Introducing a regular-looking pizza box with a special touch. The difference is that the box can come apart once it's delivered by your local pie dealer. While it starts out the size of a standard pizza box, customers can break the platter-size square into four plate-size sections using scoring and perforations.

Voila--a trashy dinner service for four, with no wasting water or soap on dishes after. I guess that sorta makes this box "green," as the manufacturer claims. If annual pizza consumption numbers in the billions, as some theorize (though of course, some must be served on plates in restaurants), sure, this could have some effect if everyone used it. Okay, maybe the "green" angle is a slight stretch, but it's also true that no trees died for the box, either. It's made from 100% recycled material, which presumably can be recycled again after supper. Every little bit helps, right?

I hadn't called my favorite pizza place in a while because I've been making my own (it's cheaper and I've been trying to eat mostly organic food). But I was going out for the night, leaving my husband alone with three boys, so I called Rudy's and ordered the best deal: the $9.99 medium pepperoni pizza.

"There's a $15 minimum now," said the voice on the other end, apologetically. "Gas is $4 a gallon, you know."

I wasn't the only one to be hit with expenses due to rising gas prices (and what's worse, my husband didn't eat the $5.99 antipasto salad I ordered). Many businesses are starting to charge for delivery, or tacking fuel surcharges on top of existing prices. The Washington Post points to a $10 increase in the cost of a mowed lawn for one woman; off-the-charts fuel surcharges at grocery delivery service Peapod; and the surcharges to ship packages at UPS and FedEx, going up by a percentage point to 9.5% on July 6 thanks to the ever-rising cost of diesel. Green Daily wrote about a fuel surcharge for traffic violations that will go into effect in one Georgia town July 1.

Naturally, not everyone is cool with the added on costs.

On Thursday, if you've never ordered from PizzaHut.com, you'll have 24 hours to order three or more one-topping Pizza Mia pizzas at a 20% discount.

So they'll be $4 each.

Of course, you have to buy three of them, so it's a $12 expense, and then once you kick in a tip, maybe $14 or $15. So it's not quite as great of a deal as the Pizza Hut people make it out to be in this press release. They have the Pizza Hut CMO saying, "We thought we'd give customers something to look forward to when gas prices reach the all-time $4 high -- an unbelievable deal on dinner. Four dollars may not buy much these days at the gas station, but it can buy you the great tasting Pizza Mia pizza at Pizza Hut."

Still, I guess they have to make you buy three pizzas. Otherwise, they'd spend $5 in gas delivering your $4 pizza. Anyway, for those who are interested, enjoy.

Papa John's, proud to be the first national pizza chain to offer online ordering, is now even more pleased with itself because it's the first with a widget. (it is also gloating about being the first to offer pizza ordering by text last November.) The widget, a little program that sits on another website, let you order your usual pizza with just a few clicks. Or order up to 21 days in advance. Or in Spanish.

Papa John's claims this isn't pointless gadgetry, but responding to customer demands. It spent $15 million perfecting the online ordering technology, but say 20% of its orders now come in that way. That's a surprising amount of internet pizza, but would these people just have made themselves a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if they had not been able to order electronically? Is calling in an order that hard?

Now everyone's got to have online ordering. Bill Barol satirized Domino's quest for online ordering in a recent Fast Company story. Pizza Hut, not wanting to be left out, has their own express ordering program -- though you are stuck on their site, you can't order off Facebook like you can with Papa John's. Then again, do I really want all my friends seeing me eating Papa John's pizza all the time. Or that's what I thought till I looked on Facebook and saw that Papa John's has its own page and 603 fans -- though I don't see any that have the mypapa widget yet.

When I get fed up with an athlete's performance or complaining about a past game I saddle up to an Internet message board or a stool at the local pub and fire away at the "star". When a major corporation is fed up with a star's complaining, they make t-shirts!

In this case Papa John's Pizza made t -shirts which contained Lebron's number, 23, below the word "crybaby". These shirts were in response to James' complaints of being fouled by a Wizards player early in the series. The humorous shirts were sold by a Washington D.C. area Papa John's before game 6 last Friday. The shirts which turned up in Cleveland had little effect on the Cavaliers who went on to win the game.

Although I don't eat too much pizza these days, there was a time in my life when the ambrosial mix of flat crust, tomato sauce, and melted cheese was a staple in my diet. Looking through my mental scrapbook, it seems like almost every major event of my high school, college, and graduate years was accompanied by the smell of tomatoes and oregano and the delicious taste of mozzarella. From hook-ups to break-ups and all points in between, pizza was there to feed me and comfort me.

I wonder if the next generation of college students will have the same experience. After all, one of the major attractions of pizza was its price; for between $5 and $10 (sometimes less if I bought in bulk or had a coupon), I could feed a bunch of my friends. We could gather around the mystical manna, make our plans, and contemplate our vile deeds. Pizza was simultaneously cheap and slightly grown up. We could have the joy of buying food for ourselves but still have enough cash left over to pick up a six pack for later. In short, it was the perfect food.

Over the past couple of weeks, a combination of poor crop yields and increased consumption have sent the price of flour through the roof. While wheat usually goes for $3 to $7 a bushel on the Minneapolis Commodities Exchange, it hit $25 a bushel last week. Over the past two weeks, the cost of a 50-lb bag of flour in New York City rose from $16 to $26. It was $9 in 2006. Cheese prices have also risen, although not as much.

It's almost diabolically clever.

As if it isn't hard enough to try and eat low-calorie foods, pizza chains are starting to attract customers by offering GPS technology so we can track the progress of how our pizza order is going. Soon, at several chains, there will be no more waiting anxiously wondering where that doofus driver is. (No offense to any pizza delivery drivers reading this, but when you're hungry and impatient, everyone is a doofus.)

So here's the thing. An 11-store chain of Papa John's restaurants in northern Alabama have been using an online-tracking system created by a startup business called TrackMyPizza. In this case, customers can watch online as their deliveries move street by street to their front doors.