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At least one reader asked for a vacation food shot. So here goes one grabbed quickly. I was too hungry to do any styling. I'm between pizzas in Naples. This one came after an hour wait in line at Da Michele, said to be the best there is in the birthplace of my favorite food.

It's a stripped-down, tiled, hole in the wall in the centro storico, or old part of this gritty city. Your choices are just as spare -- pizza with a garlicky marinara sauce or the margherita, pictured, with tomato, mozzarella and basil.  Nothing else. The pizzas cost about 5 euros each and come out of the brick oven smoking, with blistered crust. You can have Coke, Fanta, Nastro Azurro beer or bottled water to wash it down, 1.5 euros whichever.

Joy is everywhere, funiculi, funicula.

Powerball tickets are (theoretically) on sale now (I'm not going to buy one). KARK, in a deal with the Lottery Commission, will broadcast the numbers tonight of the winner.

Had some connection problems today with the blog, so getting a late start. But here's a piece of news that will interest walkers and bikers: The River Trail behind City Hall, by the Entergy substation, has caved into the river. Bryan Day says there's not enough land to go around it, so the area will have to be filled in. He guesses that with the Entergy station so near, the city might get some help from the Corps of Engineers with the work.

Well, not really.  Sam Eifling reports that a couple of high-profile firms have dropped communication staffers.  Acxiom made an undetermined number of cuts and CJRW let two people go from their Dallas operation.  But another column by Eifling notes a peculiarity in the thought-to-be improved circulation numbers for the Las Vegas Review Journal, a Stephens-owned paper.  In the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations report, the paper actually gained 6.56 percent, a pretty rare accomplishment.  However:

Steve Coffeen, Stephens' director of corporate circulation, told Editor & Publisher that the Review-Journal actually shed subscribers, and that the increase owes to revised ABC accounting rules that now count the 20,000 or so paid subscribers to the electronic edition. Suddenly a circulation jump of 10,830 feels less like a triumph and more like that old sinking sensation.

Central Arkansas Water announced today they will hold a public meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 4, to discuss a lease-purchase agreement with the Trust For Public Lands (TPL) concerning the Winrock Grass Farm in West Pulaski County.  The land, over 800 acres, sits in the Lake Maumelle watershed and protecting that land has been a top priority for Lake Maumelle advocates.  The grass farm is owned by a group of investors who bought it in a deal brokered by Jay DeHaven. 

For some good background info on what the land is worth, read this story by Leslie Peacock.  The long and short of it is the land was appraised in April of this year for $5.4 million dollars.  CAW CEO Graham Rich will announce the particulars at a press conference on Monday, but said the agreement reached between TPL and DeHaven was somewhere close to $12 million (give or take $500,000) for 915 acres.

Rich said the initial appraisal, which DeHaven was none too happy with, did seem low.  A second appraisal, commissioned by TPL, came in at over $12 million -- a figure more consistent with what they've paid for land in the watershed before, Rich said. It will be interesting to find out some  more specifics, such as why a plot of land that was bought for $4.5 million in 2005, underwent zero improvements and appraised for $5.4 in 2009 will now sell for approximately $12 million.

TPL will buy the land from its current owners, then funds from investors, including CAW, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commision and possibly the U.S. Forest Service, will be combined with funds set aside by Sen. Bob Johnson to complete the transaction.  The press conference will be held at CAW headquarters at 5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2.

The Obama administration posted a record of White House visitors today.  The beggining date for the list, as far as I can tell, is September 15 of this year.  Starting in December, the White House will release the records from the previous 90-120 days.  From the president's statement earlier today:

For the first time in history, records of White House visitors will be made available to the public on an ongoing basis. We will achieve our goal of making this administration the most open and transparent administration in history not only by opening the doors of the White House to more Americans, but by shining a light on the business conducted inside it. Americans have a right to know whose voices are being heard in the policymaking process.

Conservatives will have a field day with some names on the list, which the White House called "an important lesson in the unintended consequences of such vigorous disclosure."  A quick perusal turns up a pretty eclectic group: John Boehner, George Clooney, Tom Daschle, Howard Dean, Alan Greenspan, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jordan, Michael Moore, John Roberts, George Soros, Serena Williams, and Oprah.  Oh yeah, and this ought to stir up some good ol' GOP ire, Jeremiah Wright is on there too.

Here's the kind of news you can expect the House Communications Office to churn out when the legislature isn't in session: The city dogcatcher fawns all over a state rep. for her decal law. For this the state is paying a publicity firm $5,000 a month.

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I know it's early but what the heck.  The wait staff at Iriana's in downtown Little Rock was feeling festive today.  Flo, the Progressive insurance saleswoman is Dawn Merrell.  Robin Hood is Kelly Schlachter.  Be safe when you're out there trick or treating.  I guess "stay dry" would be more appropriate as far as advice goes. 

Last week, it was North Little Rock High School, which promoted a Christian event in that city with posters and banners on the east campus.

This week, it's Benton's Ringgold Elementary that has run afoul of the First Amendment. For several years -- at least six, principal Ann Kerr says -- the school has allowed the Gideons, armed with copies of the New Testament and accompanied by the principal, to come speak to fifth graders about their evangelical work and make the copies of the Good News available to students to take home.

A parent complained. Superintendent Tony Prothro says the district's "trying to figure out what to do," and will consult with Arkansas School Board Association legal counsel.

What's so hard to figure out? If the schools know that they can't lead the children in Christian prayer, why don't they know they can't provide Bibles? How many Korans are the schools making available? How many folks in saffron robes are chanting Hare Krishna in the cafeterias? Are they hanging the welcome sign out for the Lubavitchers?

KARK caught this video of a woman and a child being rescued after her SUV headed into high-water on 7th street last night.  Dramatic stuff.  Both were okay.  Let this be a warning to you.  

UPDATE: The Times has managed to get hold of Thomas Hudson, the young man seen in the KARK video heroically swimming out to rescue a mother and her young child from a submerged car on 7th street last night.

Hudson, a local photographer, said that he had gone to Whitewater Tavern for a drink, and had heard about flooding below the nearby viaduct. One car had already been submerged there, though the occupants were able to escape unharmed. While in the bar, Hudson and other patrons decided to walk over to 7th Street to see if the car had been pulled out yet. That's when they saw another car, the SUV seen in the video, go into the water.

The SUV didn't seem to have gone in very deep before stalling out, Hudson said, so he decided to back his truck down to where it sat and see if he could pull it out with a strap he had in his pickup. By the time he got his truck to the edge of the water, however, the SUV had started to float. It was soon dragged by the current into deeper water, and began to rapidly sink. The woman inside yelled to him that she couldn't swim, and that there was a child inside. By that time, a firetruck had arrived, but the firefighters were still staging their gear. That's when Hudson made a decision. "I said screw it, and I went in," he said.

By the time he reached the SUV, only the back windows were above water. The doors were locked. In the light from the firetruck, he saw the child's face pressed into a tiny pocket of air at the back of the car. He tried punching out the window, he said, but couldn't break it. Soon, a firefighter arrived with an axe and broke the window. The firefighter pulled out the child, while Hudson managed to pull the woman out by her leg. 

In the end, the Arkansas Times asked Hudson the obvious question: when there were so many other people around, why was he the only one who went in to save the woman and her child? His answer is a near-perfect encapsulation of what it is to be a hero: "My thought is that if you're in a position to help someone and you can do it, you have a moral obligation to do it," he said. "I ask the opposite question: what if I hadn't done it?"

Ozarks Unbound is keeping a running tally of who's gotten the axe in the merger of the Morning News and Northwest Arkansas Times. Among the cuts: Morning News columnist and reporter Bob Caudle, who OU says was with the paper nearly 17 years. OU's reporting 24 names so far; comments, all of them interesting, add more.

In the little surprise here category: Bernice King, daughter of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has been elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She beat former Arkansas Court of Appeals Judge Wendell Griffin.

Arkansas-born pitchers are 2-0 so far in this year's World Series.  Yesterday we posted about Benton native Cliff Lee and his stellar performance in game one.  Last night, North Little Rock's own A.J. Burnett took the hill and helped the Yankees tie the series at 1-1.  Both teams will now head to Philadelphia for game three.  There's an interesting piece in today's New York Times about the two pitchers and their agent, Darek Braunecker, who is based in Little Rock.  Needless to say, Braunecker is having a pretty good series so far.

On Wednesday, Lee became the first pitcher since Pittsburgh’s Deacon Phillippe in 1903 to win in the World Series while striking out 10 with no walks. On Thursday, Burnett followed with the first start in the Yankees’ last 50 postseason games to include at least nine strikeouts, with no more than four hits and one earned run.

Lee is from Benton, Ark. Burnett is from North Little Rock. Nobody from the Natural State has seemed this comfortable in New York since Bill Clinton moved his offices to Harlem.