But grilling pizza takes some practice. Obviously, it’s all too easy to burn the crust or overcook the pie, especially when dealing with open flames, so grilled pizza isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it solution.

Keep it small

Instead of cooking one large pie as I would in the oven, I generally make 3-4 smaller pizza crusts when I’m working on the grill. This makes them easier to manage and prevents breakage.

Precook the crust

Since the crust takes longer to cook than the rest of the toppings, I precook my crusts for 2-3 minutes per side before adding the rest. I often do this over direct heat to speed up the process, depending on how thick my crusts are, though that does require constant attention.

Indirect heat

Once the pizzas are topped, however, I move them off the flames and cook them with indirect heat and the lid closed. This keeps the crust bottoms from burning (too much) while the cheese melts.

Handle with care

One hazard of grilled pizza is the pie falling apart as it comes off the grill. Instead of relying on a regular spatula, I use an extra wide pizza peel to remove my pizzas carefully.

When it comes to Twitter followers, The New York Times is the top bird with more than 2.6 million followers. To illustrate how impressive this follower number is, The Wall Street Journal only has 464,591 followers in the #2 spot. The New York Times is the ONLY newspaper from the Top 25 with more Twitter followers than print circulation.

Maybe The New York Times has such a huge Twitter following because it was the first of the Top 25 to join Twitter, way back in March 2, 2007. Probably not, since The Contra Costa Times, The Washington Post and The Oregonian all joined later that month.

Oh yeah, and the Times has more Twitter followers than print subs. Ouch.

At least that's the case in the U.K.

A fascinating new piece of research this week looks in detail at the success of newspaper websites and attempts to find statistical correlations with sliding print copy sales. As one goes up, the other must go down, surely? These are the underpinnings of transition.

But "in the UK at least, there is no such correlation", reports the number-crunching analyst Jim Chisholm. "This is true at both a micro-level in terms of UK newspaper titles and groups and at a macro-level comparing national internet adoption with circulation performance. Indeed, the opposite case could be argued: that newspapers that do well on the web also do better in print… Understandably worried traditional journalists should know that the internet is not a threat."

Hmmm... but if the Internet isn't pulling readers away from print, why are circulation numbers continuing to decline?

A proposal issued in May of this year seeks to charge $10 per hiker and $20 per camper for access to the South Colony Basin area, a trailhead that serves four 14,000-foot climbs in Custer Country – Humboldt Peak, Kit Carson Peak, Crestone Peak and the Crestone Needle. The proposal would not place a limit on the total number of visitors allowed into the area and, if approved, wouldn’t go into effect until 2011 at the earliest.

“Managing recreational use and protecting the environment in South Colony Basin presents the USFS with many challenges not found in other backcountry locations,” the agency wrote in a statement when the proposal was introduced, “such as maintaining costly summit trails, restoring degraded alpine ecosystems, supporting search and rescue operations, and dealing with human waste. Revenue from the proposed recreation use fees will help to sustain the recreational facilities and environmental protections in the basin.”

Running Addiction
Gotta Have It, May 2006

Sean Burch
Q&A with Kilimanjaro Speed Ascent Record-Holder Sean Burch, July 2006

Via VeloNews:

Alberto Contador says he may retire from cycling if he’s handed down a racing ban and disqualified from the 2010 Tour de France after he tested positive for traces of clenbuterol en route to winning July’s Tour.

Speaking to Spanish television TeleCinco on primetime over the weekend, the beleaguered Contador hinted he may walk away for good from cycling if anti-doping officials deliver a racing ban and take away his 2010 Tour victory.

“If this is not resolved favorably and in a just fashion, then I would have to reconsider or not I would ever come back to the bike,” Contador said on La Noria. “I am very optimistic and I think things will be resolved favorably.”

Contador tested positive for clenbuterol on a rest-day control a day ahead of the decisive Tourmalet climbing stage en route to his narrow, hard-fought third Tour victory just ahead of Andy Schleck.

Not that this really means anything, but I never really thought that Contador rode like a doper. Landis made sense, with that miracle ride in the 2006 tour, but Contador had all the usual ups and downs of a clean racer and never looked to be summoning extra strength. Who knows? Maybe that just means I can't spot a cheater.

It would be a mistake to write off the web as a medium for serious, long-form journalism. There's a vast quantity of high-quality narrative journalism on it. The Guardian's Bobbie Johnson recently came up with an ingenious way of alerting people to this resource. He set up a Twitter account @IfYouOnly with the motto "If you only read one thing today, make it this". His aim: to highlight and link to a single piece of gripping, powerful and memorable writing each weekday.

"Ah, yes," say the sceptics, "but where's the business model to support such expensive writing?" And here's an interesting development. The online magazine Slate decided to allocate resources to encourage some journalists to produce long, long pieces – for example Tim Noah's analysis of why there hasn't been another 9/11-type attack. These pieces have attracted astonishing levels of reader attention, with page views in the 3-4 million range. And the editor of the New York Times magazine has made the same discovery. "Contrary to conventional wisdom," he says, "it's our longest pieces that attract the most online traffic."

This week, he gets The New Yorker profile treatment. Naturally, his Facebook profile is included as a source.

According to his Facebook profile, Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he’s friends with. He’s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Harvard University. He’s a fan of the comedian Andy Samberg and counts among his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. He is twenty-six years old.

Zuckerberg cites “Minimalism,” “Revolutions,” and “Eliminating Desire” as interests. He likes “Ender’s Game,” a coming-of-age science-fiction saga by Orson Scott Card, which tells the story of Andrew (Ender) Wiggin, a gifted child who masters computer war games and later realizes that he’s involved in a real war. He lists no other books on his profile.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook friends have access to his e-mail address and his cell-phone number. They can browse his photograph albums, like one titled “The Great Goat Roast of 2009,” a record of an event held in his back yard. They know that, in early July, upon returning from the annual Allen & Company retreat for Hollywood moguls, Wall Street tycoons, and tech titans, he became Facebook friends with Barry Diller. Soon afterward, Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page, “Is there a site that streams the World Cup final online? (I don’t own a TV.)”

Since late August, it’s also been pretty easy to track Zuckerberg through a new Facebook feature called Places, which allows users to mark their location at any time. At 2:45 A.M., E.S.T., on August 29th, he was at the Ace Hotel, in New York’s garment district. He was back at Facebook’s headquarters, in Palo Alto, by 7:08 P.M. On August 31st at 10:38 P.M., he and his girlfriend were eating dinner at Taqueria La Bamba, in Mountain View.

Zuckerberg may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that’s kind of the point. Zuckerberg’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.”

Curing Winter Sports Injuries With ... Stem Cells?

It profiles Dr. Chris Centeno, a Colorado MD promoting a stem cell-based treatment for knee and other joint injuries. Interesting stuff. Hopefully I'll never have a need for his services, but it's good to know the non-surgical option is there.