Results of the latest blood tests are in and while the numbers aren’t in the normal range yet, they are headed there. The doctor also ran some function tests on my prostate – because I’m peeing every hour – and those thank goodness are within what is considered normal. With my appetite back to normal, I’m feeling stronger and more alert every day.

On the other hand, I can’t get a decent amount of sleep. In part, that’s from waking up every hour to pee. But also continued lower back pain makes it almost impossible for me to find a comfortable position for sleeping – I’ve tried every different position, combinations of pillows, towels, propping up this, boosting that – and different pain killers and at most I’m getting three hours of sleep at a stretch, which of course is taking its toll. Add to that the fact that both of my feet and ankles have swelled up (more noticeably the right one), a side effect of hepatitis my doctor informs me. Doesn’t hurt so much but looks awful.

This is now my 4th week of being sick. I’m sick of being sick, pardon the triteness of that. The only benefit is that my gf has been going all out on the cooking. Two nights ago a wonderful chicken soup with pasta and veggies (soup stock made from scratch) and last night an amazingly tasty Filipino-style beef stew. Can’t wait to see what she’s cooking up tonight.

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I loved all the comments I got from my previous pizza post. Amazing that so many people here feel so passionate about pizza and that there is so little here to satisfy that craving.

Coincidentally, GQ’s new issue has a feature article by food critic Alan Richman on the 25 best pizzas in the US. (All of the above images come from that article.)

I think non-Americans might take issue with his opening statement:

Italians are wrong. Not about cars or suits. About pizza, and they’re not entirely mistaken about that, only about crusts and buffalo-milk mozzarella. They’ve got the tomato part right. Pizza was created by the Italians—or maybe by the Greeks, who brought it to Naples, but let’s not pile on the bad news. Right now it justly belongs to us. We care more about it. We eat more of it, and unlike the Italians, we appreciate it at dinner, at lunch, and at breakfast, when we have it cold, standing up, to make hangovers go away. Italians don’t really understand pizza. They think of it as knife-and-fork food, best after the sun goes down.

Pizza isn’t as fundamental to Italy as it is to America. Over there, it plays a secondary role to pasta, risotto, and polenta. To be candid, I think they could do without it. Not us. Over here, it’s one of the few foreign foods we’ve embraced wholeheartedly, made entirely our own.

Anyway, Richman sampled 386 pizzas at 109 different pizzerias across the U.S. Now there’s a writing assignment!

I tried Polish pizza in Chicago (not bad, except for the nearly raw egg on top), Indian pizza in San Francisco (pretty good, although reheated chicken dries out badly, despite the tikka masala sauce), Turkish pizza in New York (invariably called “pitza” and, because it’s made with pita dough, rather crackly), and Korean pizza in Los Angeles. (The Korean-style Hanchi Gold pie was topped with spicy bean paste, sweet-potato mousse, ground beef, onion, bell pepper, olives, corn, mushrooms, edamame, jalapeño, bacon, Cheddar cheese, marinated calamari, sour cream, garlic, and parsley, and when you have that much piled on, it’s hard to tell the potato mousse from the sour cream.)

Richman’s #1 choice is Great Lake in Chicago (sigh), a place where the Polish/Czech co-owner is also the pizza maker. At least he ranked New York as the #1 pizza city in the U.S. Sadly, I read through the list and realized I have only been to one of those places (Famous Joe’s in NYC, right down the block from the CD store I used to own, so I went there a lot) – and the odds that I’ll get to any of the others are fairly remote.

I was reading about a Burger of the Month club in New York, where each month a small group goes to an agreed upon restaurant to try the burger and then blog about the results and keep a list of rankings. Maybe we should do that in Hong Kong? Have a pizza of the month club & a burger of the month club?