When the Moon Hits Your Eye

Rudyard Kipling wrote, “A woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a smoke.”

 

Pizza is one of those foods that can be awful and still enjoyed by the masses.  And until you’ve had a really good one, you don’t know what you’re missing.  It is a personal thing.

 

Each is subject to personal taste and should not even be confused with the stuff sold in the frozen food department of grocery stores.

 

Those flour-derived manhole covers are generally disgusting and resemble nothing like a fresh, hand-made pie adorned with quality toppings.  Often, their boxes taste better than the product.

 

You’ll hear Madison Avenue types promising “rising crusts” and “real pizzeria tastes.”  One even claims their frozen pizza is indistinguishable from delivery; they’re wrong.

 

Pizza is a food that is pretty much regional.  New York pizza is thin, flexible, and greasy; some like to describe it a “foldable.”  A good New York pizza slice can be contorted like a paper airplane and after eating two slices, it makes you want another.

 

Pennsylvania pizza is thick and doughy.  From both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, pizzas are usually akin to a loaf of bread with ketchup and some unidentifiable cheese.  For some unknown reason, it is served lukewarm or cold – not something of which I am fond.

 

Moving around the country, Chicago brags about its pizza that is served in a skillet-like vessel and called “pan pizza.”  Pan pizza is not really pizza, although it is very good and very filling.  Once again, it is a personal thing.

 

Now Florida, which is a compilation of refugees from high-tax New York State, lack-of-job Michigan, toxic waste New Jersey, snowy Illinois, and just about everywhere else people are escaping you-fill-in-the-blanks, is also a haven for those trying to establish pizzerias.

 

Referring back to that “personal thing,” these pizzeria chefs bring what they know and what they think people want.  But, while they are trying to serve a wide mix of tastes they wind up offending other, more distinguishing palates.

 

Then, there are the pizza chains.  Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Hungry Howie’s, Domino’s, and Little Caesar’s, are a few that come to mind.  They’re okay in a food emergency or actually very good for the “real pizza” virgins.  I’ve tried them all, and found Hungry Howie’s to be the absolute worst with chimpanzees manning the phones and ovens, alike.  But, I digress.

 

Since it is so difficult to locate anyone who knows how to make a pizza I enjoy, I have turned to making my own.  My sainted wife and I mix flour, yeast, water, sugar, salt, and olive oil.  Granted, it takes longer than take-out, but, you know what goes in and on it.  We also use it to rid the fridge of leftovers. 

 

Toppings are whatever is in the vegetable bin, meat bin, or our special desires.  Our personal toppings usually include ground beef, mushrooms, onions, olives, and sausage, in addition to that stringy mozzarella cheese.

Most pizza joints will allow you order pies with any number of toppings, though.  Ranging from ham and pineapple to chicken and tuna, just about anything can be had but, remember that this is a pizza.  It’s a personal thing.

 

Gourmet pizzas are all the rage and can cost upwards of $25 for an 18-inch pie.  Some of their toppings include peas, almonds, duck, and venison.

 

Maybe Mr. Kipling would consider replacing that “good Cigar” with a slice “good Pizza.”

Cold as Ice

In the name of promoting mental calisthenics, we are offering a quiz to our especially astute readers.
 

Q:  What do the following all have in common?

• Akademik Shokalskiy
• Xue Long
• At least 900 traffic wrecks in the Atlanta, GA
• Record low temps
• 44^th World Economic Forum

 

A:  All of these are germane to the news of January 2014.

 

“Big deal,” you say.  And, normally you would be correct.  But, today is different because today is the day we are going to help get to the inside of the head of that great doctor of environmentalism and inventor of the internet, Dr. Albert Gore.
 

It seems that Al Gore told the world that the temperature of the interior of the Earth was “millions of degrees,” while visiting Conan O’Brien’s show in November 2009.  This is the guy who was “a heartbeat away from the presidency” when Bill Clinton was banging interns.  It is also the same guy who ran for his own term as president, and was luckily defeated. 

 

Dr. Gore was speaking at the 44^th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2014, while the coldest temperatures ever recorded in the United States affected most of the country. 

 

Ol’Al and his buds were discussing “climate change,” the new catch phrase for “global warming,” that affects us all.  Yes, we are all going to catch on fire if something isn’t done quickly to stop this heating of the planet, he contends.

 

All the while, record snow storms and related ice caused nearly a thousand wrecks in Atlanta, Georgia, alone, and trapped thousands of commuters in their vehicles for days.  We’re not counting those who slept in gas stations, supermarkets, and hardware stores, overnight, because they were unable to make it home for the inclement weather conditions.

 

At least 49 daily record lows were set on January 6^th & 7^th, 2014.

 

Countless people in various southern states were trapped in their cars for over 20-hours.

 

The Akademik Shokalskiy is the Russian research ship that became stuck in the Antarctic ice while studying the loss of – well – ice.  According to this ship of brain trustees, the Antarctic ice was disappearing at an alarming rate; the  Akademik Shokalskiy crew merely wanted to document how quickly.

 

Their ship became frozen in the disappearing ice and they had to spend the Christmas holidays there, trapped liked international, over-educated rats.  Not to worry, the Chinese came to their rescue with their own ice breaking ship, the Xue Long, which also became stuck.  So now, we have two stuck ships frozen in ice that isn’t there.

 

The conclusion is that if the Earth’s internal temperature was “millions of degrees,” that should be enough to melt the snow, ice, and vaporize the oceans.  But, the ice isn’t melting, the snow isn’t slowing, and the oceans are still there and still cold.

 

Lest we mention the repetitive blankets of snow on the East Coast states throughout much of January and February, reaching record proportions, and we have something that occurs once in a lifetime.

 

Now if only research information would tell us something important, like what the freezing temperature of vodka, is.

 

Sochi Winter Olympics

Every four years, like clockwork, the world gets together and puts its best athletes on a stage to compete to see who has bragging rights in any particular sport.  These games – known as the Olympics – are broken down into the summer and winter versions; the winter version is upon us while you are reading this.

 

In preparation for these highly competitive events, and to ensure we send only the best of the best to compete, we hold rigorous trials.

 

These trials are broken down into four different categories, namely those for speed, such as speed skating, downhill skiing, biathlon, bobsledding, luge racing, and any other sport where time is a consideration for winning.

 

A second category for determining the winner is by counting points.  One such winter sport is ice hockey.  It is a pretty simple scoring game with one goal equaling one point.  The game lasts a total of three 20-minute periods.

 

Third, is a length-determined scoring game.  One that is a crowd favorite is ski jumping.  A competitor skis off an elevated ramp attempting to soar as far as possible through the air, then tries to land on an icy slope several hundred feet away, then skis down.  It’s a lot harder than it sounds – much like golf.

 

Another category is for aesthetics.  Some sports use visual cues as ways to judge and those methods are always subjective.  Often, the scores are miles apart from judges representing “hostile” countries.  Sports that use these subjective scoring methods include figure skating.

 

It is this last category that always intrigues me but, this year it has me absolutely baffled.  You see, I am not an athlete.  In fact, my most rigorous workout consists of maneuvering a fork into my mouth.  But, still, I am allowed to be a critic, as it is my right as stated in the Twenty-ninth Amendment of the Constitution.

 

It seems as though a girl who finished a distant fourth in the aforementioned trials, made the team of three competitors.  Why, is a mystery.  The second place girl, who never competed in an international competition, made the team - another mystery.

 

But, this is not the weirdest part of the winter Olympics being held in Sochi, Russia.

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he is not the human rights president that President Barack Obama is, when it comes to gay rights.  In fact, President Putin ordered the jailing of gays, much to the chagrin of President Obama.

 

President Obama was so infuriated by this, that he may have thought about missing a round of golf – but didn’t – and decided to send an openly gay delegation to Sochi to attempt to chafe President Putin.

 

Brian Boitano, and Caitlin Cahow, both openly gay, led the delegation to somehow make some sort of point.  Perhaps President Obama will help us understand what that point is someday.

 

In any case, it would be nice if we didn’t have to use someone’s sexual orientation and bedroom proclivities to decide who competed in a sporting event.  And it would be nice if the president concentrated more on that “jobs” thing he ran his re-election campaign on.

 

And I didn’t even mention that sport, curling.

Rolling Stoned

In 1980, an organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving, (MADD) was founded by Candice Lightner, whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver.  This noble effort, according to MADD, has cut drunk driving in half.

 

Such wonderful news shouldn’t go uncelebrated so, let’s all figure a way to congratulate these folks for their righteousness.

 

One way would be to go out and have a toast but, that would be counter-productive.  Another way would be to incorporate an easy new target.

 

After all, society has proudly beaten its collective chest because it tried to force smokers to stop their “dirty” habit, or as the smokers put it, their “lifestyle.”

 

For you young’uns, smokers were people who would come by your house and join your parents in smoking non-filtered cigarettes, cigars, or pipes.  The smoke would waft though the air and eventually soil everything from walls and cheesy oil paintings, to walls and lungs.  Smokers could also be found in stores, on streets, in cars, busses, on planes, and in office buildings.  They were everywhere because they had money and paid taxes.

 

Eventually, the Surgeon General deemed smoking bad for us and decided to try to outlaw cigarettes.  Unfortunately, cigarettes were subject to what smokers called “sin taxes.”  Sin taxes were levies attached to products holier-than-thou people in free societies felt needed taxing in order to save the rest of civilization from damnation, or sin.  Cigarettes and alcohol were always the two big ones to tax because they usually sold the most and thereby generated the most tax.

 

But, the pesky Surgeon General messed things up when he told people to stop (more on quitting smoking using e-cigs in a future story.)  Taxes slowed from a river to a trickle; still there was that alcohol to be taxed.

 

Until MADD got on the mess-up-the-revenue bus, that is.  You see, now people are drinking less as is evidenced by MADD’s statistics of cutting drunk driving in half.  That doesn’t mean people aren’t drinking more at home, or simply using designated drivers or taking taxis home from bars and restaurants.

 

Nonetheless, the government appears to be anxious to tap into another source of revenue to fill the voids left by the cigarette tax chasm and the alcohol tax slump.

 

Our politicians fail to see these taxes as dynamic, in nature.  They move up and down as people change habits.  But, politicians create projects and earmark those tax dollars without considering that fact.  And so, the tax must increase and it then becomes punitive.

 

The crux of this rant, though, is to identify the latest scheme where the government is giving its subjects – er – citizens rights to a “new, legal” product: cannabis, otherwise known as marijuana.

 

This nominally inexpensive drug which is now legal in Colorado – but fails to see the importance of the Second Amendment of The Constitution – proudly collects a newly formed tax of roughly 29%, making it anything except nominal.  But people paying it are likely too stoned to notice or to care.

 

So it appears as though “lifestyles” are only acceptable if they involve ingesting drugs.  Smoking cigarettes are bad.  Smoking cannabis is good.  Paying taxes is great!

Now, if only we had a crusader to keep cannabis-impaired drivers off the roads much as Candice Lightner did.