Wednesday, July 28, 2021

What is Kev's BEST > Take a look (as far as the site's review of Best Caterers in Mesa goes, it is one of the best)

IDK. This is all they say ---- they're 100% 'local-owned'  almost everywhere

ABOUT US

Founded in 2011 by Kevin Osborne, Kev’s Best is an Independent Blog, 100% locally owned and operated. . It is one of two newspapers in Branson Missouri.

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FOR EXAMPLE >

5 Best Caterers in Mesa, AZ

Best Caterers in Mesa

Below is a list of the top and leading Caterers in Mesa.

To help you find the best Caterers located near you in Mesa, we put together our own list based on this rating points list.

Contents hide
Mesa’s Best Caterers:
Lena’s Flowers & Catering
Park Avenue Catering
Creative Hands Cuisine
Artistic Touch Catering LLC
Straight to the Plate Catering

Mesa’s Best Caterers:

The top rated Caterers in Mesa, AZ are:

  • Lena’s Flowers & Catering – provides an unlimited array of menu choices
  • Park Avenue Catering – provides a full-service catering company that specializes in all types of events and occasions
  • Creative Hands Cuisine – takes enormous pride in pleasing customers
  • Artistic Touch Catering LLC – team creating a highly qualified food service
  • Straight to the Plate Catering – provides great, fresh, and delicious culinary delights and catering services

Lena’s Flowers & CateringCaterers in Mesa

Lena’s Flowers and Catering provides an unlimited array of menu choices for your wedding or special event and each event is unique, they are delighted to customize a perfect menu for each and every event to accommodate specific tastes, desires, and up to the budget. To make your menu selection process easier, they have prepared some sample menus, at varying price points, which feature a variety of their most popular choices.

While perusing these delicious menus that are not a comprehensive listing of the many menu items that are available, and can handle any event, grand and formal or relaxed and intimate. The complete service means you don’t have to seek out a multitude of vendors for your event – they can provide you with everything you need to make your event a success.

Products/Services: 

Wedding Caterer, Wedding Reception Caterer, Wedding Flowers, Event Caterer, Event Florist

LOCATION:

Address: 330 S Gilbert Rd Suite 15, Mesa, AZ 85204
Phone: 480-813-2544
Website: www.lenasflowersandcatering.com

“My husband and I hired Lena’s team for food and flowers for our wedding on March 14, 2020. The food was delicious, the servers were organized, prompt and discrete. My bouquet was absolutely gorgeous. I didn’t exactly know what I wanted at first but Lena was so patient. She took the time to help me create my dream bouquet and pick out florals for the rest of my wedding. I would highly recommend her services to anyone.” – Monica C.

Park Avenue CateringTop Caterers in Mesa

Park Avenue Catering provides a full-service catering company that specializes in all types of events and occasions from casual to elegant and has been catering in Phoenix and the surrounding Valley for over 40 years. Park Avenue Catering has the experience and expertise to make your next event a success done and assisted by a wonderful and experienced. They have a diverse selection of menus to choose from and are happy to help you create a menu that meets your needs.

Products/Services:

Weddings Catering, Corporate Catering, Private Events

LOCATION:

Address: 558 N Robson, Mesa, AZ 85201
Phone: 480-464-8858
Website: www.parkavecatering.com

“Jennifer and the crew had everything set up and delivered to all the tabels great food. The stuffed chicken was great. The crew we’re fast polite and courteous to all of our guests at our wedding reception. We greatly appreciate Park Avenue and most likely will use them again. I highly recommend.” – Norman B.

Creative Hands CuisineCaterers Mesa

Creative Hands Mission is to take a vision made by the client and establish a one of kind culinary concert including elements of great food and service to create a theatrical and remarkable experience for their guests. Creative Hands Cuisine is a close-knit team in and out of work. Their team takes enormous pride in pleasing customers.

It is always their goal to surpass what is expected of them. Several have worked with them for over a decade and continue to raise their level of skills and performances with them. What all that means for the client is outstanding consistency and liquidity of execution of events. No impermanent workers rather seasoned and superbly trained personnel.

Products/Services: 

Wedding Catering, Social Events, Corporate Catering

LOCATION:

Address: 3035 N Maple St #1, Mesa, AZ 85215
Phone: 602-628-1534
Website: www.creativehandscuisine.com

REVIEWS:

“THIS. FOOD. IS. THE. BEST. We had a tasting with the chef for our wedding and everything was delicious. Their menus are primarily for dinner and we were hosting a wedding brunch. They were able to adapt a menu for us and people have been raving about how great everything was. From chicken and waffle bites to a prime rib carving station, every bite was amazing.” – Courtney T.

Artistic Touch Catering LLCGood Caterers in Mesa

Artistic Touch Catering LLC was founded by the couple April and Michael with 40 years of experience of being a chef that has a passion for artistically creating food that excites the eye and delights the taste buds. The team creating a highly qualified food service and business has grown with high ambitions. The couple sees the need for quality and affordable service and strives to truly pamper their clients with a chef for over.

A variety offers of the finest foods and beverages in the area, as well as a knowledgeable and experienced staff. Artistic Touch Catering boasts a wide selection of china, silverware, and rental items, in addition to relationships with the area’s best vendors for all additional needs with their expert event planner that will always work with you to design the best possible event for your reflection on your own personal tastes and preferences.

Products/Services:

Event catering, Wedding Catering, Corporate Catering, Meeting & Event Box Lunches,
Private Chef Services, Live Entertainment Action Stations, Day Care & School Meals

LOCATION:

Address: 3820 E Main St suite 8, Mesa, AZ 85205
Phone: 623-252-0798
Website: www.artistictouchcatering.com

REVIEWS:

“Artistic Touch catered my daughters wedding in November and it was simply amazing. Extremely professional, organized, and the food was so delicious everyone was running back for more. I can’t wait to use them again for my other daughters wedding in five months.” – Renee T.

Straight to the Plate CateringOne of the best Caterers in Mesa

Straight to the Plate Catering provides great, fresh, and delicious culinary delights and catering services for companies, weddings, and confidential events. They like to support local farmers and manufacturers in their community. They believe that local ingredients are best for you, and gives an improved guest experience.

They also provide biodegradable and compostable plates and vessels to help their environment. If there is extra food from events it does not go to garbage. They give excess food to local fire and police departments, Sunshine Acre Children Home, Salvation Army to name several.

Products/Services:

Weddings, Corporate, Social, Celebration of Life, Corporate Express

LOCATION:

Address: 500 W Southern Ave UNIT 26, Mesa, AZ 85210
Phone: 602-349-1208
Website: www.straighttotheplate.com

REVIEWS: 

“I have used Straight to the Plate for a couple corporate occasions lately. They are extremely easy to work with. I was given some great food ideas for each event. The staff that served at the events were extremely nice and professional. Even better the food turned out GREAT. We will be using them again!” – Peter O.

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BREAKING! Hypothetical: THE ODDS-ARE-MORE-THAN-EVEN Likely It's Not Only One County in Michigan...It could be Maricopa County Here in Arizona

When there's million$$$$$$ of American Rescue Plan monies out there - up for grabs in federal Covid Relief funds intended to get disbursed for essential 'front-line' workers  - that's a whole lotta temptation

Michigan Politicians, All Republicans, Pocket Thousands in Bonuses From Federal Covid Relief Funds

 Rolling Stone magazine logo redesign | Tarek Chemaly

Only after public outcry, a lawsuit and a statement from the county prosecutor calling their actions illegal, did the county commissioners agree to return all of the fund

By Peter Wade  
Rolling Stone

Insert

Republican elected officials in a Michigan county voted to allot themselves hefty payments in the form of “Covid hazard pay” from American Rescue Plan funds designated for essential workers, only returning the funds under public pressure and a lawsuit.

The Shiawassee County commissioners awarded themselves as much as $25,000 each for their in-person work during the Covid-19 pandemic while lower-income county employees received between $1,000 and $2,000 each. The funds were part of $557,000 of American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds earmarked for hazard pay, and elected officials allocated “the bulk” of the funds to themselves, the Argus-Press in Ossowa, Mich., reported. But those funds were intended for workers whose jobs put them at risk of contracting coronavirus and whose jobs were greatly affected by the pandemic.

Six top-level officials, including Board of Commissioners Chairman Jeremy Root and Sheriff Brian BeGole received $25,000 each last week. Other elected and appointed officials received $10,000 or $12,500 payments. Four other commissioners received $5,000 each . . .

These payments to elected and appointed officials likely violate both the Michigan constitution and the federal rules for ARP funds. A Treasury Department spokesperson told MLive-The Flint Journal that the agency’s interim final rules for the ARP specify that the funds should prioritize low-income and essential workers who were at the greatest risk of contracting Covid-19 due to their jobs.

Caving to the backlash, the county commissioners released a statement on Friday announcing they and all other elected officials who received payments will voluntarily return the funds. “Since the payments were made, confusion about the nature of these funds has run rampant,” the commissioners said. “The commissioners deeply regret that this gesture has been misinterpreted and have unanimously decided to voluntarily return the funds to the county, pending additional guidance from the state of Michigan.”

 

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CARTOON YOURSELF: Perfect. Absolutely...Boring No More > It's Dumb & Fun in A Snap!


Add some zing to your selfie face-time Zoom calls outside of in those boom-boom spaces you never go to . . .Hey there!

How to turn yourself into a cartoon for your next Zoom call

21 comments

Courtesy of Snap Camera’s cartoon filter

By James Vincent Sure
Imagine Linguini from Ratatouille stuck in endless Zoom meetings.
Image: The Verge          
"Want to make your next quarterly Zoom check-up a little more interesting? Feel like aggravating your colleagues at the virtual all-hands? If so, why not turn yourself into a freakish living cartoon, courtesy of Snapchat’s desktop app?
> We’ve written about the Snap Camera app before, as it’s fun, free, and easy to use. But Snap seems to have updated it recently with the cartoon filter from its mobile app, which is worth a look in its own right. The filter turns you into a generic DreamWorks / Pixar creation, and is surprisingly fluid. Its ability to capture your full range of expressions is a little limited (it can’t quite do a proper DreamWorks Face, for example) but access through the desktop app means you can now use the filter on your next Zoom call, which is both dumb and fun. 
The filter is available through Snap’s Snap Camera desktop app on Mac and PC.
Image: The Verge          

Next Up In Tech

To do so, you need to first download and install the Snap Camera app from here (you’ll need to give it access to your microphone and camera, and be running Windows 10 or macOS 10.13 or later). Then, start the app, start Zoom, and make Snap Camera your camera input. To do this on a Mac, click “Preferences” > “Video” in the top menu. If you’re on a PC, click the gear icon in the upper-right of the app then select “Video.” Then, from the drop-down menu labeled “Camera,” select “Snap Camera” rather than your current input.

Next, go to the Snap Camera app itself and select the filter you want from the carousel underneath the camera feed. This one is called “Cartoon Style.” Click it and you should be good to go. A little tip: you can click the video or create a custom hotkey (defined under the video feed) to switch between different cartoon styles. Enjoy!

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Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Meet The New Poster-Boy for Cannabis Legalization: Billionaire Charles Koch

CHILL Never too late or too early . . TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND INHALE THIS SURPRISE. Let us try to process this report posted by Forbes staff reporter Will Yakowicz in a section named Daily Cover

Billionaire Charles Koch On Why Cannabis Should Be Legal

". . .The only time the 85-year-old CEO of Koch Industries has consumed marijuana, he says, was by accident in the 1980s. He was helicopter skiing in British Columbia, and après-ski, he and his friends enjoyed a few gin and tonics at dinner. For dessert, the chef brought out a plate of brownies. Koch ate one and after a while felt a little “loopy.” He doesn’t know who infused the sweets with pot, but he says he has known many successful friends—doctors, lawyers and other professionals—who have used cannabis.

Although Koch isn’t big on consuming it himself, he’s going public now with a long-held belief: Cannabis should be legal nationwide. So he’s putting his name, and nearly $25 million of his $45 billion fortune, to influence criminal-justice reform and legalization by the end of 2021. Brian Hooks, Koch’s right-hand man, says that a good barometer to gauge what Koch and his network are eventually willing to spend is what they’ve already put toward these issues—some $70 million in total over the last two years.

“It should be the individual’s choice,” says Koch from his office in Koch Industries’ sprawling granite compound in Wichita, Kansas. “[Prohibition] is counterproductive. It ruins people’s lives, creates conflict in society and is anti-progress. The whole thing never made sense to me.”

progress. The whole thing never made sense to me.”

The devout libertarian known for spending a fortune on political causes is now actively funding efforts to end federal marijuana prohibition. Here’s why pro-pot advocates in both parties are high on his support.

In April, Koch’s political advocacy group, Americans For Prosperity, joined other organizations to form the Cannabis Freedom Alliance, whose members have already started lobbying Congress to help lift America’s federal marijuana ban. Sitting at his desk in front of an oil painting of his late father, Fred, who founded Koch Industries as an oil-and-refinery company in 1940, Koch is finally ready to talk about why he’s pushing for legalization.

As a staunch libertarian, he sees cannabis prohibition as a basic infringement on personal freedom, as well as a destructive public policy that adds to America’s mass-incarceration problem. The U.S. should have learned from the “nightmare” of alcohol prohibition a century ago, he says.

Koch is not alone in his view. Nearly 70% of Americans now believe cannabis should be federally legal. Currently, 18 states allow for adult use and 37 have legalized medical marijuana, creating an industry that generated more than $17.5 billion in legal sales last year—a figure expected to balloon to $100 billion by 2030.

Knowing that Koch is involved brings people “a lot of comfort,” Randal Meyer, a lobbyist and member of the Cannabis Freedom Alliance said.

HIGH FINANCE

These eight billionaires have been on the front lines of the cannabis revolution, whether by starting their own weed companies, agitating for legalization or lighting up on a livestream.

Brian Hooks of Stand Together explains that their strategy depends on support inside and outside the halls of politics. It includes a heavy emphasis on grassroots activism, lobbying, the creation of broad-based coalitions, as well as media and advertising.

In June, Amazon announced that it will lobby in support of cannabis legalization, and as other companies including Altria, Brink’s and Molson Coors launched a think tank to propose federal policy, suddenly, it seems, marijuana legalization is no longer a neo-hippie cause carried on by the likes of NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws).

“For too long, drug policy has been mischaracterized as something that’s come from the fringes,” Hooks says. “When in fact the majority of Americans, for a long time, have recognized that the system is wrong.”

Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior advisor to President Obama, worked with Holden on legislation to reduce mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders. The legislation garnered support of 80 senators, but Mitch McConnell, who was Senate Majority Leader at the time, blocked it from reaching the floor in 2016. Two years later, under President Trump, the First Step Act passed.

Jarrett says that the criminal justice reform would not have passed without Koch’s support. “That’s how you get things done in Washington—it might mean you have strange bedfellows,” she says.  

More than anything, Koch sees marijuana legalization as the beginning of the end of the federal war on drugs. Here, the modern philosopher king looks to a 19th-century French economist for wisdom. “For a law to be respected,” Koch says, paraphrasing Frédéric Bastiat, “it must be respectable.”

Reference: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2021/07/27/billionaire-charles-koch-on-why-cannabis-should-be-legal/

 

 

                    

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CYBER WARFARE Create A Problem + Make Money >> It's all a rich world of targets for those seeking money and leverage

Don't know about you, dear readers, but ...something about this really 'bugs' me REAL BAD

War Room

Opinion | The Cyber Apocalypse Never Came. Here’s What We Got Instead.

Over the past decade, cyber warfare has changed in ways the experts didn’t see coming.

IMAGE: General view at the Kaspersky Transparency Summit, where experts and leaders of the global ICT industry gathered to debated how to ensure trust in, and assurance for their products in the current cybersecurity landscape. | Adrian Bretscher/Kapersky Lab via Getty Images

Opinion by JACQUELYN SCHNEIDER

General view at the Kaspersky Transparency Summit, where experts and leaders of the global ICT industry gathered to debated how to ensure trust in, and assurance for their products in the current cybersecurity landscape.
 
Blogger Intro: Obviously from long-time industry insider > Jacquelyn Schneider is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is a non-resident fellow at the Naval War College's Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute and was previously a senior policy adviser to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission
"Even for those of us who watch cyber warfare closely, the seeming barrage of cyber-related headlines in 2021 has felt remarkable 
> This spring, the Biden administration sanctioned Russia for last year’s breach of network software firm SolarWinds, which allowed Russian hackers to access major U.S. government agencies and over 18,000 companies.
> A few months later, Russian cyber attacks were back in the news, with purported Russian criminals extorting oil distributor Colonial Pipeline and meatpacking firm JBS for millions of dollars in ransomware payouts.
> NOTE The keyword customers: attacks have become so widespread that exhausted cyber security firms are turning away desperate customers.

> Meanwhile, last week, the United States, NATO and the EU pointed the finger at China for a massive breach of a Microsoft exchange server, propagated by cyber mercenaries hired by the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The countries’ joint statement is all the more remarkable given both NATO and the EU’s unwillingness to brand China an “adversary.”

> And on the same day, researchers revealed a multi-state effort to hack and monitor presidents, monarchs, journalists and more, using spyware created not by the Russian government, China’s security apparatus or the National Security Agency—but by a private Israeli company called the NSO Group. . .

So what is going on in cyberspace, and did anyone see this coming? . .

What we got was neither the unbridled promise of digital cooperation nor a fiery cyber apocalypse. Instead, today’s cyber reality seems simultaneously less scary and more of a hot mess—a series of more frequent, less consequential attacks that add up not to a massive Hollywood disaster but rather to a vaguer sense of vulnerability. This can make it hard to understand what’s going on and how bad it really is. Are all these high-visibility cyber events more of the same, or are we living through a new era of cyber warfare?

 In some ways, the events of the past few months aren’t that surprising given the trajectory of cyber activity over the last decade. They’re the evolution of a steady, somewhat inevitable shift toward using digital tools as a means of international statecraft and political contestation. However, what we are seeing is also subtly different from the way experts had previously thought cyber would affect the international landscape. Over the last decade, authoritarian governments have embraced digital tools and leaned on shadowy gangs of cyber criminals to do some of their dirty work, while the pandemic has made the world reliant on the internet and created a rich world of targets for those seeking money and leverage. As a result, cyberspace may be less apocalyptic than predicted, and more like a termite infestation, eating at the very foundations of our increasingly digital societies. The good news, though, is that the long-sought international consensus on appropriate uses of cyber means within foreign policy may be finally coming together—which means there’s hope that today’s cyber disorder may eventually abate. . .

So  the post-pandemic cyber world has more vulnerabilities, more opportunities for economic and political exploitation, and more actors that blur the line between state and non-state involvement. The convergence of these bad-news trends certainly helps explain the battery of recent cyber headlines. However, there is some reason for optimism . . .

The succession of high-visibility cyber events in recent months, paired with a U.S. administration that is prioritizing cyber threats within its foreign policy, may have provided the impetus for the international community to slowly start agreeing on ways to punish problematic cyber activity.

Cyber attacks on hot dog plants or virtual elementary school classrooms may not look like the dystopian end times Panetta and Clapper warned about. But they insidiously eat away at the foundations of digital economies, societies and, ultimately, state power. Today, with these foundations crumbling, we may not need “cyber Pearl Harbor” analogies to understand the danger of cyber attacks. But can the U.S. and its now-energized allies build on this momentum to reverse the shifts wrought by authoritarian governments, the pandemic and the rise of non-state cyber criminals?

Fingers crossed. 

 
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LIGHTHOUSE > Let There Be Light ...16th Century Cordouan Beacon Added To UNESCO World Heritage List

For centuries Lighthouses have been prominent features in our landscapes

"The Cordouan beacon is the last to be inhabited in France and only the second, after the Tower of Hercules at La Coruña in Spain, to be added to Unesco’s World Heritage list. Cordouan was built at the end of the 16th century and overlooks the Atlantic Ocean from the mouth of the Gironde estuary in south-western France . . .

Lighthouse at low tide

From the agencies

France’s last inhabited lighthouse gets Unesco status – in pictures

Phillipe Lopez/Agence France Presse

Main image:
Lighthouse keeper Thomas Dalisson, 38, sits at the door of the Cordouan lighthouse at low tide off the coast of Le Verdon-sur-Mer, southwestern France.
Dalisson sits outside lighthouse                                                            Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images
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**** O Yes Please More Daniel Craig >> 'NO TIME TO DIE' | Bond is Back!!! Only in Cinemas October****

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