Well, I decided to take the angle grinder to the inside of the pan. Light touch, nice and slow. As one poster mentioned, this was anything but a quality piece of cookware. It's a 15 1/2" skillet, and cost a little less than a dollar an inch. While nice and heavy, it had not been polished or smoothed at all. So, I smoothed it. My intent was to knock off the bumps, but not grind down to the bottoms of the pits. So I did that in about 10 minutes, and Crisco'd the thing and put it on the grill (to avoid smoke in the house). Burned it for about a half hour, let it cool, then repeated. The pits are nice and black, and the former bumps, now flats, are a dark gray color. I think that the grinder idea was a pretty good one.
BTW, the fried chicken was pretty damn good, but the breading was not crispy. Pretty good, though, for a first attempt.
For those interested, I followed Alton Brown's recipe to the letter.
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for the responses, y'all, and all the lively banter.
-Phil Crow