A Month Or So Of Freaky Fridays

(Lohan is all like "I'm sorry, HOW MANY HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS ON COCAINE BY THE TIME I TURN 25?")

By that headline, I do not mean to say that the reason this blog has been totally silent for over a month has anything to do with me trading bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis (I just feel like, by dint of my youth and good looks and the fact that I've destroyed my health and once-promising career with drugs and alcohol, I have more in common with Lohan than Mrs. Chris Guest). That would be a good excuse, though. I have another good excuse -- which is that I've been writing like 8,500 words of copy a week for the last month, with many of those arriving during one massive byline-pileup on Friday -- but the sorry-but-I-was-Jamie-Lee-Curtis-for-five-weeks one would obviously be better. I'll work on that.

I'm not complaining about this, necessarily. In order for me to make enough money to live doing what I'm doing, I need to be writing roughly this much or a little bit more -- that or write less and get paid more which, you know, I've considered. But the last four weeks have all featured Fridays in which I had five bylines at four different venues -- the fourth of those venues has changed week to week, which is nice at least in terms of me not having to make the same sleep-deprivation excuses to the same editors. And it's nice, too, because it means that I'm writing a lot, which is after all the idea. Here, for instance, is last Friday:

- The second of the week's two NFL neo-yaks with the esteemed Jeff Johnson, at GQ. This one involves Troy Aikman getting misty over Bob Seger and Daniel Snyder hiring and then firing Mike Shanahan's grandson. (The one from Tuesday, which is maybe funnier, involves a Tom Coughlin campaign commercial I'm rather proud of)

- A Daily Fix and a round of (erroneous, indoor-voiced, intermittently amusing) NFL picks for the Wall Street Journal.

- Another conversation-style article, because why not, with the awesome and awing Maria Bustillos, at The Awl, about fancy food and fancy people and gleeful Francophile dorkpie Adam Gopnik.

Leave out the Daily Fix, which is kind of a reflex at this point and which I've more or less been doing since Jimmy Carter was President, I'm really pretty proud and definitely pretty happy of all of the above. They also add up to something like 7,000 words of prose. I'm proud/happy about the column I wrote for Vice earlier in the week, as well, which is about Tony La Russa and what a turd he is. And I was of course delighted to get back to My Life's Work of perseverating on bad pizza and the Chamber of Commerce dingleberries who slang it in this speculative bit of Papa John-related muckraking/muckwallowing at The Awl. Which, for extra creepy We Surround Them verisimilitude, was actually banked by Papa John's ads:



Which was all very nice, and which was all something that happened in one week. (It leaves out, for instance, all the stuff I enjoyed writing the week before that, during the World Series, for Vice and with David Raposa in our baseball yak at The Awl and at Deadspin) I know that "that was nice" is usually something I type after things that are not nice, but that was all actually very nice: I liked the work, I will get paid (some) for (most of) it. The reason you haven't heard about this in this space -- a space which is designed, after all, for the production and distribution of me-spam -- is that I've been too worn out with doing it to reiterate all of it here.

I'm going to try to remedy that over the next week or so -- not with more spam so much as with something to put the last few hyperspeed months in some context. I'm aware that this is probably/inevitably going to be more interesting to the guy writing it than to any humans notionally reading the things that will (I hope) get written, but that is also true to a certain extent of most everything I write, both at this blog and elsewhere. The crush of the professional is what I signed up for; the crushing of the personal is not. At the risk of looking at the busiest and most exciting period of my career in the least flattering possible way -- at the risk of not enjoying what I think it was that I wanted 18 months ago -- I want to try to get things back into something like balance. And because I'm a doofus, I think that'll probably mean more Blogging About The Process/My Feelings. So definitely be on the look out for that? If you don't see it, it's because I'm busy or exhausted or drunk or hungover. So, maybe it's not really much of a change at all from the old status quo?

Ideation Session

From: Jeff Johnson
To: David Roth

Is it horribly naive to suggest to Papa John he actually have a chain of sit-down restaurants?

Aren't his margins HUGE elsewhere?

Is it not easier for store managers to have sexual encounters with their subordinates in "spaces" without a lot of customer foot fall?

Is it not enticing though, to think of a pizza/pigskin BONANZA, shepherded over by Papa John himself? 34 HD screens? College girl waitresses. Miller lite flowing.

Special appearances by Jeff George?


To: Jeff Johnson
From: David Roth

I like the idea of this happening along the lines of those commercials where he randomly shows up at peoples' houses with a bunch of pizzas and then throws a tight spiral in the street. Like Papa John gets to your house really early in the morning with a breakfast pizza -- like the Papa Benedict, with six eggs, "real bacon," spinach, etc. -- and then moves in a bunch of TVs, an industrial fryer, etc. And your home becomes Papa John's Conference USA Football Ground Zero for a day, more or less with your consent but not entirely with your consent. Strong yes on the Jeff George thing, obviously.


From: Jeff Johnson
To: David Roth

When he leaves it is beyond trashed. But the people feel blessed.

Schnatter'ed

Tonight I celebrate the one-week anniversary of my first and last Papa John's Pizza, which I dis-enjoyed in an EconoLodge in Bangor, Maine, near one of America's worst-lit airports. This week, I plan on writing something about it, either here or for The Awl. It won't just be about that. But also this pizza thing is maybe being taken a bit far and ALSO I do not take back a single thing about Papa J and his fantastical gluten-delivery discs. Because really now, this was just about exactly what I expected. Domino's without the soul. Or at least without the sauce and weird cornmeal crusties and sense that someone gave a shit. So keep your eyes peeled for that, provided I actually get around to writing it.

Here's the face it made me make. Not so much like the shrieking lipid-beasts you see high-fiving Sir Schnattz in his commercials, but then again I was in a (fucking) EconoLodge in (fucking) Bangor, and saved the receipt because I thought the experience might become tax-deductible. So different strokes for different folks. By which I mean that people who eat this pizza a lot will get strokes.

Creeping Trumpism and Pizza You Can't Believe In

It's a big world we live in, and there are all kinds of people in it, and a great many of those people are going to see things differently than you or I might. To take a vexingly current example, there are people out there who look at Donald Trump and see a gutsy hero of capital, an innovator and a job-creating doer who has more-than-earned his gold-plated luxury urinal and gold-plated luxury urinal cakes, his monogrammed helicopter, and the right to squint and bluster and fart along through our culture looking like a bullyfaced honey-baked ham. Other people look at him and see a bullyfaced honey-baked ham who is – and this would actually be poignant, if it were anyone but this particular clownshod bullyfaced honey-baked ham – not even very good at being a bullyfaced honey-baked ham.

Or, to be more specific, a bullyfaced honey-baked ham who was too lazy and inept to even do his frankly racist recent rube-trolling properly as regards President Obama, and who is loathsome enough to make that most loathsome of bottom-scraping rhetorical irresponsibilities his attention-getting method of choice. Whose buildings from the '80s look like Soviet housing projects swaddled in gold leaf and whose hilariously classy-joe recent ultra-luxury condominium projects are grandiose marble-tarded mausoleums that look like what Yankee Stadium thinks about when it masturbates. Who apparently uses the phrase "piece of ass" in conversation the way non-assholes use prepositions, and who, as Anna Holmes points out in the Washington Post, has lived his life like someone who really means it when he uses that phrase. Who is in every way a squirm-inducing parody of a steak-fed billionaire phony, except with some long-running and serious-not-a-joke urban-redneck racial issues, the aforementioned throwback misogyny thing, and a boorish ignorance so raw that scan decidedly un-phony and totally, nauseatingly convincing. Also, he made the face you see above while getting worked over by Seth Meyers at the White House Correspondents Dinner – which, sidebar, yuck on that thing – and then, in a virtuoso bit of unintentional self-satire, proceeded to knock Meyers' delivery afterwards on popular special-needs morning show Fox and Friends.

But anyway different people perceive this particular bullyfaced honey-baked ham differently, and while both those sides are regarding the same rancid, decay-fuzzed hank of sad protein, they differ in re: its rancidity and appetizingness. "That's democracy," as YOUR President likes to say right before some act of futile meliorativeness. So there's that – different people see different things differently, as is their right. You almost certainly do not know anyone who likes Michael Bolton, and it's true that you should throw his standing-in-line-at-the-drugstore soul music and linen-and-vest wardrobe in the garbage, but that guy sold millions of records and presumably is selling out some cold, vast room in Vegas right now. No one you know probably gave even the smallest shit-shard about the recent royal wedding – and no one that anyone knows understands why American news networks herniated their Blitzers trying to out-obsequy each other in their coverage of another nation's garish fatuity – but it's obvious that there are people out there who do care about it. I imagine pleasant, slightly dotty unmarried British ladies and some of your more overcompensatory newbie American camp aficionados, but that's a few million short of the actual tally. Funny old world, etc. Tackiness is a matter of perspective – cf. the bullyfaced ham from a few grafs back – and some people just like excess.

Which, you know, is their thing and I guess good luck with that. And while I'd argue that there's a place for excess in moderation – what I'm saying here is that I am going to get drunk sometimes, and that's just how that is – I feel increasingly queasy at the idea that the unembarrassed and indeed proudly single-minded pursuit of excess should be humored as another to-each-his/her-own choice. All you have to do is look at a glowering, parodic nightmare hair-steak like Trump to see what a steady diet of every-fucking-thing-you-can-get actually makes you – it might make you rich, but it also gives you a fat, sour soul and a big, dumb, vain heart. But while it is kind of a bummer to have him all up in our monitors, Trump's being Trump-y is Trump's problem, finally. Scale Trumpian humorlessness and vulgar vainglory up and out through the culture, though, and we've all got a problem – namely cruel, crude people who can't listen to and won't care about other people except as obstacles to be cleared on the road to getting more More, and who can't smile for fear of showing some sort of weakness. People who put themselves at the center of a stupid and terrifying universe, and as such are incapable of being serious about anything but themselves, and of laughing at anything but what their own jokes. Trump's weaponized vanity is the way he has chosen to fight a war he can't win against a world he's too scared (and maybe too dumb, and probably too uncaring) to try to understand. That he doesn't appear to have an inner life is kind of sad, but his outer life – a world of surly charlatanry, rageful and prideful ignorance, transactional personal relationships and big steaks – is gaudy and bleak in the extreme.

And that's Donald Trump for you, I guess, although Donald Trump is always an extreme case – not just A garish condominium where the bathrooms don't necessarily work, but THE MOST garish condominium where the bathrooms don't necessarily work; not just a thin-skinned, callow mega-asshole, but the most thin-skinned, most-callow mega-asshole in the whole world. But go a little further down the capitalist self-parody food chain and you've got something that's more humanesque than Trump, but maybe in some ways sadder. Because Donald Trump, while he is indeed an organism moving around the world taking heroic gulps of oxygen into his rich pink lungs – I've seen him in person, and can report that he is more or less a living thing – is also not really like anyone you'll ever have to deal with. Whereas Papa John Schnatter is probably like someone you know from work, and a better example of what a scaled-down Trumpianism looks like in someone other than Trump, who is really more like a Golem crafted from Viagra slurry and dredgings from the bottom of the Long Island Sound than he is a human

I've already smeared plenty of verbiage on Schnatter, and while I obviously enjoy doing that I should probably point out that my problem is less with the guy's terrible pizza than his peculiar and puzzling insistence upon putting his tan, meaty face front-and-center in his advertising. That Papa John's pizza is crummy – salty and cheese-squelched and fatally mall-bound – is, finally, not a hanging offense. No one has passed a law making me eat it, which is maybe my favorite thing about the United States at the moment. But to see him promising that you can Taste His Virtue in every slice of his lousy pizza is to see a man struggling with a chronic case of what is, albeit entirely too slowly, killing Donald Trump. That is, Schnatter presents as a man so self-enamored and self-fascinated – and so peculiarly cut off from things that aren't himself – that he has a difficult time talking about anything but himself, even when he could be talking about one of the most appetizing things known to man, which also happens to be the thing he manufactures and sell for a living.

And so in the commercials for his international pizza concern, instead of seeing pizza – which is delicious and can be photographed attractively; one wise move for Papa John might be to photograph pizza from another establishment – you get a face-full of Schnatter, Schnattering on very seriously about "100% fresh dough" (alternatives being?) and explaining that "better ingredients, better pizza is a way of life," which is 1) hilarious ("What'd I do on Saturday night? Scrutinized green peppers, as usual") and 2) doesn't even mean anything. And of course you also get the dewy close-ups and the decontextualized and seemingly unmotivated good-guy laughs and those awkward high-fives pistoning out towards the too-giddy Caucasian exurbanites that absorb those unmotivated kamikaze "Papa's In The House" pizza-invasions in his commercials. I'm aware that these are commercials, and so not necessarily deserving of these or any keystrokes, but Papa John's ads increasingly look like political ads: in earnest, pore-inspecting close-up, Schnatter (or Candidate X) delivers a heartfelt, heavily platitudinous address about something – an un-understood faith in an imaginary definition of American exceptionalism in the political ads, a fucking way of life predicated on the use of super-premium pepperoni in the other – that is so ill-understood and insignificant as to totally opaque.

It's ridiculous, but it's not ridiculous (just) because the pizzas Papa John is getting all dewy about are so defiantly Indiana-n, so crassly mass-produced, and so frankly unappetizing. It's ridiculous because the dude is so serious about himself and the crummy food that made him a multi-millionaire. And while it's a stretch to look at those queasily cholesterolic nightmare-pies as being an expression of Schnatter's own cheese-clotted soul, his branded vanity – and again these are commercials for pizza, which is infinitely more appealing-looking than some Kiwanis Club doof talking earnestly about core corporate values – is another side of the same unthinking excess evident on his pies. It's one thing to be self-absorbed enough to put your name on a pizza place's awning – a million Fat Sal's and Cousin Joey's and Original Famous Ray's do that, sea to shining sea. It's another to be so self-absorbed and humorless that you can't talk about the pizza you put your name on without insisting upon the ways in which it reflects your own flinty virtue.

At some level I'm inclined to see the Papa John's Royal Wedding Pizza above as a symbol of something dreadful – and honestly it's pretty terrible to look at – but I think in a lot of ways it could be worse. While there's a sense in which the PJRWP is clearly the poisonous of a bunch of different delusions and stupidities and excesses and so on, there's at least a simple honesty to it. It's a joke – there's a pepperoni flower on it, and also look at that fucking thing – and while there's plenty of that sad whimsification-of-food that I hate so much at work, it's also at least in on it's own joke. Let a thousand pepperoni flowers bloom, honestly. I'll take a joke pizza over a dead-serious pizzaiolo any day. That horrifying pizza at least knows that it's a joke.

(Thanks to Richard Timm and Jeff Johnson for sending news of the PJRWP)

Our Pizzas, Ourselves

The other day, I linked to this site in an email to a prospective employer. As with all of those sorts of emails, it felt like kind of a longshot. I don't necessarily know what makes editors say yes or no to a pitch, and I have the track record to prove as much. But one thing that might not help, or which at least could conceivably influence decision-making in one direction or another, would be if the person pitching you an article idea linked you to his professional page and the top item was a series of barf-centric St. Patrick's Day limericks and if the obvious purpose of this purportedly professional page was to air some amorphous grievances with Papa John Schnatter.

I am not unaware of this. But unless and until I can find a paying venue for my musings on our nation's pizza corporations, I'm going to use this site to air those particular amorphous grievances. These particular amorphous grievances. Which is to say that I'd like 1) to remind any and all readers that my grown-up writing work -- which I am proud of and I like to think pretty good at, and which generally has nothing to do with pizza -- is over there in the right hand column and 2) to rap at you about offensive pizza for a minute.

And I don't just mean pizza that tastes bad. That sort of pizza will always be with us. You can go back to biblical times on this -- about the only thing I agree with in the Pauline Epistles is when Paul instructed the Corinthians not to get a slice with toppings on it at the average pizzeria, because (and I'm quoting from memory) "it's just a regular crappy plain pie that they kind of threw some mushrooms on, and is probably like a week old." Which is wise and forward-thinking and generally the sort of thing that makes you surprised at how rigid and sour Paul was on other matters. But my point -- to the extent that such a thing can be said to exist in a post that is (spoiler alert) about stuffed-crust pizza -- is that pizza mega-brands have no kind of lock on wack slices, and that bad pizza is just an irksome fact of modern life, not unlike libertarians or allergies.

It's also easy enough to avoid, if you eat pizza often or have decent eyesight -- pizzerias that display slice pies featuring, like, ziti or salad or sliced breaded chicken cutlets where toppings should be are generally worth avoiding. Pizzerias that do not at least attempt the odd parm-style sandwich are kind of suspect to me. Places with gross-ish names -- there's a Fat Sal's near me, which just sounds kind of unappealing -- are probably worth a pass. Misspellings aren't a good look -- I'll deal with a "calzon" on a menu, but I don't really appreciate "Our Heros" and will not abide a "Sweaty Vin's Pizzaria" on the awning, because come on with that shit. You probably know all this already, or at least know the non-crazy stuff.

And you probably know, too, that nothing good is coming out of a place called Pizza Hut or Papa John's. (You may think nothing good will come out of a Domino's, and you may be right, but for a series of complicated reasons I am not sure I agree with you) Everyone knows this. Papa John's helpfully reminds us of this by actually showing its pizzas in its television commercials, and in so doing revealing those pizzas as less pizza-as-pizza than as garbage fires that were extinguished by six pounds of cheese, and then resold as foodstuff. I don't like looking at Papa John's commercials very much -- and I especially dislike the parts featuring Schnatter himself, which scan like the ads of a Club For Growth-backed congressional candidate from the Indianapolis suburbs -- but they are kind of instructive. This goes beyond Schnatter, although it starts with him: if you can deal with his I-am-the-brand self-seriousness and new fakey Pawlenty-style imitation country voice and strained what-are-my-muscles-doing-this-feels-weird smile, you can deal with the pizza. If you are the sort of person who sees televised images of something called "The Tuscan Six-Cheese Pizza" (or even the meaningless words "Tuscan Six-Cheese Pizza") and thinks "fuck yes, and let me get some breadsticks and a side of ranch with that," then the commercials work for you and of course good luck with your diabetes. If you see those commercials and do not think that, then you just avoided engagement with a Tuscan Six-Cheese Pizza, and also probably dodged a clammy and miserable evening of junior coronary incidents. So maybe I should bitch less about Papa John's, I guess? Pizza Hut, though, deserves no such quarter.

Pizza Hut, as far as I know and can imagine, is no one in the world's favorite pizzeria. Where during my youth the (oddly, Wichita-born) macro-pizza corp dealt in crummy buffets and suspect-seeming deep dish cholesterol supplements, Pizza Hut has responded to the challenges of the current pizza marketplace -- foremost among these, I have to imagine, being a nation of physicians telling patients "never for lunch and dinner, unless you want to be riding around in those sad Tea Party scooters by age 40" -- by first attempting to rebrand as an Italian bistro, and then finally and terrifyingly embracing a strange and high-fat avant-garde. The former didn't work because Pizza Hut is one of those places that would rather pay teenagers as little as possible than pay more for people who can be trusted around a hot oven, and also because no one, ever, has ever been enticed by the words "ravioli from Pizza Hut." The latter... I don't really know about, honestly. The chain is not yet in Chapter 11 -- which is more than bankrupt lukewarm-pizza dons Sbarro can claim -- and continues to run national television ads and loose its horrible pizza-vations on an American public that will apparently eat essentially anything. So I'll assume that Pizza Hut is doing fine. Their frontier-pushing new stuffed crust pizzas, though, are proof that Pizza Hut cannot and will not do good.

Of course, Pizza Hut has been putting cheese into pizza crusts -- where it manifestly does not belong -- for decades now. What makes their new endeavor different is that they're now jamming either pepperoni or what I'm pretty sure the TV ads refer to as "meaty" (full stop), which is a short way of describing a pizza crust crammed with shards of sausage, bacon and "beef." Pigs and cows, in other words, but only the parts of which are choice enough to be cheese-jected into pizza crust. I should mention, I guess, that I eat all those things/animals, and that natural ambivalences aside I imagine that I will continue to do so until a doctor gives me the Tea Party Scooter Speech mentioned above. I don't eat them all the time because 1) what-am-I-made-of-money and 2) is a bit more complicated.

Because at some point -- probably about 600 or so words ago -- it doesn't matter if a bunch of assholes jam sad bacon crumbles into pizza dough to appease a broad and uncool national dedication to high-performance lardassery. It matters to the pig whose body became a punchline, presumably, but I can't really write that particular essay right now. (That is, I can't write it as long as I continue to consume cured pork products with such aplomb) What's a bummer about it, for me, is the whimsification of meat and the dumb carelessness with which (especially) bacon has been turned into some sort of man-status-bolstering bro-condiment. (Note: the gnarled, glib, chuckleheaded bloodlust of upmarket foodie writing is just as gross to me -- my ideal food writing is, I think, a Ted Berg sandwich review) No one really turns to pizza for a monastic, austere experience. The opposite, I know. (Note: I tend to like my pizza monastic, but I am a doofus and have already written like 1200 words on this)

But even if pizza is what we eat when we want to feel like kids, or to remember a time when eating was just a fucking blast -- even then -- I don't know why macro-scale pizzas have to be so dumb and bro-branded and irresponsibly fatful and aggressively un-foodlike. I understand that, nationally and discursively and in an increasingly dangerous way, our nation has had a hard time distinguishing between "better" and "more" for a few decades now. Of late, at least in our politics and also I think in our other smaller life-decisions, that indistinctness has curdled into a sad, babyish nastiness -- alternately an hysterical fear of being asked to make do with slightly less excess and a childish petulance at the prospect of ever and anywhere being told "no." Finding ways to jam more More into everything -- regardless of whether or not grafting a pepperoni roll to the perimeter of your meat lover's pie could possibly taste good -- is no way to go through life. It's a decent enough way to go through second grade, and a popular one. But if you're an adult who understand where food comes from and what effects it has on one's body and environment and economy and so on, this is no way to eat. Which makes it all the weirder and more distressing that our tax dollars are funding this ongoing national extra-cheese order, but which is also another reason to do the one simple thing that will prevent any reasonable person from ordering a baco-stuffed crust meatstravaganza pie. That one simple thing being to think, even briefly, about what you are about to eat, and whether you are sure you can't maybe do a bit better by (for starters) yourself.

Waiting for Papa John

There's always something kind of touching about not especially charming CEOs making themselves the center of advertising campaigns. I don't know all that much about advertising or marketing, although I imagine my years of watching television accord me the same layman-expert status on this topic that most people my age have. But I have a hard time believing that even companies with bad products can't come up with some better way to advertise said bad products than putting their uncomfortable-looking white dude front and center. As painful as the ads featuring Sprint's pinchy CEO agonized attempts to extrude some folksiness are -- and they're pretty painful -- my personal most/least favorite is the new line of Papa John's commercials starring "Papa" John Schnatter. I understand that Papa John's was sort of up against it, here, given that they can't really base the advertising on the actual pizza made by Papa John's, which from my experience tastes like something you'd get at an airport. But as a pitchman, Schnatter certainly can't hold a candle to former Domino's CEO Jeff Noidson (pictured).

Which isn't Schnatter's fault, honestly. He's a CEO, which means that his job is to 1) take Republican congressmen on golf junkets intended to get the FDA to loosen the legal definition of what constitutes "cheese" and 2) give interviews to Pizza Marketplace magazine:

PM: What was happening — or not happening — internally that caused problems?

Schnatter: Our system was asleep. We were on our boats, on our yachts on our golf club memberships, but we weren't paying attention to the fundamentals of the business. That's how we got our tit in the ringer.

Great answer, very instructive. Anyway, the CEO's is obviously a very particular sort of charm -- one that exists at a frequency I can't detect, as it turns out -- and one that Schnatter presumably has. But showing him in commercials impatiently delivering pizzas to hyped-up suburban caucasians -- and capping it by showing him either throwing a tight spiral to a kid or nailing a half-court shot at a Louisville home game -- just doesn't strike me as good marketing. And there's a voice-over guy saying, "Papa's in the HOUSE," as if that were a good thing, and not the sort of thing that would inevitably involve Schnatter steering the conversation around to his issues with the income tax.

Obviously Papa John's story -- sold his car, bought a pizza oven, sold pizzas out of the back of his dad's stabby-looking tavern that were so good as to impress Indianans -- is a big part of the Papa John's brand or whatever, but whose idea was that? The same guy whose idea it was to mention Schnatter's Outstanding Young American Award from the Jaycees on the company website? Before he started founding private ultra-Catholic towns where everyone has to speak Latin all the time, the Domino's guy had a pretty inspiring personal story, too. But they never let that get in the way of other terrible marketing ideas.

Again, I get that you can't advertise Papa John's pizza on its own nonexistent strengths, but given that the CEO -- admirable though his success undoubtedly is -- offers just as much personal warmth as his pizza-that-tastes-like-airport-pizza offers delightful and surprising flavor, you'd think they could find some other way to get this done. I'm not looking forward to the inevitable commercial in which Schnatter hits bombs during BP before a Cincinnati Reds game and Bronson Arroyo passionately groans out Schnatter's "Go Big Papa" theme song to the tune of Pearl Jam's "Black."

Also, if you were wondering, this is not the most inconsequential and over-reported thing ever written about Papa John Schnatter. The winner would be this hilariously comprehensive/inconsequential piece from the British tabloid the Daily Mail, which calls Schnatter on the gaffe (?) of advising radio listeners not to eat a whole pizza in every sitting. I don't know if the same people responsible for that nation's ongoing breaking-glasses-on-each-others-heads epidemic (87,000 per annum!) are going to read an 850-word unbylined article about this amazing non-story, but I'd love to think they would. And I find it almost touching that the Daily Mail gave them just that 850-word piece, the nation's descent into boozy and entropic semi-anarchy be damned.