Respect Authority

Just stay away from its poo.

A BROOKLYN CHILD sustained permanent brain damage, and a teenager lost sight in one eye, after contracting a rare disease transmitted through contact with raccoon feces. The city’s Department of Health is telling parents to be on the alert for so-called raccoon roundworm, which can cause nausea, nerve damage and potentially death. Being “on the alert,” according to the health department, means supervising your children to “keep them from ingesting raccoon feces.” Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better than swine flu.

IN TYPICAL “We Hold Our Movie Awards Show About Four Months After Every Other Relevant Movie Awards Show” fashion, MTV announced nominees for annual movie awards, airing May 31. Topping nominations were Slumdog Millionaire and Twilight, taking in six nods each. Indeed, Slumdog lead Dev Patel will go head to head with Twilight star Robert Pattinson for the “breakthrough performance” award, a comparison that pretty much sums up why MTV awards are meaningless.

TWO PEOPLE WERE injured Monday when a car jumped a curb and crashed into the entrance of a Times Square restaurant while filming for an upcoming action movie. Both people were brought to a hospital after being non-fatally injured by the runaway vehicle, part of a shoot for upcoming Nicholas Cage film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Though anyone in Times Square at 1 a.m. on a Sunday is asking for trouble, I don’t think anyone deserves to be hurt for a Nicholas Cage movie.

ALWAYS A BASTION for out-of-touch stories, the New York Times profiled up-and-coming gossip site Wonderwall.com, whose claim to fame seems to be a combination of not slamming celebs (a la Perez Hilton) and scrolling horizontally. The site’s founders, Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun, say they wanted to push celebrity news without being catty (Perez) or dated (People.com), but the result is pretty much just boring.

JUST IN CASE you didn’t resent Wall Street enough already, the Wall Street Journal today outlined the woes of bored New York Stock Exchange traders, displaced by electronic trading and falling action at the beleaguered exchange. While before they could barely find time for lunch, traders these days are spending work time on YouTube, online shopping, solitaire, newspapers, crossword puzzles, naps, or horror flicks in the exchange’s movie room. Oh, the inhumanity.