PITTSBURGH (AP) – This is one pizza you’d better order ahead for.

Mama Lena’s Pizza House is vying for a spot in the Guinness World Records as the planet’s largest commercially available pizza.

The Big One, a 3-foot-by-41/2-foot pie, takes about 15 minutes to assemble and another 20 to 25 minutes to bake, said Rob Carrabbia, whose wife, Wendy, owns the pizzeria in the suburban Pittsburgh town of McKees Rocks.

The $99, 150-slice pizza has been on the menu for more than a year. So far, about 10 have been sold, including for birthday parties and to a school for its basketball team.

“It’s 20 pounds of dough, it’s a gallon of sauce, 15 pounds of cheese and a lot of tender love and care,” Carrabbia said Monday. “We cook the old fashion way, stone and cornmeal.”

The current record holder is a 4-foot diameter pizza offered by Paul Revere’s Pizza in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Dubbed the Ultimate Party Pizza, it uses more than 10 pounds of dough, 48 ounces of sauce and about five pounds of cheese.

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CHESTERFIELD, Va. (AP) – A hospital is promising emergency room patients they’ll be seen by a doctor in 30 minutes or less – or else receive an apology and free movie tickets.

Shortening emergency room waiting times is part of a hospital-wide initiative aimed at improving patient care, said Pam Hash, administrative director of emergency services at the newly opened St. Francis Medical Center. The free movie tickets were the marketing department’s idea.

“One of the big dissatisfiers for patients is the wait time they spend in the emergency department,” Hash said.

Other hospitals around the country have offered 30-minute guarantees to make themselves competitive. If the wait times are exceeded, patients are compensated with everything from restaurant gift certificates to free medical care.

There are exceptions to St. Francis’ 30-minute guarantee, such as when the emergency department has multiple critical-care patients or is so crowded that ambulances are being diverted to other hospitals.

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PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. (AP) – For $100 and an emotional essay, you could be the new owner of a flower shop.

“We thought that having a real estate agent would be a boring way to sell the shop, and we wanted to have more fun with this, so my mother, who is a former high school English and history teacher, and I thought of this essay contest,” said Wendy DeSousa, who has owned the Dial-A-Flower shop with her mother, Linda Varnell, for 10 years.

“The only problem is that yesterday, I caught her ‘grading’ the essays,” DeSousa said.

The owners estimate the business is worth about $100,000. They hope to get 1,000 essays from folks willing to pay $100 each to explain “Why I want to own a flower shop.”

“We’re not really looking at how the essay is written,” DeSousa said. “We’re looking for someone’s essay that appeals to us, who wants to be in the florist shop business and wants to learn.”

The owners said they have already received about 50 essays.

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BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) – Democratic leaders in one Illinois county have begun making very clear what other politicians might consider obvious: Party money should not be used to buy votes.

The Democratic Party in St. Clair County has sent out reminders to precinct committeemen that party money can’t be used to influence votes.

The refresher course on democracy follows the June convictions of five East St. Louis politicians for vote buying. Prosecutors said they had helped distribute more than $70,000 received by city Democratic precinct committeemen just before the 2004 election from the county Democratic organization.

The committeemen were recently sent a one-page letter from St. Clair County Democratic Central Committee Chairman Robert Sprague saying that money from the county committee should be used only to pay to help get the vote out.

Precinct leaders should “keep a record of all expenses” and “under no circumstances” use party money to pay for votes, the letter says.

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