Quick Takes

Tough customers

For the monks who run the Antoniano soup kitchen in Bologna, Italy, securing the services of an Italian celebrity chef seemed like an excellent way to improve the food they provide to the city’s homeless. But after the first meal on April 20, Simone Salvini discovered Bologna’s homeless don’t have a palate for his specialty vegan cuisine. “Some told me that they need to eat meat, and would return to the streets [if they were fed vegan food],” the chef told a local paper. The TV chef said he will still aim for healthy fare, but that meat is officially back on the menu.

Chicken style

Would you be interested in keeping the savor of spicy fried chicken at your fingertips all day long? In an unusual marketing campaign, KFC has created edible nail polish designed to taste exactly like the fast food company’s signature chicken. The polish comes in two flavors chicken lovers may lick to their tongue’s content: Original or Hot and Spicy. So far, KFC is only selling the polish to customers in Hong Kong. Its campaign slogan: “Finger Lickin’ Good.”

Fast cash

If you can’t beat them, join them. That’s the sentiment of Zimbabwean treasury officials who just announced they would soon be printing their own version of United States dollars. After sustained hyperinflation, Zimbabwe ditched its own currency and began using the U.S. dollar as the nation’s main money in 2009. Using U.S. currency has helped stabilize Zimbabwe’s economy to an extent, but banks don’t always have enough U.S. currency on hand to satisfy customer demands. To solve that problem, central bank governor John Mangudya said the nation would issue “bond notes” equal in value to U.S. $2, $5, $10, and $20 bills.

Gross national cheddar

Time to break out the fondue pots. America has a bona fide cheese glut on its hands. According to an April Department of Agriculture report, the United States inventory of cheese has mounted to its highest level in 34 years. The country has nearly 1.2 billion pounds of cheese stored away. Analysts blame the dairy glut on overproduction in both Europe and North America. But while consumers may find it sweet, dairy farmers on both continents have soured on crashing cheese prices.

Hot box

In what could pass for a Saturday Night Live parody, Vinnie’s Pizzeria in Brooklyn has unveiled its newest offering: a pizza delivered in a pizza box made from pizza. The restaurant announced the new creation, called the Pizza Box Pizza, from its Twitter account on April 27. According to the restaurant, the outer square-shaped pizza excellently insulates the inner circular pizza. The invention will cost hungry customers $40 plus delivery fees.

Swiped mail

Dogs and postal workers are known for being not always on friendly terms. But one British mailman is protesting what he describes as a dangerous cat. A resident of Patchway, U.K., received a notice from the Royal Mail requesting he either install a new mailbox or take action to restrain the “potential hazard” inside his house—his black-and-white cat Bella. Apparently the cat had made a game of clawing at letters as they come through the front door’s letter receptacle. The Royal Mail said the mailman was worried the cat “put his fingers at risk of injury.”

Bored sick?

For seven months, a middle manager at a French perfume company refused to come to work, claiming to be ill. Now he says his health problems—insomnia, ulcers, and epilepsy—were because his company offered him too little work to perform. “I felt guilty and ashamed to earn a salary for nothing,” Frédéric Desnard, who made more than $90,000 a year, told Le Monde. Interparfums finally fired Desnard after months of sick leave in September 2014, and now the 44-year-old Paris man wants a payday to make up for losing his job. On May 2, Desnard filed a lawsuit against his old company alleging that the job bored him to the point of serious depression. Desnard’s lawsuit requests a payout of more than $400,000 from Interparfums.

Of strange tongues

A language group is asking U.S. District Court Judge Gary Klausner to go where no judge has gone before: to declare Klingon a real language. In Paramount Pictures’ lawsuit against a group of Star Trek devotees making a fan-fiction film, the production company alleges it owns a copyright on the Klingon language. But, in an April 27 court brief filed on behalf of the defendants, lawyers for the Language Creation Society claim that since the publication of The Klingon Dictionary in 1985, the language has become organic and cannot be the property of Paramount Pictures. For instance, the brief notes, literature from Shakespeare to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh has been translated into Klingon.

Heads in the clouds

Flush with oil wealth, one Arab nation is considering a colossal plan to bring rain to its desert. Officials in the United Arab Emirates are consulting with an American firm to research the possible impact of building a man-made mountain in the Persian Gulf nation. If the plan is adopted, Emirati officials hope the artificial mountain will cause moist air rolling in from the gulf to rise and develop into rain clouds. And if that happens, the U.A.E. could gradually turn areas of desert into farmable land. No stranger to major earthworks, the U.A.E. constructed a pair of man-made archipelagoes off the coast of Dubai last decade.