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The Citizen, 1995-05-31, Page 5Arthur Black International Scene Y HaYmo1 Ca THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 1995. PAGE 5. Pizza — a window on your world We live in an age when pizza gets to your house before the police. Jeff Marder What would you say is Italy's greatest gift to civilization? The masterpieces of Michelangelo? The music of Rossini or Verdi? The machinations of Machiavelli? The larynx of Caruso? The films of Fellini? How about the pizza? Hard to think of any Italian creation that's touched more minds - and bellies - around the world. You want statistics? Consider this: in an average day, Canadians buy approximately $500,000 worth of Pizza Pizza pizzas. (No, I'm not stuttering. Pizza Pizza is a chain.) Half a million dollars worth. That works out to approximately 7,000 kilograms of cheese, 6,000 kilograms of dough, and about 5,000 litres of tomato sauce. And that's just Pizza Pizza. Imagine the numbers when you factor in Pizza Delight, Pizza Hut, Pizza Palace, Pizza Heaven, Piece o' Pizza and all the other pizza parlours in the phone book. Ah - but is the pizza really Italian? For Political rains in Spain Having written about the turbot tussle between Canada on one side and Spain with its European allies (more or less) on the other, it might be as good a time as any to describe what is going on in Spain at the same time as fishermen were pelting the Canadian embassy in Madrid with fish, not to mention the government's decision to make all Canadians, no matter how touristy they were, obtain a visa before entering the country. Throughout the entire brouhaha, I often thought that the Spanish prime minister, Filipe Gonzalez, was secretly envying his Canadian counterpart Jean Chretien. While Mr. Chretien has been basking, ever since his election last year, in the glow of public approval, Mr. Gonzalez sees himself at the head of a scandal stricken minority government for which favourable news is something very hard to come by. How he must have latched on to the fishing dispute as a way of taking people's minds off all the other negative aspects of the government's behaviour. Earlier this year the former head of the country's famous Guardia Civil, which is something akin to our RCMP, was captured in faraway Laos, after he fled the country in the face of allegations of corruption, including the amassing of a huge personal fortune. It took a lot of time and effort on the part of the Spanish government to track the perpetrator, Luis Roldan, to his hiding place in Laos and it should have turned out as a feather in the cap of Mr. Gonzalez for accomplishing it. Instead it turned into a fiasco which made the prime minister look both inept and foolish. The Laotians revealed that the papers years, conspiracy theorists like to think that, as surely as JFK was killed by a cabal of Masonic curlers from Gimli, so the pizza is not Italian, but North American. Show a real Italian one of our pizzas, they claimed, and they wouldn't even recognize it. Well the American Firsters were right. And wrong. A citizen of Florence or Venice might have trouble identifying, say, a deep- dish double cheese with pineapple slices in a cardboard box...but that doesn't mean Italians don't know pizza. In Italy, pizza is a thin bread, flavoured with oil and salt. Sometimes they might toss in a few tomatoes or anchovies as a garnish, but generally speaking you'd have trouble finding in Italy any of the high rise pasta condos we're used to on this side of the water. At least, that's the way I found it. I haven't been to Italy in 25 years. Perhaps nowadays the "American" pizza is as common as Coca Cola. One thing is certain - the pizza is solidly entrenched as a food favourite. It's reputation is secure - and not just in your home town and mine. Over in Hong Kong a publisher by the name of Jimmy Lai has just hired 10 new reporters for a newspaper he's about to launch. Where did he find his candidates for the 10 jobs? In pizza delivery vans. Reason: traffic congestion is the number one nightmare in Hong Kong - and who knows better how to which authorized Roldan's extradition were faked (which they were) and that the Laotian police inspector referred to in the papers did not even exist. In reporting the event, the Spanish interior and justice minister, could not get his facts straight and it took three press conferences to restore some semblance of credibility to the government. In addition, this came at a time when there was another government investigation going on with respect to the use of illicit government funds in the largely clandestine war against Basque separatists groups in the north of Spain. This war resulted in at least 26 deaths, deaths which Mr. Gonzalez claims he knew nothing about since his government had not endorsed it. Polls taken at the time show that about half the country did not believe him. The most frequently heard comment was that Spain had become an international joke. And that was before the fish war which resulted in several nations besides Canada hauling in Spanish trawlers for illegal fishing. Even the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) cannot be forgotten, much as that would be desirable. A row has broken out between the city of Salamanca, and Barcelona, the capital of the province of Catelonia. The library in Salamanca contains documents on the Spanish Civil War which pertain to the situation in Barcelona after Franco's forces overran it. The fact that, until its capture, Barcelona was one of the centres of the losing Republican side, only adds fuel to the fire. Many intelligent Spaniards realize that dredging up embers of the war is not in the country's best interests since so far they haven't been able to write about it with any degree of impartiality. As a matter of record, all the good studies have been carried out by foreigners. What makes this row embarrassing for the prime minister is that his minority deke through traffic jams than a pizza delivery man? "We feel the pizza delivery boys know how to arrive at a spot the fastest", says Lai, "the details can be chased by ordinary reporters." Makes sense. I foresee the day when pizza deliverers will be taking polls, selling encyclopedias and acting as midwives. You think the guy at the door with your pizza is just some high school kid trying to make a few bucks after work? Don't be so sure. Some kids who deliver for Domino's are also gathering statistics. Here's what Domino's analysts already know about you: • men wearing muscle shirts when answering the door order pepperoni three times more often than any other topping. • people who have pierced eyebrows, lips or noses ask for vegetarian topping 23 per cent more often than meat topping. • if you have wind chimes on your porch, chances are four to one that you've ordered olives on your pizza. Most popular TV show to eat pizza by? Melrose Place for vegans; Roseanne for carnivores. The biggest hour for pizza delivery ever? The slo-mo pursuit of you-know-who's White Ford Bronco down the Freeway. Pizza - more than just a snack food. A window on your world. Now...will that be with or without anchovies? government is being currently kept in power by Catalan nationalists and he finds it hard to resist their demands that the documents in Salamanca be returned to Barcelona. At the time of writing the matter still has not been resolved; it appears that, whichever side wins, Gonzalez loses. As indicated even the fishing dispute did not go the way Madrid intended. After inflaming public passions to the extent of allowing people to harass the Canadian embassy in Madrid, the government had to learn the meaning of the great Canadian political tactic, compromise. Perhaps when Gonzalez and Chretien were talking about the fish dispute, the Spanish prime minister sneaked in a few quick questions about political strategy. I wouldn't blame him if he did. Letter to the editor Continued from page 4 telephone number on file but did not contact me. According to him the village worker opened the door so he could remove his cart. I telephoned the reeve of Brussels who informed me his workers could enter private property whenever they feel like it. The reeve said he has property in Brussels that is broke into all the time. He saw nothing wrong with a worker entering through a window and opening my garage door from the inside. Is this a law that applies only in the village of Brussels? It seems every official I spoke with justified unlawful entry of private property. How can this be? Today, large cities .are rampant with theft and break and enter violations and officials and adults in these centres are working diligently to stop such unlawful actions. In Brussels, a small village in rural Ontario, officials are indifferent and feel such actions are normal and lawful. Is this a message we are sending to today's youth, a group in need of guidance from people in authority, a group who may one day in the future be elected to an official office in the village of Brussels? Kenneth W. Lazenby. The Short of ►c By Bonnie Gropp Hawaii, a yacht & George Clooney With the championship on the line, my friend and I knew there was only one way to win tomorrow's race. But, I was never one to cheat and take chances; it wasn't that I was a goody-two-shoes, it was just that I was always the one to get caught. My friend assured me, though, that he had a foolproof plan to get us across the finish line first. He convinced me to take a trial run with him to prove how much quicker it would be and how easily we could pull off this surreptitious adventure. I soon found myself on his underground route, travelling through a mysterious maze of dank caverns where water swirled around us, and bats above us. As we climbed slick surfaces and clung to rocky ledges, there was no sense of fear, no sense really of anything. We just put one foot forward as simply, and as carefree, as if this were a trip to the store, all the while chatting about casual, everyday things. When we reached the end, blown up with our accomplishment, we were told that the race had been cancelled. And then I woke up. As is usually the case after nights like this, I lay for a time wondering, "Where did that come from?" My friend died almost 20 years ago and I can't think of anything happening in my life to make me dream of caves, races or cheating. I know you've all had these kinds of dreams. Mental activity that happens as we sleep, dreams are visions that usually tell a story, however mystifying that story may be. As we sleep, our subconscious slips into overdrive, taking events from past, present and the perceived future, then combines them into a personal, albeit illogical, vignettes. The realism of our dreams has caused much speculation over the years as to their meaning, beginning as far back as Biblical times. An early example is the story of Joseph interpreting the dreams of a pharaoh. Dreams have been thought to be supernatural, to represent the will of the gods. Some believe that dreams predict our future, though there is no scientific evidence to prove this. Noted pyschologist Sigmund Freud believed that conscious control of the mind is reduced during sleep and the thoughts, wishes and conflicts that a person refuses to acknowledge when they are awake are brought out through our dreams. However, Freud maintained they are expressed through symbols so even the dreamer can not uncover their true meaning. For example, climbing a ladder may mean a desire to escape, while a mean giant might represent a big bully. What could my unconscious mind have been trying to tell me the other night? It was an interesting puzzle to consider for a time, but it could not occupy my mind for long, because the next night it all began again. According to tests on the subject people dream about one and a half hours during an eight hour sleep. Dreams usually last about 20 minutes and happen at intervals. Personally, I think I dream much more than that. There are many, many times when I awake feeling as if I had just spent the night at a foreign film festival. There was something on the screen the whole time, but none of it made much sense. Oh well, at least last night's feature presentation was pretty good. I'll spare you the nonsensical details. It's enough to say it featured Hawaii, a yacht and George Clooney.