baths, who cares! It's not crowded in the least! Or at least it wouldn't be if I wasn't staying with three close relatives.

Fortunately for you New Yorkers, I'm not planning on moving back to Toronto any time soon. (I was born here, or didn't you know?) At least not based on the pizza we had last night. My sister's been living in Key West for many years now, so I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised when she had no reaction to my mother, looking through the local yellow pages, suggesting that we order from Pizza Hut or some such. I think that if I was married to a fisherman and had access to that much great raw bar as cheaply as she does, even my memory about what qualifies as a good pizza might begin to slip (merciful reader, if it ever does come to that, please put me out of my misery with a pearl-handled six-shooter like the one that Tom Mix used to have). But my mother! Ay mi corazon! She should know better, still living in Brooklyn as she does. The only thing that I can think might explain her lapse is that perhaps much in the same way that people who return to a country where they grew up suddenly find themselves speaking with an accent they'd lost some time ago she reverted to old habits of pizza ordering. It's either that or the CIA has kidnapped my mother and replaced her with an agent. Remind me tomorrow to try to pull her face off.

I realized in a very brief time that there probably wasn't a long list of pizzerias in the local yellow pages, and I was still doped up from the lorazepam that I'd taken so I could make the flight from Newark to Toronto without running up and down the aisle screaming "It's too heavy! It's going to crash into the ocean! We're all going down! This is it my friends! This is it!" and being restrained with some really fat man's belt like the last time. I was hoping my mother was going to say "How about Nunzio's?" or something, but instead she said "Okay then, how about Pizza Pizza?" In my drug-addled state (she can't make the same excuse she doesn't have any tranquilizers, I checked) I ignored the little voice in my head reminding me that "Pizza! Pizza!" was what that malevolently impish cartoon character used to say at the end of every one of Little Caesar's advertisements, whether it was for "pizza" or for "cheesey bread" or hot baked potatoes stuffed with crawdad puree and a southwestern chipotle sauce. I prayed that some linguisticly unoriginal but culinarily competent Torontonian had seized on this as the name for his or her pizzeria and the pizza would somehow turn out alright. My mother wanted peppers and pepperoni on her pizza. Fine, that was fine with me. So my sister dialed the number and placed the order. If it didn't arrive in 40 minutes it would be free. We all consulted our watches.

I knew what it was that we were in for as soon as I walked into the kitchen not long after the delivery and saw the pizza sitting in the open box. The slices were cut small (the diameter of the pie was fine) and the slices each looked kind of puffy. That didn't stop any of us from digging in because we were all starving. God forgive me, but I after dishing out two slices each to my mother and my sister (my aunt arrived today, remember? besides, she's from just outside of Rome (a little town named Infernato which translates to "little hell") and probably never would have let this fiasco take place in the first) I hungrily took two slices for myself. I don't know if it was right then that I noticed the big problem or if it was when, God help me, I went back to get another slice. But I'll come to that in a second. The pizza was puffy and tastes like most puffy pizza does. Doughy. Plenty of dough in those crusts, and they're plenty thick as one would imagine. The cheese and the sauce were less than noteworthy, as was the pepperoni. The green pepper was the only other outstanding flavor, probably not cooked or pickled before it was put on the pizza going into the oven, it was still somewhat crunchy and gave the flavor of the pizza some contrast. That is to say, the green peppers tasted somewhat fresh, whereas the pizza itself I could have defrosted and heated up in my own oven.

I asked both my mother and my sister if they were still hungry and they both claimed they were not. As I walked back into the kitchen my feelings of greed and hunger overtook any feelings of horror that may have already been creeping within, because what I saw there in the box were four more slices. If you still haven't caught on, dull-witted reader, that's two slices for my mother, two for my sister, two for me plus four more in the box, yes! Yes! It's true, and below the hunger and the greed, trampled upon and stamped down into the very depths of my soul a tiny voice of reason and lament cried out just as you yourself have cried out now: "Ye Gods! That's ten slices cut from one pie!"

Later, only after the hunger and greed had left my body like so much flatulence did I really have time to think over the depth of my error. Yet in my remorse I was repeatedly plagued by the questions of how they would cut a pie into ten sections and more worrisome still, why? To the first I could only imagine that either a machine had been constructed wherein the finished pie is set on a plate that rotates a perfect 36 degrees before after every cut or that the employees were trained to use protractors to measure out a 36 degree angle prior to their making each cut. I considered briefly that an experienced pizza craftsperson might eventually gain the ability to cut a pizza into ten slices using no tools other than a pizza cutter and an expertly trained eye, but I abandoned this quickly realizing that this would require years and years of practice and probably an apprecticeship system that sadly hasn't been in place in the Western world for ages. In light of the likely high-turnover rate at these places such a skill might only ever be developed by a sincere hobbyist after he or she had mastered the standard eight-slice and antiquated nine-slice techniques.

Of course, why? Why would anyone ever spring a pizza upon an unsuspecting family after they'd cut it into ten slices? Was this some kind of practical joke? Perhaps, but I began to deem this unlikely being that the slicer would likely never know the effect that it had had upon those faced with such a pie. We were all only visiting from out of town so unless there were some manner of outrageous mix-up the slicer couldn't have had revenge as a motive, we'd had no contact with the pizzeria before. In spite of the fact that she's been living in the States for the past thirty-three years, my sister miraculously gains an enormously convincing Canadian accent upon stepping off of the plane. In fact, I've known her to begin ending her sentences with "eh?" not long after touchdown. (i.e., "That wasn't such a bad flight, eh? That belt's not too tight around your chest, eh?") As I continued to ponder the reason for this plague that had befallen my family it dawned on me why it was that the pizza had been cut into ten slices: the metric system! We had just eaten a metric pizza. The cheese and the sauce and the dough had probably been weighed in grams or kilograms, and the temperature of the oven that it had been cooked in was probably measured using centigrade. Was it driven over to the apartment building at a speed of less than forty kilometers per hour? It probably was. And I'd probably been deceived from the beginning. This probably wasn't a 16" pie, it was probably a 40cm pie or some such! It became clear to me beloved reader, that they'd cut the pie into ten slices because that was the metric way to do it.

And so now I find myself here in Toronto, a city beautiful in its diversity, wanting to thank you Ronald Reagan. As president I cursed you many times, even though I wasn't yet old enough to vote or be drafted when you were president. In seventh grade, when our teacher asked us what we thought of, or how we were feeling about your having been shot recently, although not fatally, I replied "I hope next time they kill him." And while there might have been some manner of justice served considering the number of people who were killed as the result of your foreign policies in places like Iran, Nicaragua & El Salvador, at least you removed the burden that had been laid on the rest of the world of having to learn to use and convert to that pesky metric system from our reliable, reasonable system of English measurements. Thank you for saving us the indignity of having to learn to measure everything in units grouped in tens like monkeys (like the one you and Diana Lynn co-starred with in that 1951 movie) counting on our fingers so we can proudly measure things in units gather in twelves and sixteens and so that I can eat a slice of pizza, safe in the knowledge that the pie it sprang forth from was cut into eight pieces, as God and nature intended it.