Ivana the Terrible: A chef said Ivana...

Ivana the Terrible: A chef said Ivana Trump fricasseed his ego when she fired him from the Trump Castle Casino Resort in Atlantic City, N.J. Paul Patay, 57 when he got the ax in 1988, filed an age-discrimination suit against Ivana and ex-husband Donald Trump, claiming Donald promised to protect him from Ivana’s allegedly capricious behavior. Patay cried on the witness stand Wednesday, claiming that when Ivana canned him he was left feeling impotent, depressed and suicidal.

* Heavy Subjects: Miss Manners thinks philosophers “are not paying enough attention to manners.” The etiquette columnist, a.k.a. Judith Martin, said recently at Johns Hopkins University that the heavy thinkers at the school’s philosophy department need to help people deal with--think about this--telephone answering machines, lap-top computers and people who hog the TV remote control.

* Tombstone Blues: Before he went on to create Bart, Homer and the rest of “The Simpsons,” Matt Groening had a not-so-promising career maintaining tombstones in Portland, Ore. The future cartoonist often had to straighten up turn-of-the-century gravestones. “Once we dug them up and stacked them to the side and then couldn’t remember where they went, which almost got me fired,” he said.

* Not Caving In: An injured explorer who was carried from the nation’s deepest cave last week after a dramatic four-day rescue operation flew home Wednesday to Albany, N.Y., with a cast on her left leg. “I feel great,” Emily Davis Mobley said on seeing her husband, Bill, and a crowd of fellow cavers. Mobley’s leg was crushed by a falling rock March 31 while she was on a mapping expedition two miles into Lechuguilla Cave in southeastern New Mexico. “With work I’ll be able to cave again,” she said.