Brits don't know what a pizza is

If you are British, more likely than not you have never eaten a pizza in your life.

What goes under the name of 'pizza' in these isles is not pizza at all.

This blog has been inspired to me by the recent edition of the TV program 'The Apprentice', during which one of the two teams competing tried to prepare pizzas to sell and, guess what, they made a loss.

It doesn't surprise me in the slighest.

You cannot improvise yourself as a pizza maker.

Not even chefs are allowed to make pizza, in Italy. You have to have a special skills training.

A 'pizzaiolo' (this is the Italian term) is not any chef, but a particular type of chef.

Google is in trouble

Not only Google's shares on the stock market have fallen well below expectations.

Censorship issues, accusations of plagiarism, copyright infringement claims and other legal problems have been plaguing Google and its super-ambitious plans of becoming the world's greatest information and education tool for some time.

Now the British daily broadsheet The Independent has just published on its front page a report on all of the above, ending with a news item concerning the newspaper itself. Gavin O'Reilly, president of Independent News and Media, the owner of The Independent newspaper, accused search engines of building their business "on the back of kleptomania" adding that he would not rule out legal action.

Some seasonal tips

Hangover prevention. If you have drunk much alcohol, a way to avoid being sick the next day is to drink a lot of non-alcoholic drinks, especially fizzy ones.

Cold and flu. I don't know why people stuff themselves and their children with so many medicines. When I was little my mother used to give me a drug if I sneezed once, and I seemed to be always ill. What I do now, if I have a cold or cough or even if I've already developed a high temperature (which happens rarely), is simply increase my intake of orange juice, lemon juice or other rich source of vitamin C. My cold-related symptoms disappear almost immediately. The best thing is to strengthen the natural defences of our immune system. Drink a lot of orange juice as a matter of course, and increase it if you feel you are developing a cold or influenza.

The birthplace of Britain

Great Britain started its life as an island in Cromer, in Norfolk.

A TV documentary on the natural history of the British Isles says that Cromer is the exact location where Britain separated from mainland Europe after the melting caused by the end of the Ice Age.
One oddity I noticed, when I visited the region, is that the area around Cromer is just about the only place on the East Anglia coast which is hilly. There are promontory tops, over there, that have collapsed into the sea and where there is still a risk of landslides.