I once lost about 12 pounds by eating lots of sushi. I didn’t think was a good long-term idea, however, because sushi was expensive and might have too much mercury. Now Jeremy Piven, best known as Ari in Entourage, has found that eating lots of sushi can indeed raise your mercury levels a significant amount. According to New York,
Dr. Carlon Coker went on record with Entertainment Tonight to confirm that Piven has six times the amount of mercury in his system that a healthy person should have, apparently a result of Piven’s insatiable appetite for sushi.
As a result he quit his role in David Mamet’s Speed the Plow. Mamet’s response:
I talked to Jeremy on the phone, and he told me that he discovered that he had a very high level of mercury. So my understanding is that he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer.
What a jerk.
LOL! That was a funny response! There’s a good example of a spontaneous creative joke.
I doubt it was spontaneous. Probably he got it, ultimately, from whoever writes Letterman’s or Leno’s jokes.
More sushi for the rest of us?
https://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/12/do-fish-fly.html
@Nathan Myers: Unlikely. Maybe you don’t know Mamet, but he’s no stranger to comedy. He doesn’t need to be fed lines.
I’d like to echo Seth’s final “What a jerk” remark. Everything I’ve read by Mamet and about Mamet leads to that one, inescapable conclusion, from his brutal plays to his awful screenplays to his recent public neocon conversion. Yuck.
And I’m thrilled to see “Dark Age Ahead” by Jane Jacobs on your “I Recommend” list. It’s beyond depressing but it certainly is useful right now.