And joke or not, it was hard not to view Truffles On The Nipplesgate as a deliberate upstaging of her rival, a shot over Paltrow's bows that sent out a clear message: yes, you may have spent a proportion of your $29 weekly budget on seven limes, but when it comes to saying idiotic things about food, there's a new sheriff in town, and her website's flogging a wooden egg holder for $68 plus P&P.
Let's hope Cable doesn't avoid it by flogging the state's remaining shares before Royal Mail's annual meeting, which is set for the summer.
It's a shame, though, that Sawers wasn't on hand to soften the flogging BP received from US courts after its Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 that killed 11 people.
Melbourne and Sydney were a public flogging for a very dead English horse, while the sole outstanding Test in the England series was, unfortunately, the first.
When the market for sugar-sweetened carbonated soft drinks began to decline in the late 1990s giants such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo knew their future lay in flogging water.
That at least is the message from the retired experimental physicist Leon Lederman, who is flogging his Nobel prize medal.
Even with 344,000 households in London awaiting a council home, the mayor is cheering on their flogging off and replacement with unaffordable luxury flats.
Because, let's be honest here, wearing oversized or "boyfriend" clothes does make you look like a slob: I know it, you know it and the people flogging you the clothes certainly know it.
THAT WAS THEN; Sinn Fein is now not only in diligent Ministerial panoply without even a.38 changing hands, but its candidates have also romped home in both recent elections as the bigger NI nationalist party, soundly flogging what party spokespersons regard contemptuously as a dying SDLP horse.
And then: more trouble, in the shape of Paltrow's nemesis Blake Lively, proprietor of Goop's upstart rival in the world of websites flogging insufferably marketed, overpriced cobblers, Preserve.
Admitting that he'd "done time for flogging the fuck out of some coons," he insisted that "a lot of my friends are Aboriginal," before adding, "go and see the fucking coon camps, the coon creeks… they couldn't invent the fucking wheel".
