pizza

This might be my best pizza photo, the most viewed with 44,000, with the most comments on Flickr. I don't have stats for the views on Photobucket site and that's where the Google images comes from.

And now I'm bummed out.

Because I didn't make the pizza. It's a frozen pizza. It was a joke. I used the pizza for a joke photo, and the joke photo gets only a few hundred views. People were not drawn to it by the joke, they were drawn to the original pizza and to this one more than any of the pizzas I made from scratch, dough and everything. What a bummer.

Comments go, 

Wow this pizza looks freaking amazing ...

This looks delicious! ...

Great picture! I'm glad that I stumbled upon ...

This pizza looks absolutely delicious .... 

Oh BITE ME! It was a joke. Didn't you notice the other photos next to it in the photostream? Come on, that's funny. Nobody cuts a slice out of pizza that way. Damnit, Janet. 

Now I'm cross. 

This tells you Red Baron makes the mot photogenic pizzas, for whatever that's worth.

By the way, I called Denver Pizza Co the last time I ordered with three questions I wanted to discuss, about their email coupons and online ordering, about the call box downstairs, and the like, I could tell the guy who I spoke to wanted to get me off the phone. He passed me to his supervisor who was equally impatient with my concerns. I could tell he was eager to get off the phone. I said, "I have one more thing." And I could hear him sigh with dismay. 

"I need to tell you that I've tried a lot of pizzas around here and yours is the best and by far. First, I make a lot of pizzas myself but I cannot make them so good as yours. I studied your pizzas to improve my own, and I noticed a few things. One, you have cornmeal on the top as well as the bottom and that added texture is attractive. They're not just ballbearing to slide the thing off the peel into the oven. And two, your jalapeños are fresh and not pickled. The  jalapeños roasting with the pizza is excellent while the other place's pickled  jalapeños add vinegar that makes them worse.

And the guy suddenly became talkative. He talked my ass off about pizzas. He said the cornmeal on top comes from the entire dough ball being smashed on cornmeal coated surface. It's not sprinkled on top. He thanked me for complimenting their pizzas. He really did appreciate a customer noticing the specifics of their work, not just some guy saying, "You guys are the best," rather, specific reasons why  they are the best. He really dug that. And he would not shut up. He went on and on like he discovered a new best friend. I was on the other end, our roles of impatience reversed, I became all, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, hey I gotta go.