All right, who left all these tabs open? Somebody’s gotta clean this shit up!

Yeah, it was me. I left the tabs open. Time to clean house!

::  Is Byron Brown the worst mayor in America?

This piece, in a local site for investigative journalism, came out in the wake of the recent blizzard during which 40 people died and also during which Mayor Brown was pretty much a nonfactor, if not directly MIA.

Problem is, if Brown is the worst mayor in America, whose fault is that?

As Jim Wright often says: If you want a better nation, start by being a better citizen.

::  Cook For Iran: Making Khoresht-e Bademjoon When I’m Homesick

Sarah Gailey is running a feature in which people wrote in with personal stories connected to the recipes to which they return again and again, and this was the first installment. If this is how the series starts, it’s going to be something special to watch unfold.

::  Hubble observes a star being devoured by a black hole.

::  Pizza boxes suck.

A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.

Having spent four years in the 90s putting pizzas in boxes, I can attest that indeed, the pizza box isn’t the best thing in the world. However, a big problem is in the pizza itself; unless you’re the person who never eats more than a single slice, the texture of the pizza is already changing from the time it comes out of the oven. If the texture you encounter in the first slice within minutes of emerging from the hot box is your Platonic ideal, you’d best stop eating after that first slice, because with the second slice, things are cooling and congealing and the crust is absorbing moisture again. The best the box can do is vent steam through those little vent slots, but if you got delivery and the box got shoved into that thermal bag? Fuhgeddaboudit!

I’m not sure what the solution is here, but maybe a part of it lies in Americans getting beyond crispy being the texture they desire in so many foods. (Oh, and the best way to reheat leftover pizza is not in the microwave or the oven. It’s in a pan on the stove. That way you can, yes, crisp up the crust again, and slap a lid on it during the last minute of reheating it to get things good and melty again.)

::  A Brazilian art collector claims that a Van Gogh painting on display in Detroit belongs to him.

The art world is wild, innit? This is a fascinating story and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out:

A painting by Vincent van Gogh on display at the Detroit Institute of Art was stolen, a new lawsuit claims.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday by Brokerarte Capital Partners and its sole proprietor, Gustavo Soter, a Brazilian art collector. It claims the DIA borrowed the painting from an unnamed party that is not its legal owner.

The painting in question is an 1888 oil called Une Liseuse De Romans, or The Novel Reader, which shows a young, dark-haired woman reading a yellow book. It is on show as part of the Van Gogh in America exhibition, which features 74 works by the Dutch post-impressionist, borrowed from 50 sources.

According to the lawsuit, Soter purchased the painting in 2017 for $3.7m, whereupon “a third-party immediately took possession of the painting”.

The suit says Soter “never transferred title to or any interest in the painting to this third party. Since the third party took possession of the painting in May 2017, plaintiff has not known the painting’s location.”

Hat tip to Nerdishly, who actually saw the painting in question before this story broke.

::  Should I divorce my husband after the insane stunt he pulled at our wedding?

The stunt? This:

My only hard-and-fast rule was that he would not rub cake in my face at the reception.

Being a reasonable man who knows me well, he didn’t. Instead, he grabbed me by the back of the head and shoved my head down into it. It was planned since the cake was DESTROYED, and he had a bunch of cupcakes as backup.

The advice columnist advises:

I think what he did was a red flag about not respecting you and your wishes—to say nothing of the physical aggression—but even if it wasn’t, the fact that you really didn’t like it is enough. Make a mental note about which of your loved ones don’t seem to value your happiness, and continue with your divorce.

And maybe this is surprising coming from a fan of the pie-in-the-face, but I couldn’t agree more. What this guy did was shitty and disrespectful, and it was aggressively so, right in front of everyone. There is nothing lovable about violating someone’s wishes in so brazen and humiliating a way.

(If anyone’s wondering, no, The Wife and I did not do that cake-smashing bullshit at our wedding. I honestly think it’s stupid and tacky and I’ve hated it at every wedding I’ve seen it happen at.)

OK, that’s all my open tabs! Yay! Time to open more tabs!