The Daily Feather — Slicing Wallpaper Cake Pizza

In 1708, Italy’s Silvio Pacitti invented the mezzaluna (half-moon). Initially intended for vegetable and herb chopping, the rounded blade clean-cuts as it rolls across you-name-it in its crosshairs. The mezzaluna predates the modern-day pizza wheel, an iconic addition to food gadgetry. The mere sight of a circular blade cradled in a handle prompts a Pavlovian salivary response. How ironic is it that David S. Morgan of Asheville, North Carolina never saw a pizza in his life. Why? His 1892 patent was for a “roller knife for trimming wallpaper.” Be that as it may, the design is a dead ringer for the ubiquitous occupant in our kitchen drawers. As for the closet crossover, that would be the baking industry’s “cake cutter,” registered by Canton, Ohio’s Carl A. Frahm in 1922. His durable, inexpensive, and easy-to-clean tool divided dough before baking. In practice, it was a culinary twist on what had already been applied to interior decorating.

Today’s Wednesday morning quarterbacks are taking a pizza slicer to the consumer price index (CPI). Some will attempt to cleverly reframe what the bond market digested yesterday. Tellingly, the demotion had already taken place via Bank of America’s November Global Fund Manager Survey, which pushed geopolitics ahead of price pressures before the data crossed the wires. Yesterday’s October CPI report will drop inflation further down the list come the December Survey.