Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #4008 - Pizza Intelligence: Tracking Correlation Between Late Night Pizza Orders and Military Activity
I re-scheduled multiple blog posts for today, and after planning out most of the next month and now I want to get off the blog and onto other things, I am just sharing this fascinating web site.
The Pentagon Pizza Index (PizzINT) is a real-time dashboard that monitors pizza shop popularity around the Pentagon area in Arlington, Virginia. Based on the famous "Pentagon Pizza Theory," this project tracks potential correlations between late-night pizza orders and military activity.
Originally a Cold War-era observation that pizza deliveries to government buildings might indicate crisis activity, the theory gained internet fame during recent geopolitical events. Our dashboard brings this concept into the digital age using publicly available data.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The Pentagon Pizza Theory dates back to the 1980s and 1990s, when journalists and pizza delivery drivers noticed spikes in late-night orders before major military operations:
1983 Grenada Invasion: Pentagon pizza orders reportedly doubled the night before
1989 Panama Invasion: Similar patterns observed by Domino's drivers
1991 Gulf War: Extensively documented by D.C. pizza franchises
2024 Viral Moment: Social media users tracked Google Maps data during Middle East tensions
Our dashboard digitizes this folk intelligence into a modern OSINT tool.
HOW IT WORKS
Our system monitors pizza shops near the Pentagon using:
Data Sources
• Google Maps "Popular Times"
• Real-time foot traffic data
• Historical pattern analysis
• OSINT social media feeds
Analysis
• Spike detection algorithms
• DOUGHCON-style alert levels
• Pattern correlation
• Automated monitoring
THE TEAM
PizzINT is maintained by a team of developers, OSINT enthusiasts, and pizza lovers who believe in making intelligence accessible and entertaining.
Our Mission
To democratize open-source intelligence through innovative data visualization, while maintaining the humor and skepticism that makes OSINT both effective and enjoyable.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS
• Educational Purpose: This is a novelty/entertainment project based on internet culture
• Not Official Intelligence: We are not affiliated with any government or military organization
• Correlation ≠ Causation: Pizza spikes do not necessarily indicate military activity
• Public Data Only: All information comes from publicly available sources
• No Investment Advice: Do not make financial or strategic decisions based on this data
TECHNICAL INFORMATION
Built With:
• Next.js 15 & React 19
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS
• Supabase Database
• Vercel Hosting
Features:
• Real-time data updates
• Mobile-responsive design
• API access available
• Historical data tracking
• Social sharing tools
GET IN TOUCH
Questions, suggestions, or just want to chat about pizza intelligence? We'd love to hear from you!
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2602.06 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3871 days ago & DAD = 526 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2312.28 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3100 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
Fifty years ago this March, dozens of people gathered in Ossineke, Michigan, for one of the strangest funerals in American history. They were there to witness the burial of nearly 30,000 frozen pizzas that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had deemed inedible. The pizzas actually were just fine.
At the center of the "Great Pizza Funeral" was Mario Fabbrini, an Italian immigrant who founded Papa Fabbrini Pizzas after settling in Michigan. In February 1973, Fabbrini heard from officials at the FDA, which was issuing a widespread recall of canned mushrooms after a suspected outbreak of botulism at a canning facility in Ohio. Fabbrini submitted samples of his pizzas to the FDA for testing. When two mice died after eating his pizza samples, Fabbrini was ordered to recall thousands of pies.
The "funeral" on March 5, 1973, was how Fabbrini disposed of the potentially tainted pizzas. Trucks dumped the pies into a massive ditch at a Michigan farm. It was partly a cheesy public relations stunt. The Associated Press covered it, and the funeral made the front page of the Detroit Free Press. It was also a public show of accountability during a botulism scare: Better to lose 30,000 pizzas than to lose customers for years to come.
The funeral might have seemed like a jab at the FDA for mandating the recall in the first place. In the weeks leading up to the funeral, as Fabbrini was rounding up thousands of mushroom-topped pizzas from stores and homes across Michigan, the FDA realized it had made a mistake. The lab mice that had been fed Fabbrini's pizza died of an unrelated infection, not from botulism.
"I think it was indigestion," Fabbrini quipped to an A.P. reporter on the day of the funeral. "Maybe they just didn't like my pizzas."
But having already gone ahead with the recall, Fabbrini was left with little choice but to destroy the pizzas. Hence the funeral, where he cooked other pizzas for hundreds of people, including then-Gov. William Milliken, who came out to witness the weird moment. After the pizzas were buried and the governor said a few words over the grave, Fabbrini reportedly marked the tomb with a garland of red gladioli and white carnations—the colors of pizza sauce and mozzarella cheese.
According to the A.P., a reporter asked Fabbrini about the safety of the pizza he was serving. "Gov. Milliken ate a piece," he replied, "and he's still alive."
The recalled and destroyed pizzas cost Fabbrini $60,000 in lost retail sales, according to a lawsuit that he subsequently filed against his mushroom suppliers. United Canning, the main defendant in the lawsuit, used the fact that the FDA had screwed up the initial diagnosis to argue that Fabbrini had never demonstrated any defect in their products and had voluntarily recalled his pizzas.
The recall, of course, was voluntary in name only. As the Michigan Appeals Court pointed out in its final ruling in the case, "FDA representatives threatened to inform Fabbrini's customers to put the pizzas aside" and "radio stations were advising the public" that Papa Fabbrini Pizzas were potentially unsafe to eat. Faced with those direct threats to the survival of his business, the court's three-judge panel ruled, Fabbrini had no choice but to recall the pizzas. The judges affirmed the $211,000 settlement that a jury awarded Fabbrini.
The FDA, meanwhile, never had to pay anything. And Fabbrini's once-growing frozen pizza business faded away. He sold the remaining assets in the early 1980s.
Botulism is no joke, and Fabbrini probably was right to quickly recall the pizzas rather than risk causing any real funerals. But 50 years after his pies were buried in the dirt of a Michigan farm, the Great Pizza Funeral serves as a reminder that public health officials' mistakes can come with heavy costs.
ON MARCH 5, 1973, SEVERAL dozen people headed out to a farm in Ossineke, Michigan, to witness an unusual event: the burial of an estimated 30,000 frozen, family-size mushroom pizzas. The mood was somber, and a little cheesy. The governor of Michigan, William G. Milliken, gave a brief homily “on courage in the face of tragedy,” before bulldozers began shoving pizzas into an 18-foot hole.
“I guess by next fall there won’t be anything but the cellophane,” the farm’s owner, Gary Johnson, was quoted as saying as he peered into the mass grave. Pile after pile of pies slid out of a line of pickup trucks and into their final resting place. When it was all over, the victims’ creator, the frozen pizza magnate Mario Fabbrini, laid a two-colored flower garland on the grave: red gladioli for sauce, white carnations for cheese. He then offered slices to all of his guests.The story of the Great Michigan Pizza Funeral is one of loss, terrible maladies, and spilled marinara. But it’s also a classic tale of the strange obstacles immigrants can often face in new countries. In this specific case, it was bad mushrooms that interrupted Fabbrini’s American dream.
In January of 1973, employees at United Canning in Ohio were checking their inventory when they noticed some of their tins of mushrooms had swelled up. Swelled cans are bad news, and sure enough, tests revealed that the cans were harboring Clostridiumbotulinum, the bacterium that causes botulism, which can lead to body-wide muscle weakness, low blood pressure, and, sometimes, death.
The FDA removed the affected products from store shelves, but to ensure a comprehensive recall, they had to make some calls up the supply chain. Various prepared food businesses used United Canning’s mushrooms, including Mario Fabbrini, owner of Papa Fabbrini’s Frozen Pizzas.
When Fabbrini got the call, “everything [went] dark,” he later told the Detroit Free Press. Fabbrini was an immigrant, and the architect of his very own all-American success story. He had a visceral understanding of what he stood to lose, and a palpable fear of losing it. He had come to Michigan from Fiume, Italy, after World War II, having grown up under the Fascist regime—“They put the black shirt on me when I was six years old,” he told United Press International. After he got to the U.S., he and his wife, Olga, adapted his family pizza recipe for American palates (“the pizza from my country no one here would eat,” he told one reporter), and went from rolling dough to raking it in.
When he got the news about the mushrooms, Fabbrini stopped his shipments and submitted his mushroom pizzas to a crude contamination test: slices were fed to a couple of FDA lab mice, who promptly died. So Fabbrini recalled his ‘shroom-topped pies, rounding them up from local restaurants and grocery stores. In order to get rid of them, he decided to throw a funeral—partly for the grand optics, but, one suspects, partly as a display of accountability, too.
By the time of the botulism scare, Fabbrini was a decade into his pizza-making career. He was churning out tens of thousands of pies per week, with the help of 22 full-time employees and a state-of-the-art factory. The scandal threatened to undo all he had worked for. “All I could think was, ‘Oh my God. Not me,’” he told UPI.
Some people—at least 17, UPI reported—tried to make Fabbrini’s nightmare come true, claiming they had taken ill from tainted toppings. His neighbors, though, rallied in support. One local fan, anticipating Fabbrini’s bankruptcy fears, offered to put some stock up for collateral if it became necessary to save his business. A bank teller told Fabbrini that a nearby priest was leading prayers for him.
Besides the governor, dozens of community leaders attended the funeral, including Chamber of Commerce members and bank presidents. “It sorta makes you goose pimples about America,” Fabbrini said to the UPI reporter. Governor Milliken later called Fabbrini “an example for all of us.” The article’s subhead, mincing no words, was “Immigrant Offered Help.”
In the end though, Fabbrini’s dramatic action was all for naught. In the two weeks between the recall and the funeral, the pizzas were let off the hook: Their mushrooms were untainted after all. The mice that died after eating them had apparently succumbed not to botulism, but to some other mouse malady. (“I think it was indigestion,” Fabbrini told the Associated Press. “Maybe they didn’t like my pizza.”)
Fabbrini’s sales took a bit of a dive—the pies buried at the funeral cost him about $30,000. According to legal documents, he lost even more money bringing new flavors to market, because his customers lost trust in mushrooms. But his business survived, and the tale of the Great Michigan Pizza Funeral harbors one final twist. Those legal documents only exist because, a few days before the burial, Fabbrini sued the canning company for a million dollars, and won a good chunk of it—an all-American ending to an all-American story.
This story was updated, with minor edits, on October 21, 2020.
Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2311.16 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3058 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1490 - Trains, Pizza, and Self-care
These are old pictures from a few weeks ago because today was sunny and 72-77 degrees as I rode the Max train again, graded papers, and this time visited TWO comic shops -- Books with Pictures and Floating World Comics -- took a slight detour on the Blue line before I figured out I was on my way to Clackamas -- OOPS -- got turned around and back on the right train switching at the Rose Quarter. I am good at navigating.
I got back on track and got off at Mississippi and Albina where I walked to the Mississippi Pizza Pub for lunch and then walked the rest of the way, taking the pedestrian bridge over the I5, to get to the Overland Park station and take the train the rest of the way back and get my car at Delta Park and head on over to Concordia University.
I graded papers the whole time.
I like trains.
And so at FLOATING WORLD COMICS, I found out about this..........................
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Portland Comic Book Month, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly is honored to host an opening party and art exhibit at City Hall on First Thursday April 4, 2019.
Portland City Hall (1221 SW 4th Ave) will be transformed into a mini-convention with more than 20 tables featuring local comic book creators, publishers, educators, nonprofits, and collectives, showcasing the range of talent and diversity in the Portland comics community. Commissioner Eudaly’s office will also host an art exhibit featuring 25 local comic book artists.
The opening event, which runs 5pm-9pm, is free and open to all ages. Commissioner Eudaly will make a special proclamation at 6pm, followed by live drawing by local artists. Pizza will be provided by local sponsors Sizzle Pie.
Look for more Portland Comic Book Month events throughout April, including workshops, readings, release parties, and meetups. See the full First Thursday lineup and April schedule of events at http://bit.ly/pdxcomicbookmonth.
WHO: Art exhibit and mini-con with over 30 exhibitors including –
Books with Pictures
CBLDF
Dark Horse Comics
Floating World Comics
Sophie Franz
Helioscope Studios
IDW Woodworks / Lion Forge
IPRC Certificate Program
Miss Anthology
Multnomah County Library
The Nib
Outlet PDX
PDX Comic Crew
PNCA
Portland Indie Con
Portland Zine Symposium
PSU Comics Studies Program
Secret Room PDX
Soft Skills Press
Vision Quest
David Walker
Young Audiences of Oregon
WHAT: Portland Comic Book Month 10th Anniversary Party
WHEN: Thursday April 4, 5-9pm
WHERE: City Hall, 1221 SW 4th Ave
“The artists, the writers, the companies and the comic shops—all of these aspects of Portland’s comic scene intertwine to create a unique tapestry. Portland is the kind of place where names big and small can mingle, where artists can live comfortably and small presses are still viable.”
PSU Vanguard
Portland Comic Book Month was first declared by Mayor Sam Adams, in conjunction with Stumptown Comic Fest, to recognize the cultural contribution of comics to Portland. At that time, Portland was already home to numerous comic book creators, as well as publishers Dark Horse Comics, Oni Press, and Top Shelf Productions.
Today, the city is also home to publisher Image Comics, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and hundreds more artists and writers. Publishers IDW and Lion Forge have offices here. Helioscope Studio is the largest collective of comic book and animation artists in North America. PSU, PNCA, and PCC all offer comic book courses. And the Oregon Historical Society recently mounted a whole exhibit calling Portland “Comic City, USA.”
Portland is known for its unique creativity, its appreciation of art, and perhaps most of all, a vibrant DIY culture that has become an incubator for free spirits. Commissioner Chloe Eudaly comes directly from this world. Her independent bookstore, Reading Frenzy, was a hub of DIY comics and activist publishing for 22 years.
Thanks to our sponsors and volunteers that made this celebration possible: Commissioner Eudaly’s office, Anina Bennett, Pollyanne Birge, Books With Pictures, Floating World Comics, Ford Food and Drink, Sophie Franz, Helioscope Studios, IPRC, Sarah Mirk, The Nib, PNCA, Portland Zine Symposium, Portland’5 Centers For the Arts, PSU, Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg, Sizzle Pie, Reid Psaltis, Melanie Stevens, Liz Yerby and the Portland comics community. (poster artwork by Sophie Franz)
The pizza was pretty good. Not the best ever but really top shelf among what I have had. I need to put some thought into a rating system for pizza in Portland (which surely someone has done) and find CHICAGO STYLE pizza vendor.
My mind was not blown, but I really like this place, so I will be back. Plus the proprietor made special effort to make sure I had a cold soda as he had just filled the cooler and there was only one cold one.
Book to get at FLOATING WORLD.....
Book to get at Books with Pictures...
ART SHOW I SAW ONLY BRIEFLY ... NEED TO SPEND MORE TIME...
After the pizza place, I walked around to get back to the Max train station...
As I wrote, I crossed the I5 via the pedestrian bridge.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1903.20 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1355 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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