Free My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places by Mary Roach

told him I’d read something about breast cancer levels and alcohol.
    He said he wasn’t a chicken, twisted off the cap, and raised the bottle. “To your health!”

    Menu Madness
    You always know when a waiter is about to recite the specials. It’s like that awkward moment in a musical when the lead guy is about to break into song again. Everyone around him tries to be polite, but inside they’re going, “NOOO!!! Be a normal person!” NOOO! Just write it on a chalkboard!
    Last week I went to a restaurant where they don’t recite specials. They actually write it all down. Unfortunately, they write it in a mixture of Italian and food-ese, necessitating a half-hour vocabulary lesson. I don’t do well in these places. I’m happiest in a restaurant that calls its sauces Louis, or “red.” I don’t want to know which organic farm the produce grew up on, and I don’t want to hear the adjective heirloom unless I’m watching Antiques Roadshow . Do you know what you’ve got here? It’s a tomato. It’s worth about $45. . . .
    I was out at a new Italian place with some girlfriends last week. We were thinking of ordering an antipasto platter, which included “House-made salumi. ”
    “You’ve got a typo here,” said Adair to the waiter.
    He replied that, no, salumi meant “cured meat.” “ Salumi is the generic category. Salami is salumi, but salumi is not salami.” Soon someone would be breaking into song about how they say “tomato,” and I’d have to leave.
    Kathy ordered first. She was considering the “ Bigoli all’amatriciana with house-cured guanciale .” She happened to know that guanciale was pork cheek, and for some reason felt this was a plus. She asked the waiter what Bigoli was. He said Bigoli was the name of the pasta machine.
    So we consulted amongst ourselves. We didn’t want to be rude. “And . . . what comes out of the machine tonight?”
    “It’s an extruded pasta.” It was spaghetti. Spaghetti with red sauce. Talk about cheek.
    Adair ordered next. She had some questions about the rabbit. The menu described it as “Rosemary-braised rabbit with rabbit offal spiedino .”
    “What is offal spiedino ?” said Adair, accenting the second syllable of each word, so as to suggest she spoke Italian. The waiter said that spiedino meant “on skewers.”
    “Yes, but what’s on the skewers? What is oh-fall? ”
    “Heart, kidneys and liver wrapped in pancetta and . . .”
    Offal was offal.
    The lesson being taught here is that it is better not to ask. If you ask, then you run the risk of knowing. For instance, we now also know that hanger steak is cut from “the muscle that pushes the food from one stomach to the other.”
    My other beef—sorry, complaint—with menu language is that the hyphen is underused, often with alarming consequences. For instance, in the phrase “Grilled Potter Family Farm beef heart,” what is grilled? The Potter family? Their farm? Whose heart is it? The cow’s or Mr. Potter’s?
    I have seen with my own two eyes a menu offering “Mesquite grilled alligator pepper crusted pork tenderloin.” Fortunately, by the time I got to the end of the phrase, I’d forgotten the beginning of it, so it was just some pork thing.
    Because of the excess verbiage on menus these days, the desserts have run over onto their own separate pieces of paper. This gives them plenty of room to stretch out and make no sense.
    Kathy noticed a red-wine risotto, which had apparently escaped from the entrées page—or was it the wine list?—and was masquerading as a sweet.
    We went straight to the check. I put my hand on the tray and used the muscle that pushes the bill from one diner to another.
    “Your treat this time, right?” I said to Adair.
    “Cacciucco!” said Adair, which is either an Italian curse word or an entrail, I forget.

    Is That What You’re Wearing?
    Every Saturday evening in households across America, a predictable scene unfolds. A couple is dressing for dinner