RIDGEWOOD, NJ, Ridgewood, New Jersey’s premiere authentic Neapolitan trattoria A Mano, proudly welcomes to its staf, multi-award-winning pizza chef Michele D’Amelio. The decorated pizza maker from Italy, has been appointed to head pizzaiolo overseeing the Neapolitan pizza-making team, and is already heating things up by crafting special pizzas for the restaurant.
Born in Avellino, Italy in 1988, it was in Lioni, a small town outside of Naples, where D’Amelio was raised, and his fascination with pizza-making blossomed. At a young age, each week D’Amelio played with dough his mother used to bake bread in the family’s wood-burning oven. He quickly learned to make pizza for the family, and years later at age 19, began working at a local pizzeria. In 2010 his passion for pizza pinnacled in the opening of a family-run pizzeria, Chest’é Pizza, in Lioni.After honing his craft, D’Amelio’s competitive spirit kicked in and he entered several prestigious pizza competitions.
In 2010 he took the second place title in the Regina Margherita Association’s Margherita STG competition in Naples, Italy. Next, in 2013 he traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada with the Caputo/Orlando Foods’ team of master pizzaioli and was crowned first place champion in the Italian Style category at the International Pizza Expo. In 2014, D’Amelio was awarded second place in the coveted
Pizza World Championship in Parma, Italy.Eager to promote internationally the product of his homeland, the prize-winning pizza-maker accepted a two-
year consulting position to help open Pizzeria Testa, a Neapolitan pizzeria in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, and ultimately settled at A Mano. Said D’Amelio, “I am very proud to be able to share pizza Napoletana with people in the United States. There is nothing quite like authentic Neapolitan pizza, and at A Mano, we make pizza with the same methods used in
Naples for more than 300 years. Tradition is important and something that should be passed on. It’s culinary history.”A member of the elite Italian pizza-governing organization APN (Association of Neapolitan Pizza Makers), D’Amelio has been granted authority to ofer APN certification to aspiring Neapolitan pizza makers who train under his guidance.D’Amelio has made his first culinary mark at A Mano by crafting masterful creations which will run as specials on weekends beginning June 26th. Highlights include:
Pizza Fiori: imported smoked bufalo mozzarella, zucchini flowers, zucchini, fresh basil and extra virgin olive oil
Pizza Pugliese: homemade mozzarella, fava beans, Italian ham, peas, fresh basil, extra virgin olive
Pizza Terra Mia (“My Land” – tribute to D’Amelio’s home – ingredients are imported from the Naples’s area): cherry tomato sauce, imported bufalo mozzarella, basil leaves and extra virgin olive oil (cherry tomatoes from Campania, bufalo mozzarella, olive oil and flour from Naples)
A Mano is located at 24 Franklin Avenue (at Chestnut Street), Ridgewood, NJ. Hours of operation are:Monday through Thursday, 11:30AM–10:00PM, Friday and Saturday 11:30AM-11:00PM and Sunday 12:30PM–9:00PM. Tel. 201.493.2000, www.amanopizza.com, www.facebook.com/AManoPizza
JUNE 23, 2015, 3:57 PM LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2015, 10:19 PM
BY JOHN C. ENSSLIN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Bergen County’s recent bid to be the first county in New Jersey to add drones to its toolbox for handling emergencies comes amid a growing national debate over the use of unmanned flying machines by government agencies.
Leaders of the county’s emergency management operation are seeking freeholder approval to acquire two drones, which would be used for purposes ranging from finding a lost child to getting a bird’s-eye view of a fire or disaster.
Civil liberties advocates say that’s fine. But they worry that what they termed “mission creep” could open the door to other uses for the new technology and lead to questions of who is watching whom and for what purpose.
CNBC data analysis shows outbound flow from high-tax states.
John W. Schoen | @johnwschoen
Everyone complains about taxes. But millions of American households apparently are doing something about it: Picking up and moving.
A CNBC analysis of tax data and figures provided by two major national moving companies shows that states with the highest per-capita taxes, for the most part, are also seeing the biggest net migration out of those states.
Take Connecticut, for example.
Earlier this week, the Nutmeg State’s legislature approved a collection of new taxes to close a two-year, $40 billion budget to help pay the multibillion-dollar tab to repair and replace the state’s dilapidated roads and bridges. The package includes a 50-cent-per-pack hike in cigarette taxes and a bump in tax rates on corporations and the state’s wealthiest earners.
The budget battle drew heated debate, along with threats from large employers like General Electric, which issued a rare statement that it might consider moving its Fairfield headquarters.
Republican opponents warned that the tax hikes would likely drive residents to flee to lower-tax states. One legislator suggested that a local moving-and-storage company up for sale should do a booming business moving households from the state.
“I think the best buy in Connecticut right now is a business for sale in Westport,” Michael A. McLachlan, R-Danbury, told the AP earlier this month as the debate wore on. “For $650,000, a sharp investor can get up and increase this business into a mega moving company, because that’s what people are going to be doing, starting today.”
Social dysfunction can be traced to the abandonment of reason
Post published by David Niose on Jun 23, 2015 in Our Humanity, Naturally
The tragedy in Charleston last week will no doubt lead to more discussion of several important and recurring issues in American culture—particularly racism and gun violence—but these dialogues are unlikely to bear much fruit until the nation undertakes a serious self-examination. Decrying racism and gun violence is fine, but for too long America’s social dysfunction has continued to intensify as the nation has ignored a key underlying pathology: anti-intellectualism.
America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof’s actions on America’s culture of racism and gun violence, but it’s time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation’s culture of ignorance.
In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are“lies straight from the pit of hell,”(link is external) where the chairman of a Senate environmental panelbrought a snowball(link is external) into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president(link is external), it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.
In considering the senseless loss of nine lives in Charleston, of course racism jumps out as the main issue. But isn’t ignorance at the root of racism? And it’s true that the bloodshed is a reflection of America’s violent, gun-crazed culture, but it is only our aversion to reason as a society that has allowed violence to define the culture. Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn’t possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.
TRENTON — Moving a step closer on its fast track to the governor’s desk, the Assembly Appropriations Committee voted up acomplex bill aimed at modernizing and streamlining New Jersey’s voter laws today.
Along party lines, members of the committee debated and ultimately passed the bill, introduced by Democratic leaders in both houses last week and dubbed the “Democracy Act” for its intended goal of increasing voting rights access to certain demographics in the state. Sponsors of the bill say it would make it easier for residents to register to vote and vote in state elections by implementing measures like online voter registration, same day registration, and new technologies at the ballot boxes — all of which would help increase voter turnout in the state, which ranks 39th in the country in terms of registered voters at 64 percent, with an average voter turnout of 54.5 percent. (Brush/PolitickerNJ)
The Confederate Flag Is the Legacy of Democrats, Not Republicans!
By JEFFREY LORD
Updated Aug. 13, 2008 12:01 a.m. ET
As Democrats prepare to nominate Sen. Barack Obama to be the first black president, the Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Howard Dean, have whitewashed the party’s horrific and lengthy record of racism. The omission is in the section of the DNC Web site that describes the party’s history. The missing history raises the obvious question of whether the Democrats, unable or simply unwilling to put their party on record as taking direct responsibility for one of the worst racial crimes of the ages, will be able to run a campaign free of the racial animosities it has regularly brought both to American presidential campaigns and American political and social life in general.
What else to make of the official party history as presented by the DNC on its Web site? It is a history so sanitized of historical reality it makes Stalin look like David McCullough.
The DNC Web site section labeled “Party History,” linked here, is in fact scrubbed clean of the not-so-little dirty secret that fueled Democrats’ political successes for over a century and a half and made American life a hell on earth for black Americans. Literally, the DNC official history, which begins with the creation of the party in 1800, gets to the creation of the DNC itself in 1848 and then–poof!–the next sentence says: “As the 19th Century came to a close, the American electorate changed more and more rapidly.” It quickly heads into a riff on poor immigrants coming to America.
In a stroke, 52 years of Democratic history vanishes. Disappeared faster than the truth in the Clinton administration. Why would this be? Allow me to sketch in a few facts from those missing 52 years. For that matter, lets add in the facts from the party history before and after those 52 years, since they aren’t mentioned by the Democrats’ National Committee either.
* * * So what’s missing?
There is no reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery. There were six from 1840 through 1860. There is no reference to the number of Democratic presidents who owned slaves. There were seven from 1800 through 1861 There is no reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms that either supported segregation outright or were silent on the subject. There were 20, from 1868 through 1948. There is no reference to “Jim Crow” as in “Jim Crow laws,” nor is there reference to the role Democrats played in creating them. These were the post-Civil War laws passed enthusiastically by Democrats in that pesky 52-year part of the DNC’s missing years. These laws segregated public schools, public transportation, restaurants, rest rooms and public places in general (everything from water coolers to beaches). The reason Rosa Parks became famous is that she sat in the “whites only” front section of a bus, the “whites only” designation the direct result of Democrats. There is no reference to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, which, according to Columbia University historian Eric Foner, became “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.” Nor is there reference to University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease’s description of the Klan as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.” There is no reference to the fact Democrats opposed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. The 13th banned slavery. The 14th effectively overturned the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision (made by Democratic pro-slavery Supreme Court justices) by guaranteeing due process and equal protection to former slaves. The 15th gave black Americans the right to vote. There is no reference to the fact that Democrats opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It was passed by the Republican Congress over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, who had been a Democrat before joining Lincoln’s ticket in 1864. The law was designed to provide blacks with the right to own private property, sign contracts, sue and serve as witnesses in a legal proceeding. There is no reference to the Democrats’ opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses Grant. The law prohibited racial discrimination in public places and public accommodations. There is no reference to the Democrats’ 1904 platform, which devotes a section to “Sectional and Racial Agitation,” claiming the GOP’s protests against segregation and the denial of voting rights to blacks sought to “revive the dead and hateful race and sectional animosities in any part of our common country,” which in turn “means confusion, distraction of business, and the reopening of wounds now happily healed.” There is no reference to four Democratic platforms, 1908-20, that are silent on blacks, segregation, lynching and voting rights as racial problems in the country mount. By contrast the GOP platforms of those years specifically address “Rights of the Negro” (1908), oppose lynching (in 1912, 1920, 1924, 1928) and, as the New Deal kicks in, speak out about the dangers of making blacks “wards of the state.” There is no reference to the Democratic Convention of 1924, known to history as the “Klanbake.” The 103-ballot convention was held in Madison Square Garden. Hundreds of delegates were members of the Ku Klux Klan, the Klan so powerful that a plank condemning Klan violence was defeated outright. To celebrate, the Klan staged a rally with 10,000 hooded Klansmen in a field in New Jersey directly across the Hudson from the site of the convention. Attended by hundreds of cheering convention delegates, the rally featured burning crosses and calls for violence against African-Americans and Catholics. There is no reference to the fact that it was Democrats who segregated the federal government, at the direction of President Woodrow Wilson upon taking office in 1913. There \is a reference to the fact that President Harry Truman integrated the military after World War II. There is reference to the fact that Democrats created the Federal Reserve Board, passed labor and child welfare laws, and created Social Security with Wilson’s New Freedom and FDR’s New Deal. There is no mention that these programs were created as the result of an agreement to ignore segregation and the lynching of blacks. Neither is there a reference to the thousands of local officials, state legislators, state governors, U.S. congressmen and U.S. senators who were elected as supporters of slavery and then segregation between 1800 and 1965. Nor is there reference to the deal with the devil that left segregation and lynching as a way of life in return for election support for three post-Civil War Democratic presidents, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. There is no reference that three-fourths of the opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Bill in the U.S. House came from Democrats, or that 80% of the “nay” vote in the Senate came from Democrats. Certainly there is no reference to the fact that the opposition included future Democratic Senate leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia (a former Klan member) and Tennessee Senator Albert Gore Sr., father of Vice President Al Gore. Last but certainly not least, there is no reference to the fact that Birmingham, Ala., Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, who infamously unleashed dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protestors, was in fact–yes indeed–a member of both the Democratic National Committee and the Ku Klux Klan.
JUNE 23, 2015 LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY CHRIS HARRIS
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
RIDGEWOOD — The Historic Preservation Commission wants to expand the downtown historic district as part of the Planning Board’s impending update to the master plan.
At the board’s meeting last week, Ridgewood’s planner, Blais Brancheau, outlined the Historic Preservation Commission’s recommendations for the master plan’s next iteration.
The commission suggests widening the Village Center Historic Zone to encompass Ridgewood’s entire business district as well as Doremus Avenue, Prospect Street, both sides of Franklin Avenue and the area surrounding the railroad station on Garber Square.
Such an expansion would promote consistency throughout the heart of the village.
The commission said the expansion would further en-sure “renovations and new construction conform to the his-toric streetscape” and increase scrutiny of proposed demoli-tions.
Discussion of the master plan update will continue for the foreseeable future at Planning Board meetings.
But members of the board did comment last Tuesday on the potential benefits and possible pitfalls of designating more of the village as “historic.”
Mayor Paul Aronsohn, a Planning Board member, said he was both “sensitive to the imperative of historic preservation as well as the needs and rights of property owners in the vill-age.”
photo by Boyd Loving at Metropolitan AME Church in Ridgewood
JUNE 21, 2015, 10:10 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 2015, 11:46 PM
BY NICHOLAS PUGLIESE, LINDA MOSS AND JIM NORMAN
STAFF WRITERS |
THE RECORD
Although the killing of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church happened more than 700 miles away in Charleston, S.C., churchgoers in North Jersey felt the reverberations strongly Sunday as they prayed for the victims and their loved ones.
At the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Paterson, the Rev. Allan Boyer asked worshipers to help him light candles in honor of the victims.
The nine flickering lights represented a deep connection between the two churches, Boyer said. Both were started over 150 years ago by individuals concerned with the fight for civil rights. Both boast a link to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered a speech at Emanuel in 1962 and visited the building where Bethel is currently housed just eight days before his assassination in 1968.
And now, both are relying on their faith to respond to mindless hate with Christian love. “We hate the sin, but love the sinner,” Boyer said Sunday, urging his congregation not to be consumed by anger in the wake of the shootings. “If you’re going to be a Christian, sometimes you have to bite your tongue. Sometimes you have to turn the other cheek and walk away.”
At Christ Temple Baptist Church in Paterson, the Rev. Gregory Turner lauded the relatives of the Charleston victims for forgiving suspect Dylann Roof.
President Jimmy Carter to Speak at the Y
Wed, July 08, 2015
Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Location: YWCA Bergen County, YMCA of Ridgewood, 112 Oak St., Ridgewood, NJ 07450
YWCA Bergen County and Ridgewood YMCA, in cooperation with Bookends Bookstore, is proud to welcome former President Jimmy Carter, to the Y to discuss his new book, A Full Life.
Tickets are $33 each and include a signed copy of the book. Tickets and books are required and must be purchased in advance by visiting Bookends Bookstore at 211 Ridgewood Ave in Ridgewood or calling (201) 4445-0726.
No photo or personalization will be done at the signing.
JUNE 21, 2015, 10:43 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 2015, 10:48 PM
BY SALVADOR RIZZO
STATE HOUSE BUREAU |
THE RECORD
Hundreds of thousands of public workers began paying more for their health care benefits after Governor Christie overhauled the system in 2011 — a massive shift that would save New Jersey taxpayers $3 billion over 10 years, administration officials said at the time.
But just four years in, instead of the expected savings, state and local taxpayers are staring at the prospect of footing more of the bill for those medical coverage plans.
The reason: Tucked inside the sprawling 2011 reform law is a sunset provision that says the higher payments required of public workers will expire in four years. After that, the provision says, all health care costs must again be negotiated at the bargaining table as union contracts come up for renewal.
For much of the workforce, that change kicks in at the end of this month.
So New Jersey’s powerful labor unions are gearing up for contract negotiations at all levels of government — from the state to counties, municipalities and school boards — with one unifying goal: to reduce health insurance costs as much as possible for their members.
By George F. Will Opinion writer June 19 at 9:04 PM
Now come Greeks bearing the gift of confirmation that Margaret Thatcher was right about socialist governments: “They always run out of other people’s money.” Greece, from whose ancient playwrights Western drama descends, is in an absurdist melodrama about securing yet another cash infusion from international creditors. This would add another boulder to a mountain of debt almost twice the size of Greece’s gross domestic product. This protracted dispute will result in desirable carnage if Greece defaults, thereby becoming a constructively frightening example to all democracies doling out unsustainable, growth-suppressing entitlements.
In January, Greek voters gave power to the left-wing Syriza party, one third of which, the Economist reports, consists of “Maoists, Marxists and supporters of Che Guevara.” Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, 40, a retired student radical, immediately denounced a European Union declaration criticizing Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine. He chose only one cabinet member with prior government experience — a former leader of Greece’s Stalinist Communist Party. Tsipras’s minister for culture and education says Greek education“should not be governed by the principle of excellence . . . it is a warped ambition.” Practicing what he preaches, he proposes abolishing university entrance exams.
On July 19, 1910, the governor of the U.S. state of Washington proclaimed the nation’s first “Father’s Day.” However, it was not until 1972, 58 years after President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day official, that the day became a nationwide holiday in the United States…..
ORIGINS OF FATHER’S DAY
The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers did not meet with the same enthusiasm–perhaps because, as one florist explained, “fathers haven’t the same sentimental appeal that mothers have.” On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who had died in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah, but it was a one-time commemoration and not an annual holiday. The next year, a Spokane,Washington woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers and government officials to drum up support for her idea, and she was successful: Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on July 19, 1910. Slowly, the holiday spread. In 1916, President Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C.In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day. However, many men continued to disdain the day. As one historian writes, they “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more products–often paid for by the father himself.”
EJ Montini, The Arizona Republic4:30 p.m. EDT June 19, 2015
(Photo: Joshua Lott, Getty Images)
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PHOENIX — A sheriff on trial, accused of harassing some members of a minority community, will sendarmed volunteer posse members into 60 black churches Sunday in response to the racially motivated attack in South Carolina earlier this week.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who already is under federal supervision because of a ruling two years ago that his office racially profiled Hispanics in its traffic and immigration patrols, is scheduled to go to trial in August in a separate lawsuit alleging additional discrimination against Latinos.
He said the Rev. Jarrett Maupin, who describes himself as a Progressive Baptist preacher and civil-rights campaigner on his Facebook page, asked him to provide the protection because he was worried about problems with white supremacists in the area.
“I am the elected sheriff of this county. He asked me to help, and I’m going to help,” Arpaio said Friday.
RACEFASTER (in Bookends) 211 E. Ridgewood Ave. ribbon cutting 1pm June 20, 2015 a great fit!
GiGi’s Boutique 48 E. Ridgewood Ave. ribbon cutting 11am June 27, 2015 fashion perfect!
Interim Healthcare Tuesday, July 7, 2015 NEW ADDRESS join us 27 Chestnut Street take elevator to first floor ribbon cutting 5:30pm join the celebration!
Please visit the Graydon Pool homepage at www.ridgewoodnj.net/graydon to learn about membership rates, program offerings and pool amenities. Be sure to bookmark our Graydon homepage on your computer for future special events and program offerings. Opening day for Graydon Pool was Saturday, June 6th.
2015 season memberships may now be purchased online via Community Pass at www.ridgewoodnj.net/communitypass. Be sure to refer to your online confirmation when purchase is complete for detailed information on how to obtain your photo identification badge.
Aquatic programs, including the Graydon Swim Team and instructional and recreational swim, are also available online at Community Pass, or you may review levels and print program registration forms from our Graydon homepage referenced above. Meet the Aquatic Staff and learn more on the following dates at the pool: Saturday, June 6th, 10 am to 1 pm, and Saturday, June 20th, 10 am to 1 pm.
American Red Cross Waterfront Lifeguard Training (recertification/bridging and new) is available through Ridgewood Parks and Recreation. Details/registration are also available on the Graydon Pool homepage.
