Monday, January 4, 2010

“Curtis Allina Dies at 87; He Put the Heads on Pez - New York Times” plus 4 more

“Curtis Allina Dies at 87; He Put the Heads on Pez - New York Times” plus 4 more

Curtis Allina Dies at 87; He Put the Heads on Pez - New York Times

Posted: 04 Jan 2010 08:39 PM PST

Curtis Allina, a candy company executive who presided over a powerful innovation in marketing that was less about the candy itself than it was about the container it came in — and who in unintended consequence created a universe of enraptured collectors — died Dec. 15 at his home in Olympia, Wash. Mr. Allina, who helped bring the world the modern Pez dispenser, was 87.

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Curtis Allina started marketing an adult candy to children in whimsical dispensers that now inspire collectors.

The cause was heart failure, his son, Johnny, said.

For nearly three decades after World War II, Mr. Allina was the vice president in charge of United States operations at what is now Pez Candy. In 1955, at his urging, what had been an austerely packaged Austrian confection for adults took on vibrant new life as a children's product.

That year, the first character dispensers, as they are known in the parlance of Peziana, were issued, giving birth to what is today a highly collectible pop-cultural artifact. Instantly recognizable, the dispensers are slim plastic containers, usually anthropomorphic in design, whose heads — modeled after those of TV characters, cartoon figures or historical personages — flip back to disgorge brick-shaped pieces of candy.

Driven in large part by baby-boomer nostalgia, Pez dispensers are now a staple of eBay and the ubiquitous subject of conventions, Web sites, newsletters, books and even a museum, the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia in Burlingame, Calif. They have been featured in movies; a memorable "Seinfeld" episode (in which Elaine ruins a piano recital by laughing uncontrollably at the sight of a Pez dispenser); and a 2006 documentary, "PEZheads: The Movie," which explores the Pez-collecting phenomenon.

Today, Pez Candy, based in Orange, Conn., sells tens of thousands of dispensers each year in 80 countries.

A Pez dispenser is a simple little machine: back snaps the head, out pops the candy, and the head flicks shut again with a satisfying click. But oh, the variations, from a spate of licensed characters to those designed by Pez. For serious collectors, the most highly prized dispensers, long discontinued, are elusive objects of desire that can run to thousands of dollars apiece.

Hundreds of different dispensers are extant. ("Hundreds" is a conservative estimate, for collectors count minute alterations in a dispenser's shape or color as meaningful in ways others do not.) They include Popeye Pez, Pokémon Pez and Paul Revere Pez; SpongeBob Pez and Elvis Pez (in several historical variants, from '50s boyish through '70s dissipated); Mozart Pez, Hello Kitty Pez and Mickey Mouse Pez.

Precisely whose idea it was to put heads on Pez dispensers — previously headless, unadorned and tastefully Viennese — is the subject of continuing debate among Pez historians. In a telephone interview, David Welch, the author of "Collecting PEZ" (Bubba Scrubba Publications, 1994), said that in researching his book he encountered half a dozen possible candidates, Mr. Allina among them. This much, Mr. Welch said, is certain:

"The idea came from the United States. And for the idea to have come out of the United States and made it to Austria where it could be approved, Allina was the only guy who could have made that happen."

Curtis Allina was born Aug. 15, 1922, in Prague, and raised in Vienna. Between 1941 and 1945, he and his family, Sephardic Jews, were forced into a series of concentration camps. Mr. Allina emerged at war's end as his family's sole survivor in Europe. Making his way to New York, he worked for a commercial meatpacker before joining Pez-Haas, as the company's United States arm was then known, in 1953.

Pez was invented in 1927 by Eduard Haas III, a Viennese food-products mogul. Small, rectangular and mint-flavored (the name is a contraction of pfefferminz, the German word for peppermint), the candy was marketed to adults as an alternative to smoking. Originally sold in tins, Pez was repackaged in the late 1940s in plain, long-stemmed dispensers meant to suggest cigarette lighters.

Introduced into the United States in the early 1950s, Pez sold fitfully. Then someone thought of remarketing it as a children's candy, in fruit flavors, packed in whimsical dispensers. It fell to Mr. Allina to persuade the home office in Vienna, by all accounts a conservative outfit that took sober pride in its grown-up mint.

Mr. Allina prevailed, and the first two character dispensers, Santa Claus and a robot known as the Space Trooper, were introduced in 1955. Unlike today's plain-stemmed, headed-and-footed dispensers, both were full-body figures, completely sculptured from top to toe.

Mr. Allina, who left Pez in 1979, was later an executive of Au'Some Candies.

Mr. Allina's first marriage, to Hanna Hofmann, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Hannelore; two children from his first marriage, Babette Allina and Johnny Allina; two children from his second marriage, Tanya Carlson and Alexia Allina; and three grandchildren.

His legacy also includes hundreds of Pez-related Web sites, dozens of conferences with names like the Swedish Pez Gathering and the Slovenian Pez Convention, and scores of organizations, from Lone Star Pez (in North Texas) to the Association Française des Collectionneurs de Pez. There is a collector in Oklahoma who owns a Pez-dispenser-encrusted automobile, and thousands of others around the world, it is entirely safe to assume, who dream Pez-infused dreams at night.

Perhaps all this renders moot the question of who came up with the now-familiar dispenser in the first place.

"Whose idea was it? Who the hell knows," Mr. Welch, the Pez historian, said. "Who was more important in getting it done? Allina."

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Orange Bowl pleased more than 60,000 tickets sold - Miami Herald

Posted: 04 Jan 2010 09:00 PM PST

Unlike last season's BCS national championship between Oklahoma and Florida, Tuesday's Orange Bowl won't be a sellout at Land Shark Stadium.

Orange Bowl Committee chief executive officer Eric Poms said that about 65,000 tickets have been sold -- including a mandatory 17,500 to each team.

Poms said he hopes the crowd will exceed 60,000.

``It was shaped by two factors: one, the economy; and secondly the date of the game and day of the week -- January 5 and Tuesday,'' Poms said. ``New Year's Day fell on Friday, and most people weren't going back to work and school until [Monday]. So a lot of fans were faced with having to miss another three days of school and work to come. It is what it is.

``We're fortunate to have more than 40,000 visitors. That's the core of our mission statement, to put a spotlight on South Florida and provide an event our local residents can enjoy. We're very fortunate to have a BCS game.''

Poms said Iowa brought about 30,000 fans to South Florida and Georgia Tech brought 15,000-20,000.

``We certainly are very appreciative of the ones who made it here,'' he said.

TWO OBs, TWO TEAMS

Georgia Tech's triple-option offense feature ``B-back'' is Jonathan Dwyer, the centerpiece of the offense who is sometimes referred to as a fullback and stands in the middle. Anthony Allen of Tampa is the ``A-back,'' a wing back who stands on the side.

Allen, 6-0 and 231 pounds, transferred from Louisville and also played in the Orange Bowl as a freshman at the end of the 2006 season. That season, Louisville beat Wake Forest. This year, his first on the field as a Yellow Jacket, Allen averaged 9.8 yards per carry. He rushed for 597 yards and five touchdowns, and added five catches for 112 yards and a touchdown.

``I don't think of myself as the Florida representative,'' Allen said. ``I think of myself as the Orange Bowl rep.

``The last Orange Bowl was definitely fun because we won and I scored two touchdowns,'' he said. ``I was young and trying to do everything. But this time around means a little bit more to me. I just love the guys on this team.''

FUN, FUN, FUN

The players from Georgia Tech and Iowa said they had a great time leading up to Tuesday's kickoff. The Tech players stayed on the beach in Hollywood at the Diplomat. The Iowa players were in South Beach at the Fontainbleau.

Their most memorable moments:

• Tech linebacker Sedric Griffin: ``Hands down jet-skiing. That was the best thing ever. I hit a few waves and they had me airborne. That was exhilarating -- oh my God, it was crazy.''

• Iowa strong safety Tyler Sash: ``Seeing the different culture down here. It's just a different atmosphere compared to what most of us are used to. It's not reality. Everybody seems to us like they're living the dream. We want to be living the dream, but we're living in 6-degree weather in Iowa with snow all over the place.''

• This will be only the second Orange Bowl matchup featuring the Big Ten vs. the Atlantic Coast Conference. The other was Joe Paterno's Penn State team meeting Bobby Bowden's Florida State squad on Jan. 3, 2006. The Nittany Lions won 26-23 in triple overtime.

-- SUSAN MILLER DEGNAN

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2 dead in Las Vegas federal building shootout - WBOC

Posted: 04 Jan 2010 08:17 PM PST

By DEVLIN BARRETT and KEN RITTER
Associated Press Writers

LAS VEGAS (AP) - A gunman who opened fire with a shotgun at a federal building Monday, killing one security guard and wounding a U.S. marshal before he was shot to death, was upset over losing a lawsuit over his Social Security benefits, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press.

The two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said 66-year-old Johnny Lee Wicks opened fire with a shotgun at a security checkpoint, touching off a gunbattle with deputy U.S. marshals.

Although the investigation is continuing, the officials said preliminary evidence pointed to Wicks' anger over his benefits case as the motive for the shooting.

Authorities also were investigating the cause of a fire that damaged Wicks' modest one-bedroom apartment in a 90-unit seniors complex three miles northwest of the scene of the shooting.

"There was a fire at his apartment this morning," FBI Special Agent Joseph Dickey said as investigators pieced together a motive for the shooting and retraced Wicks' steps.

A neighbor, Johnetta Watkins, said she didn't see Wicks after firefighters doused the fire.

Watkins, 56, used to drive Wicks to the grocery store. She described him as a quiet man who walked with a limp, lived alone and sometimes complained that Las Vegas was a "prejudiced" place to live. He also complained about what he called an unfair cut in his Social Security benefits, she said.

The gunman opened fire at the courthouse at about 8 a.m. Gunfire lasted several minutes, with shots echoing around tall buildings in the area more than a mile north of the Las Vegas Strip.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was in Las Vegas but not at his local office in the building, said one of his aides bent down to pick up some newspapers in the atrium when the shooting began.

"She believes her life was saved as a result of picking up those papers," Reid said. "She then crouched behind a pillar when this 'war,' as she said, took place."

The U.S. Marshals Service said the victims included a 48-year-old deputy U.S. marshal who was hospitalized and Stanley Cooper, a 65-year-old contract court security officer.

Cooper was a retired Las Vegas police officer employed by Akal Security, said Jeff Carter, spokesman for the Marshals Service in Washington. He was a police officer for 26 years and became a federal court security officer in Las Vegas in 1994, Carter said.

Authorities didn't immediately release the name of the wounded marshal.

U.S. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., told reporters it appeared the gunman acted alone and the shooting was not a terrorist act. Ensign also has an office in the building but wasn't there at the time.

In a handwritten lawsuit filed in March 2008, Wicks complained that his Social Security benefits were cut following his move to Las Vegas, and accused federal workers of discriminating against him because he is black.

"This case from the start was about race," Wicks wrote. "Lots of state worker(s) and agencies have took part in this scam mainly for old blacks who are not well educated."

Wicks claimed the problem began in California, after he had a stroke and was unable to go to government offices to protest an earlier benefits reduction. He alleged Social Security staff called his new landlord in Las Vegas and told her not to help him.

The case was dismissed Sept. 9 by U.S. District Court Judge Philip Pro in Las Vegas following a hearing before federal Magistrate Judge George Foley Jr. Both judges have courtrooms in the federal building.

FBI Special Agent Dickey said the gunman opened fire in front of a set of security metal detectors just inside a two-story atrium rotunda. He said he didn't know if any words were spoken before the shooting began.

"From what witness accounts have said, he walked in with a shotgun underneath his jacket and opened fire when he opened the doors," Dickey said. "Seven officers responded and returned fire."

Ensign said the guard who died was shot in the chest.

A YouTube video recorded the sound of the running firefight as the man retreated across Las Vegas Boulevard toward another federal building and a historic school.

"I could see guards and everything coming out, and then all of a sudden I just started hearing pop, pop, pop. I mean, just like 30 or 40 shots," said Troy Saccal, a tax services manager who was arriving for work at the time.

Saccal said he thought he saw one guard slump to the ground and another move to help him.

The gunman died moments later in the bushes outside the Fifth Street School, which was built in 1936 and restored for use as an art and architecture school and city cultural affairs offices.

John Clark, director of the U.S. Marshals Service in Washington, called the security officers heroes.

"The brave and immediate actions of these two individuals saved lives by stopping the threat of a reckless and callous gunman," Clark said in a statement.

Bullet holes marked the entrance of the eight-story modern federal building, which was locked down after the shootout and closed for the day.

A helicopter view showed heavily armed officers in flak jackets scouring the building's roof. Shortly afterward, armed officers escorted employees to the auditorium of a school three blocks away. Dickey called the evacuation "standard procedure."

The gunfire erupted as downtown was busy with office workers and jurors reporting for duty, both at the federal building and the RegionalJustice Center, which houses state and local courts two blocks away.

The state courthouse was evacuated as a precaution and closed for the day, court spokesman Michael Sommermeyer said. Sommermeyer said later he could find no criminal or civil court filings under Wicks' name.

The Lloyd D. George U.S. Courthouse and Federal Building opened in 2002 and is named for a longtime senior federal judge who still hears cases. It was touted as the first federal building built to comply with blast resistance requirements following the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.

___

Barrett reported from Washington. Associated Press Writer Oskar Garcia in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Kenya Seeks to Deport Muslim Cleric to Jamaica - New York Times

Posted: 04 Jan 2010 08:10 PM PST

LONDON — The Kenyan authorities were reported on Monday to be planning to deport a Jamaican-born Muslim cleric, Abdullah el-Faisal, who may have helped inspire the Nigerian man accused of trying to bomb an American airliner headed to Detroit on Christmas Day.

Mr. Faisal has long been known to law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe. He was tried in Britain in 2003 on charges of spreading racial hatred and urging his followers to kill Christians, Hindus, Jews and Americans. He was deported from Britain in 2007.

Reuters reported from Nairobi, the capital, that Mr. Faisal was in Kenya on a preaching tour. But intelligence officials feared that his speeches would encourage radicalism in a country that has been a target of attacks ascribed to Al Qaeda, including the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy. He was arrested Sunday in the port city of Mombasa.

"The minister in charge of immigration has declared him as an unwanted immigrant. We don't want him in this country," a police spokesman, Eric Kiraithe, told Reuters. It was not clear when Mr. Faisal would be deported.

"From what he says, he was coming to preach," Mr. Kiraithe said. "The contacts he was maintaining, according to our intelligence, are not the best, are not in our national interests."

Mr. Faisal settled in Britain in the early 1990s and became imam of the Brixton mosque in South London, which was reported to have been frequented by Richard C. Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who sought to blow up an airliner bound for the United States just before Christmas in 2001.

Abdul Haqq Bakr, the chairman of Brixton Mosque and Islamic Cultural Center, said at the time that Mr. Reid had joined prayers at the mosque in late 1995 and left in 1998.

Zacarias Moussaoui, who was sentenced in the United States in 2006 to life in federal prison after he admitted knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, plot, also prayed at the Brixton mosque.

Mr. Faisal, a Jamaican-born convert to Islam who studied in Saudi Arabia, was found guilty in 2003 of encouraging followers to use chemical and nuclear weapons against their enemies from other faiths. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

He was deported four years later after the authorities accused him of influencing Germaine Lindsay, one of the four attackers in the London bombings of July 2005. Mr. Lindsay was also a Jamaican-born convert to Islam.

Mr. Faisal's name surfaced much more recently in investigations into Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of the attempted attack on a Northwest Airlines flight.

In an online posting in May 2005, under the name "farouk1986," Mr. Abdulmutallab referred to Mr. Faisal as a cleric he had listened to, according to American military and law enforcement authorities.

In his posting, Mr. Abdulmutallab wrote: "I thought once they are arrested, no one hears about them for life and the keys to their prison wards are thrown away. That's what I heard Sheik Faisal of U.K. say (he has also been arrested I heard)."

It was not clear how Mr. Faisal had made his way to Africa after being deported to Jamaica in 2007. The Kenya newspaper Daily Nation quoted the immigration minister, Otieno Kajwang, as saying that he entered Kenya from Tanzania using a border post at Lunga Lunga that was not connected to a central database in Nairobi.

Daily Nation reported Sunday that Mr. Faisal has previously been denied entry into Kenya.

He had traveled to Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, Swaziland, Malawi and Tanzania before arriving in Kenya, the newspaper said. He was arrested after attending prayers at a mosque.

The newspaper quoted Mr. Kajwang as saying: "We are not deporting him because he is a Muslim. We are deporting him because of his terrorist history and the fact that he is on the international watch list. "

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Egypt Explores Tourism Beyond The Package Tour - NPR News

Posted: 04 Jan 2010 09:00 PM PST

Bedouin children play with their camels after a day of giving rides to tourists in June in Dahab, Eg
Enlarge Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Bedouin children play with their camels after a day of giving rides to tourists in June in Dahab, Egypt.

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Bedouin children play with their camels after a day of giving rides to tourists in June in Dahab, Egypt.

In Egypt, tourism is big business. Nearly 13 million people visited the land of the pharaohs in 2008, and officials say the global economic crisis caused only a temporary slippage in the numbers in 2009.

A budding eco-travel movement is emerging, almost unnoticed amid the bulging tour buses and packed cruise ships. Its leaders are trying to tap into the skills and knowledge of Egypt's Bedouins and other tribal peoples, who have been all but ignored by the mainstream tourism industry.

The tourism experience in Egypt is best known for the hordes of tour groups circling the Great Pyramids of Giza or wilting under the desert sun at Luxor's Valley of the Kings.

Egypt's annual tourism revenues of nearly $7 billion in 2005 soared to more than $10.5 billion in 2008.

The government has razed shantytowns and swept aside poor villagers in efforts to make the experiences more pleasant for tourists.

Tourists take pictures of the temple of Abu Simbel, south of Aswan, Egypt, in 2008.
Enlarge Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images

Tourists take pictures of the temple of Abu Simbel, south of Aswan, Egypt, in 2008.

Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images

Tourists take pictures of the temple of Abu Simbel, south of Aswan, Egypt, in 2008.

Integrating Traditional Communities

But in late October, activists and businesspersons gathered with members of various Egyptian tribes in the remote southeastern desert to celebrate their heritage and traditions, and to explore ways of responsibly bringing people to the Egypt that package tour visitors never see.

The second annual Characters of Egypt festival featured Sinai Bedouins from the eastern hills, Nubian tribes from the south, and the tribes of the western desert from as far as the Siwa Oasis near the Libyan border.

It was a rare opportunity for the tribes to swap songs, stories, food and art, and to debate whether this new eco-travel movement could provide desperately needed jobs without forever changing their lives.

The head of Egypt's national parks, Mustafa Foudy, said that last concern is part of his job — to see that eco-tourism doesn't turn into a smaller version of mass tourism.

"When you talk about eco-tourism, we are talking about responsible tourism, people that they come and gain experience by sitting with these local people. We trained them to work as guides, to take these tourists to safari, for example, to act as bird-watchers, to help the tourists," he said.

Overcoming 'The Handicrafts Plateau'

So far, eco-tourism is a term that can have many definitions in Egypt, from expensive "luxury eco-lodges" to primitive Bedouin-led desert treks. One of the founders of the tribal festival is Lynn Freiji, director of the Wadi Environmental Science Center.

Freiji says well-intentioned efforts these days focus too much on what she calls "the handicrafts plateau" — creating and marketing jewelry and carpets to tourists. She says the next step should be a sustainable travel sector that values the environment and relies on the knowledge and skills of those who live there.

"The tribes are those that have protected the territories. Somehow we tend to forget about them. These people need to be banked on. These men need to get to work, these fishermen need to be better integrated. These tribes who have the knowledge of the desert should be working hand in hand with tour operators," she says.

Better Lives For Bedouins?

Freiji says there are obstacles, including the deep mistrust between the government and tribal people, some of whom thrive on smuggling. Clashes, especially in the northern Sinai, are a regular occurrence. Each year when she tries to organize the tribal festival, Freiji says she must provide a list of all those attending to Egyptian security forces five months in advance, and inevitably security officials strike a number of names from the list.

Mohammed Darwish Hamdan, a Sinai Bedouin, said that without tourism, living conditions in the Sinai would be even worse than their current dismal state. But he said the heavy-handed tactics of the security forces make development impossible. He said the common procedure of rounding up relatives of a wanted man to force him to come forward is not only wrong but disrespectful — a major sin in tribal culture.

"They have to respect the dignity of the Bedouin when they deal with us. And they have to offer us a chance to make a living. If someone does something wrong, OK, arrest that person. But don't seize innocent people for someone else's deed," he says.

With additional reporting by Aya Batrawi

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