The Daily Gyro (DCGreeks.com)

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The Daily Gyro
Updated Daily on Greek Time

May 2, 2005

Christos Anesti to everyone, and welcome back to The Daily Gyro. We hope you’re not surprised that we basically took off Holy Week with services every night taking up all of our free time. With that said, we’d like to welcome meat and dairy back into our lives. We’re not sure what the benefits or detriments were to an all soy diet but we’re happy to stop reading ingredient labels for egg or milk derivatives. We’d like to thank our sponsors again this year, Gardenburger, Ore-ida, and Silk for providing us the closest thing to a burger (or McRib), fries and shake that we were going to get for 40 some odd days, and Long John Silver’s for providing lunch on Palm Sunday. (One of these days we’re going to get guilted into sticking around for the traditional plaki lunch after church, and should probably start working on good excuses from now.)

In anticipation of the weekend’s Easter celebrations and mass exodus out of the big cities, Greek Police posted over 2600 officers at key intersections to stop speeders and drunk drivers. (We always thought that those speed limit signs were minimums by the way people drive in the Greek countryside.) Starting last Wednesday, police officers at major tollbooths had been handing out thousands of free folk music CDs along with advice on safe driving. Hopefully they avoided including the tail end of the song that traditionally accompanies the hasapiko (a.k.a., the Zorba Dance), which speeds up like crazy at the end. Then again, a tsamiko mix may lead to falling asleep at the wheel, so who knows.

The Greek island of Lemnos is considering flying in a group of German weasels to take care of a plague of wild rabbits that is responsible for the destruction of almost 5000 acres of crops. This solution is favored over traditional eradication methods like hunting, which have been opposed by the Greek branch of the World Wildlife Fund as a slippery slope that could encourage the hunting of other animals on the island. (Donkeys, Goats, Tourists?) This solution sounds like it could work based on common sense, because who hasn’t experienced tourist weasels chasing (cotton)tail on a Greek island?

Greece temporarily has withdrawn its Ambassador to Slovakia Efstathios Daras after he was arrested in a Greek port for allegedly caring a gun, silencer, and related weaponry in his car. In September 2004, a Slovakian newspaper reported that the ambassador was involved in weapons smuggling from Slovakia to Greece. Next thing you know, there will be a paper trail naming him as the kingpin of crime in all of Eastern Europe. Oh wait, we must have this ambassador confused with Nicholas Natchios in the comic book movie “Daredevil,” which continues to be a staple on most of the movie channels and will more than likely continue to be so with the movie’s stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner recently getting engaged to each other. (While we’re on the subject of this movie, here’s a handy viewing tip: when watching the one sequence where badly mispronounced Greek takes place between Jennifer Garner’s character, Elektra, and her father, the above-mentioned ambassador, flip the SAP on your TV to Spanish if available or watch the Spanish language version on HBO Latino to actually understand what they’re saying.)

Due to the urging of some of our younger readers over the weekend, I guess we have to talk about Constantine Maroulis who got kicked off from American Idol on Wednesday. Admittedly Constantine had been on our radar from the beginning of this season’s American Idol from having accidentally caught his audition performance (which incidentally was in DC), and modifying the joke from MBFGW to get you to his last name meaning, “Lettuce.” It’s not that we’re averse to promoting awareness of Idol hopefuls both here and abroad, but that was so 2003. Some of you will no doubt remember what we inadvertently had a small hand in launching Kalomoira’s career back when she was simply Carol Sarantis, through the hundreds, maybe thousands of decisive votes in her Long Island Idol contest that came from the DC area, months before she tried out for Fame Story. But in Constantine’s case we didn’t want to focus too much attention on him until he either made it to the finals or got voted off. From the little we’ve read or followed on this guy, we have to give him props for being a savvy Greek-American who was able to use the system to advance his career. (He never really struck us as the typical Idol pop star and he was smart enough to make sure that his back-up band didn’t get caught up in any of his obligations to American Idol when it was signed by a label a few weeks ago.)

Speaking of savvy Greek-Americans, the first month of the Major League Baseball season is over and Peter Angelos’ Baltimore Orioles are in first place in the American League East over the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. He gets a host of concessions from Major League Baseball when DC got the Washington Nationals and he has a first-place team with its best start since the mid to late 90s when he was spending insane money and the Orioles were in playoffs.