Pizza War -Lakeside, Florida

‘The battle for pizza supremacy has taken a wrong turn in Florida.
Two managers of a Domino’s Pizza restaurant in Lake City, in north-central Florida, have been charged with burning down a rival Papa John’s location. The motive? Police say one of the men admitted that he believed with his competitor out of the way, more pizza lovers would flock to his restaurant.
The Papa John’s was gutted in the Oct. 20 fire.
Both men — Sean Everett Davidson, 23, and Bryan David Sullivan, 22 — were booked on an arson charge and were being held in jail.’ I thought what a waste of talent. Had they been sent with hardware to Iraq they could have shipped so much dough and scalps home, of a few natives they had bagged during their stint. Instead they are playing with matches like Bernard Madoff having made millions is at the moment making chains with paperclips. So many poor devils playing for cents instead of learning from the real pro. (The devil with D is at the moment finding time hanging on his hands. these imps belong by the side of Bernie and not definitely with a crummy pizza joint. This is my view.)
I have had pizza’s with scampi, tuna you name it anything that floats have been a fair game for the pizza makers; and having tried them all I can tell you, folks the supposedly rivalry between Domino an Papa John is all exaggerated. Their competition is not about quality, ingredients, presentation but about dough. Simple dough will not do. It must bear the sweat, smell and sneeze of every one who is called to make the shape. Round shape for the base is the norm. Don’t let that bother you. Who and what comes on it is the main thing. The busboys begin their workout playing with it while his peers are all waiting to butt in. Each bring his expertise, moods, attitude of the moment.
Having eaten pizzas all my life indifferently I can only say,’Heaven help the man who invented the first pizza. He is going to get his reward. He shall eat pizza in all eternity chewing on the indigestible teflon up there or here down below. Some pizza ! some pizza war!
benny

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Theatrical Types-anecdotes

Sir. Herbert Beerbohm- Tree (1853-1917)
Hesketh Pearson, the writer was waiting at His Majesty’s Theater for Herbert-Tree. There was also another gentleman waiting for him. Finally Beerbohm-Tree came and flung himself in a chair between them. ‘Consider yourself introduced,’ he said looking at the ceiling, ‘because I only remember one of your names and that wouldn’t be fair to the other.’
2.
He once broke news to an author like this,’ My dear sir, I have read your play. Oh my dear sir!’
3.
Charles Frohman (1860-1915)
The celebrated theatrical manager once cabled a European actress asking what salary she wanted to appear in a play in N.Y. She demanded $1000 a week.
‘Accept thousand with pleasure.’
‘Thousand for acting ,’ she promptly wired back, pleasure extra.’
4.
W.B Yeats(1865-1939)
At Dublin’s Abbey Theater, poet-playwright Yeats was searching for a particular effects for a glorious sunset. He wanted realism and he coaxed the electricians to try harder with the colors and equipments at their disposal to come up with the effect he could approve. The technicians did all that they could and their experiments at one point elicited a cry of approval. ‘That’s it! Yeats cried stepping forward,’ Hold it, Hold it!’
‘We can’t hold it, sir’ came the stagehand’s apologetic voice,’ The theater is on fire.’
(Sir. Cedric Hardwicke-A Victorian in orbit/Methuen, London)
5.
Edmond Rostand(1868-1918)
He visited an estate put up for sale and found it too big and expensive for his purse.’ One of my plays is going to be put on at the Porte Saint-Martin theatre’ he confided to the seller, ‘If it is a hit I’ll buy it.’
Cyrano de Bergerac was a great success. The seller wrote Rostand to congratulate him and reminded him of his plans.
Rostand wrote him back saying, ‘Property now too small for me.’
benny

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Niños Rabados or stolen babies

There is a scandal raging in the heart of Spain and it goes back to the days of Franco.The Church have been accused of colluding with the dictator’s regime. Not surprisingly the role of Church as always have been unsavoury. First the news.
“It is estimated that between 1950 and the early 80’s, 300,000 babies were taken from parents deemed “undesirable” and sold to loyalists of General Franco. This pipeline is also thought to have been orchestrated with direct aid of the Catholic Church in Spain and has left a country wondering the fate of the stolen babies.“and many women have died without learning their children’s fate. Now activists are stepping up pressure on Spain’s justice system to ease their search for answers.
— Emilia Giron never forgot her second son. She wanted to name him Jesus, but he was taken from her in the hospital to be baptized and was never returned.
He was stolen while she was imprisoned by Gen. Francisco Franco’s regime, in the early 1940s, after the country’s bitter civil war.
Giron died at 95 in 2007, five years after telling her story to historian Ricard Vinyes, who was also jailed by the Franco dictatorship. She never found out what happened to Jesus.
Her baby boy was one of thousands of children who were reportedly separated from their parents in the 1940s during a little-known chapter of the repression that followed the 1936-’39 Spanish Civil War, a practice that would have a terrible echo decades later in Argentina’s “dirty war.”
Giron’s ordeal and that of other parents were immortalized by the 2002 documentary “The Lost Children of Franco,”(Ack: Hazel Healy, Los Angeles Times, reporting from Madrid)
Under Franco’s far-right regime, she was considered morally unfit to raise a child because she was the sister of an outlawed guerrilla leader.
Military psychologist Antonio Vallejo-Nagera built the ideological framework for the practice of taking children from their parents. He saw Marxism as a form of mental illness that was polluting the Hispanic race and advocated that children of leftists be removed and re-educated, a process he termed “separating the wheat from the chaff.”( In the Central America the Church have been propagating Liberation Theology in the seventies. There they were forcing Marxist ideology on the faithfuls by perverting the teachings of Jesus. At the heart of it do you see their motives? It would seem the Church were by stealth trying to hit at the very interests of USA. Plying fast and loose with words and obfuscating clear arguments to put the opposition stymied seems Jesuitical but the Catholic theology and its apologists revel in them!)
An unknown number of infants were taken from women’s prisons. In addition, some Republican child evacuees were repatriated without their parents’ consent and interned in Social Aid homes for schooling in religious and nationalist ideology. Many were adopted by right-wing families.
A law passed in 1941 allowed the state to change the surnames of children in their care. Original records were tampered with, destroyed or simply closed to information seekers, and the victims’ past became virtually untraceable.
When Franco died in 1975, the abuses of his regime were swept under the carpet in the interest of a smooth transition to democracy. In a country still littered with unmarked mass graves, the past has remained untouchable and hugely contentious.
Unlike Argentina, Spain has had no truth commission or trials.
In 2008, Spanish Judge Balthazar Garzon catapulted the fate of the “lost children” into the public spotlight as part of a wider investigation of human rights abuses during Franco’s 37-year dictatorship. I am almost certain he must have been eased out for his courage.
Tailpiece: Consider the atrocities perpetrated in areas where the Catholic Church have authority: Italy, Ireland,Spain. Looking at each of these places unable to come out of their low economic status is it possible to make a connection between the Church and the State? What has sapped from them the spirit of enterprise and bold initiative one that you find in Germany or in the North? Spirit of the individual bled white with the obscurantist ideas,- and wherever possible his children abused and their innocence compromised, make up the citizenry. The citizen still educated has something missing out deep down. How do these individuals add to the country when they cannot even get rid of their feeling of unworthiness? What ideals can a country of such wounded and skewed mindset uphold?
Franco the dictator is still revered for his boldness and achievements. It must be the boldness of a rapist who having violated the moral purity of the nation at which some fools sing the praise of his patriotism! Personally I consider the Church guilty of crimes more foul than actual murder. There are spiritual ghouls, frocked and unctous in their tomfoolery, and yet mouthing homelies. What is more they also want to be called abbe or father!
In the way the Spanish government have turned a blind eye to these crimes against Spanish mothers reveal they are as guilty as the Church. When shall the guilty ones brought to justice?
benny

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Forest Murmers-pastel

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The Merchant and the Jinn-18

The second sheik contiued. ‘O Jinn my wife was a Jinn like you and she lifted me from a watery grave and flew into the air. Before I could say aboubakr-is-no-fakir-and-the-onus-is-on-younus’ I stood right in front of our house. I took my wife into our new home. Here shall we live and set up our home’. She was pleased with my words. I dug up the reserve money I had kept away from my brothers. Next morning I went as usual to the market and opened the shutters. I did business as if I had not left the place at all.
It was late evening when I went home.
After supper my wife said,’I have sent word for my sister and she assured me that your brothers would be taught a lesson. No more you need to fear them.’ Next morning I was surprised to see two greyhounds pawing piteously before my door. ‘They were my brothers and here they stand.’
The Jinn was pleased to hear the story He asked,’ But where are you taking them?’.(to be continued)
benny

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An Artist Abroad-6 :1989 ‘Parthenon Frieze’

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The Merchant and the Jinn-17

The second sheik continued,’Am I my brother’s keeper? O Jinn what do you think?
‘The Jinn did not answer. ‘My brothers were plotting against my wife and me. I should have kept watch over their moves. One night we were in our cabin deep in sleep. These dogs crept stealthily into our room They bound us and threw overboard. They let out a yell even as I felt icy cold water hit me. My wife quivered and said,’Trust me. I shall even save you. Before my befuddled senses could make sense my wife had snapped her cords as though it were butter! She swam and held me aloft from going under.

(to be continued)
benny

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Post-mortem: Libya

Gaddafi would have made blood of civilians run through Libya had not NATO decided to interfere. They first got the UN resolution to disable the airpower of the Libyan dictator and it was prudence that they stayed clear of the actual fight. Unless the Libyan people did not sweat for their freedom at least by willing to fight for their streets or lanes why should West sacrifice their troops?( In this connection we see the Syrian populace has no nervousness in tackling the regime despite being outgunned).
Obama’s administration prudently played a low-key role since the presence of the US would have given wrong signals to the world.
This begs the question why the US had to go into Iraq without a UN resolution to deploy troops into their territory? This hurry was needless and to no point. Iraq is still in no hurry to sweat it out in determining what course they want to take. President Bush did not show the qualities that needed a cool head to push the Iraqi opposition to begin their protests. In order to provoke Saddam Hussain to begin reprisals and use it an excuse for the Allies to take him and the Ba’athists down would have been wiser. Under President Reagan the CIA and other American agencies could arm the Jihadist elements to fight the Russian occupation in Afghanistan. Pity with such experience in establishing democracy by the muzzle of the guns,- had the Bush administration been smart, they could have achieved. Anyway Bush’s ‘gung ho!’ approach was a disaster. Whatever be his ‘conciliatory approach may yield in his domestic policies, Obama’s foreign policy shows maturity.
Well the number of dead (Iraqi population and the allied troops included) would have been much lower if the chicken hawks like Donald Rumsfeld. Dick Cheney did not imagine their firepower would yield the desired results. False steps of politicians leave a trail of dead civilians and soldiers. So much for politics.
History reveals the banana peels on which the mighty take a dive. History will write its own conclusions.
benny

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Last Moments of Gaddafi-first person account

Here is the report by ‘The Exterminator’ agent 007.5
Gaddafi ‘King of Kings’ is no more. If it is Allah’s will the cockroach should have been killed with the woodwork.So be it, I say.
I got the order three moons away and I was stalking my target ever since. ‘The order is from higher up’, said the man who would not give more than a name ‘Moussa’. I asked how high and he said in a whisper, Allahu Akbar. In this dirty business one does not press matters further than that.So I assured my Kalashnikov was ready. Moussa said lugubriously,’Exterminator, take one good look at me. I am going to disappear and after the mission is over you will forget what I look like. Understand?’
I let it at that.
But I know an order when I have one. So it was I found myself in Sirte as the convoys converged according to schedule. I saw them under a purple sky and I sighted my target. I checked the photo of Gaddafi. Never had I seen so many medals and he looked like a buffoon all dressed up. Even in death he was going to meet his maker like a poltroon. So be it. He looked silly with hardware and silken tassels hanging from here and there. The cut of his clothes was so bad I mentally made a point to shoot his tailor as well. His face was like a wax mask with a fire in blaze going under it. ( That reminds me I may shoot his plastic surgeon as well if I have my way.)
I waited for Gaddafi to settle for the night. My idea was to shoot with his dream as well. I waited with my old faithful. But he chose not to sleep in the room intended for the night. Time was on my side. I waited for the next morning for him step into the desert for vaccuation. I had him in sights and he was there in the middle of nowhere, ready to drop his all. He had 42 years a golden throne to do his business but it seemed his heart was not in his duties. He picked up a few pebbles to wipe his behind mechanically. It was when he wanted to enter the hideout I caught up with him. He saw me and looked as bucketload of his worst fears had been flung back at his face.
He just spluttered,’I must take a leak.’
‘Oh no,’said, ‘it is my turn now. my kalashnikov has to go when it has to go.’
I shot him and the empty shell cases just fell where it would.
Mission accomplished.
I send along with this report the proof of death. The wig carries the name of the wearer and a number. It may be of the Swiss Bank or some other.
Allahu Akbar!’

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buzzard-art

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