Advance review of Laura Bush's memoir

[UConn James]

NYT link

 

Among other items, including discussing for the first time the fatal car accident when she was a teen.... Something I'd never heard before:

 

Mrs. Bush also suggests, apparently for the first time, that she, Mr. Bush, and several members of their staff may have been poisoned during a visit to Germany for a G8 Summit. They all became mysteriously sick, and the president was bedridden for part of the trip. The Secret Service investigated the possibility they were poisoned, she writes, but doctors could only conclude that they all contracted a virus. After noting several high-profile poisonings, she wrote, “we never learned if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one.”

 

You know, food poisoning happens quite frequently in the course of things. You'd think that with a crowd like that, tho, extra special caution would be taken vis-a-vis food procurement, storage, cooking temp., etc. You wouldn't expect an event like that to be a place featured on "Kitchen Nightmares." And, yeah, the diagnosis of an unknown "virus" is the medical default for "We've run a lot of expensive tests. Done everything we can short of getting a sample of the food, and well, like Sergent Shultz, we're **** out of ideas. Get some rest and stay near a toilet."

 

Back in the day, kings used to have food tasters. As we now know, these little buggers often take several hours to wend their way through the system, and some can take up to six weeks before symptoms. Tasters, I guess, were there to counter for active, malevolent poisoning of the quick, deadly kind e.g. cyanide. Is monitoring the food something that the Secret Service did, or now does?

[John Adams]

Sounds kooky.

[RkFast]

Sounds kooky.

 

Cooks will wipe some swamp-ass sweat on your burger for as little as asking them to cook it another three minutes.

 

You dont think some nitwit chef in a Berlin hotel could do the same to an unpopular American President?

[John Adams]

Cooks will wipe some swamp-ass sweat on your burger for as little as asking them to cook it another three minutes.

 

You dont think some nitwit chef in a Berlin hotel could do the same to an unpopular American President?

 

Do you think cooks are not under a watchful eye as they prepare a meal for multiple heads of state?

 

Sounds kooky. Not impossible. But considering there is no evidence other than people go sick, kooky.