$3.09 a slice...

Of course, you can get it for $2.99 if you're willing to pay cash over credit.

Look, don't take this personal, it's not necessarily you, but America at large. Every year, when the weather gets more extreme (i.e. coldest parts of winter, hottest of summer), we set about bitching and moaning about the price of petro. And I can't take it anymore.

Consider this - what if we all had to have pizza to make our daily lives function? However, pizza restaurants were only allowed to be built in our worst neighborhoods. To get a slice, you had to enter America's most dangerous and crime ridden ghettos, projects, and streets. Of course, getting it yourself wasn't feasible, too dangerous, and you just can't do it. So you hire middle men, because you have to have your slice or everything falls apart. These middle men travel, bring armed guards, buy bullet resistant vehicles, top of the line transport, and they become very good at getting pizza out, and in your mouth. Now that's expensive for them, and its expensive for you. And because these middle men know you have to have the pizza, they charge whatever the market will bare for this "delivery service." Years and years of this go by and pretty soon the delivery middle men, the only face you see, become the boogie men of the scenario. The bad guys. After all, you're paying them for the end product, so they get the scorn.

BUT, no one asks why in the hell we only allow Pizzerias to be built in bad neighborhoods. And what makes it particularly curious is that in scores of safe neighborhoods with low crime rates and competent workers lie all the fresh ingredients to a great pizza, all the necessary brick and mortar to house and bake them, only by law they are illegal. Unable to be constructed and produced in these lush neighborhoods around the country ... only sold, after the middle men bring the pizza in.

Why aren't those who mandate such laws the bad guys? Why is it the middle men whom simply are taking part in an artificially created market, dictated by law, the recipients of scorn?

We collect our oil from all the world's worst neighborhoods. These are nations where democracy is a tool of the infidel. Where gays are stoned to death. Where a sheik head dress and big sun glasses are not a Halloween costume, but a Saturday night out. Where Latin American pseudo Napoleon's with bad skin and beige uniforms pretend to be elected by a 99.9% margin, so no worries over the manipulation of price and production from this lot, right? In response do we bang on the doors of Al Gore and his minions? Do we hit our jail house cups against the bars in protest over the stranglehold the Green movement has on domestic production of fossil fuels? No. We reserve all that anger, all that hatred, for the pizza delivery guys at Exxon and Shell, who go into the bad neighborhoods and get our slice with extra pepperoni. And all because it is they who put the over sized numbers that read out "3.09" on the marquee, never questioning the reasons behind those numbers, only the men displaying them.

It's madness.