By Stephanie B Goldberg
1. “Our special for the day is a lovely salmon steak, laden with tapeworm larvae and served on a bed of irradiated spinach.” Or so goes the menu at the Paranoia Cafe, where everything that’s supposed to be good for you turns out to be swarming with deadly pathogens. This week, the Cafe did gangbusters business when a man filed suit – two years after the fact – against Shaw’s Crab House for serving him an undercooked salmon salad, which he alleges was the source of his nine-foot-long tapeworm. Maybe radiating our food isn’t such a bad idea after all.
2. Does John McCain’s confusion about how many houses he has strike you as a “metaphorical moment,” just waiting to be etched the consciousness of America’s undecided voters? That’s what Barack Obama’s campaign strategists hoped as they
unveil the world’s slowest attack that had Obama cogitating over three recent missteps by McCain including remarking that being rich means earning at least $5 million.
3. We all have lousy days at work, but most of us have the good sense not to write a book about them. Not so Steven Dublanica, the proud author of Waiter, an account of his seven years in food service. Dublanica had the nightmarish experience of being yelled at by a customer whose gift certificate was declined and who came back an hour later and did it all over again. (Insert Chinese food joke here.) On the bright side, Dublanica swears he “never, never spat in anyone’s food.” Unlike his brethren at the Paranoia Cafe.
4. As if Windows Vista doesn’t have enough problems already, Microsoft’s most unloved operating system is getting a $10 million spokesman: Jerry Seinfeld. The computers in Microsoft’s executive suite must have been down when they were looking up the success of Seinfeld’s latest project.
5. Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson might want to think about moving to New York.
Posted on August 23, 2008