Welcome to ...And Crustice For All

I hope I don't get a cease and desist letter from Metallica, Sep 10, 2017

I recently read an article about starting your own blog and one of the key takeaways was simply to write about what you are passionate about. Simple enough, but what am I passionate about? It did not take long for the idea of a pizza blog to enter my mind. I've long been a fan of pizza, as are most well-adjusted first-world humans, and have thought about doing some sort of blog or tracker to keep track of my pizza habit. The next step was a name. This was tricky and my first few tries, "Pizza is Life," "A Slice of Life," and "For Love of Pizza" were too generic and the URLs were already taken to boot. Interestingly, a Google search for pizza puns revealed the use of "crustice" to replace "justice" in a sentence and that combined with my years of listening to Metallica resulted in the name of the site you are now reading this from.

My history with pizza was definitely not love at first taste. For the first 7-8 years of my life the only way I had pizza was when my parents ordered it for delivery and they always ordered supreme pizzas. I did not then, nor do I now, like most of the toppings on a supreme pizza, so before I ate each slice, I'd have to spend a significant amount of time picking off a variety of toppings until only pepperoni remained on a cold, mangled shell of a pizza slice. Inevitably I'd miss a hidden shard of onion, making each bite a game of Russian Roulette to my picky childhood palette. Thus, if you’d have asked me at that time, I would have said that pizza was ok, but that I would rather have had Burger King or macaroni and cheese.

So what changed? I am not sure whose idea it was, but my dad took me to the local Little Caesar’s (we only had one in town at that time, and it was a dine-in restaurant with lots of video games) for my 7th-9th birthday and told me I could get a pizza with whatever I wanted on it. I, of course, chose pepperoni and when I got my pizza a lifelong love affair had begun. It was absolutely fantastic. My tiny brain nearly exploded with tasty pleasure. It was still a few years until that experience would be commonplace, though. My parents still routinely ordered the supreme pizzas and unlike before, I would be sad because I knew what the pizza could be but I had to settle for the comparative garbage I was getting. Eventually, my appetite increased to the point where I was able to convince my parents to start getting me my own pizza, since I would easily eat half of one or more and leftover pizza created an easy 2nd meal for my growing and always hungry self.

Next, in the fall of 1988, video games became a significant part of my life when I met my friend Mat and discovered his NES. This is a significant development because it led to many multiple-friend sleepovers in which these growing, near-teenage kids needed to be fed. Pizza was frequently an easy way to do that. A couple years later I would start working and that led to me having my own money that I could spend on pizza, and a couple years after that I got my first car which meant I could go pick up pizza and save delivery charges and tips.

And the rest, as they say, is history. From there I pretty got pizza from everywhere I could, as often a I could. Now that I am older, I have to temper my passion for pizza as it is a detriment to my waistline, but I workout hard and often to best be able to justify the occasional pizza consumption. I’ll be posting pizza reviews, memes, rankings, commentary on advertising, comparisons, as well as anything else pizza related that comes to mind. I hope you come back and read more as I write it!