Home of Mold

I happened upon a brief reference to Grog's Pizza today. Grog's was a pizza place at UI on Green Street, in that plaza by Locust that contains the Jimmy John's. Grog's was most notable for the price of its pizza-two small cheese pizzas for $3.99. That's right, $3.99 (the price did go up by my senior year). Mediums and Larges were comparably priced, as long as they were purchased in twos. This was cheaper than Gumby's and Pizza World, who also specialized in cutrate pizza. I thought Gumby's and Pizza World had absolutely awful pizza. On the other hand I actually liked Grog's. It was thick crust pizza, with sweet crust, and a little on the greasy side. We would get barbecue sauce all the time, because the barbecue sauce was good and the regular pizza sauce was nothing to write home about. The thought of a small pepperoni pizza with barbecue sauce has my mouth watering right now. I was turned onto Grog's by the Marmion bunch on my floor at Bromley my freshman year (the same guys who would be my roommates in the crack house two years later). Ian ordered Grog's so much that he had a corner of his room devoted to the Grog's graveyard, which consisted of two (maybe more) stacks of old Grog's boxes, all the way to the ceiling. His plan was to take the boxes into Grog's and demand a free pizza from them for being such a good customer. I don't remember if he ever followed through on that plan. Anyway, Grog's closed down in 1995-I don't remember if it closed down before I graduated, but a new pizza place was already there by September of that year (Dewey's Pizza, which only lasted two years or so). Meanwhile, a Grog's in Normal remained open until 1998-which of course was the year when I moved to Normal, so I just missed it. Here are two paragraphs I found when googling Grog's, and I wish I had a picture of that pizza box to show you!
"A now-defunct local pizza delivery business, noted for being very inexpensive and for being the only establishment that offered pizza topped with barbecue sauce. It got its name when the founder, a regular Plato user, asked the readers of a notesfile what he should name his new restaurant; inexplicably, this joke entry became the winner. Grog’s was the pizza of choice among the sysops at CERL 165, who ordered with such regularity that the restaurant had been known to call them back after an orderwas placed to let them know that they hadn’t ordered their “usual”, wondering if this was perhaps an oversight. Officially, the restaurant’s name was simply “Grog’s,” but the “Home of Chow” portion was used as an advertising tag line on its pizza boxes. Regular eaters, however, quickly noticed a quirk in the lettering of this tag line: the word “CHOW” was written in such a way that, when turned upside down, read “MOLD”. A popular dorm room door decoration for many years was a Grog’s box with “Chow” carefully cut out and inverted, so that the box now read, “Grog’s Home of Mold.”

The Killing Joke

The ramifications of Heath Ledger's death in regards to the new Batman movie are unknown at this time, but it certainly doesn't look good for the movie. Even though primary shooting has been completed, this makes reshoots difficult, though presumably they could pass off someone else as the character when in full makeup. If this movie wasn't already going to be dark, it had better be now. Light popcorn fare is not a good combination with a recently deceased, twentysomething actor. Marketing is another problem. Will the new trailers contain any shots of Ledger?