Striking Out

We knew something was up when Morton Thidwicke, CEO of our parent company Encompass, Leverage and Devour, came strolling through the Lighting Round newsroom and said a bright day was dawning. Unfortunately, we had the blinds closed.

He talked of synergy and the dynamism of new media, exactly the kinds of things you hear before a flunkie starts handing out pink slips.

"Huh?" I injected. "Is this an Obama rally?"

"No, no, son," Thidwicke replied with his grandfatherly air. I looked to see if he was holding a knife. But he continued: "Like the Walrus said to the Carpenter, 'The time has come to talk of many things.'"

"Like my job, I gather."

"Like your future job, my friend." He turned in place and waved his arms around our battered office as if he were shaking off responsibility for his forthcoming words. "We have surveyed your operations for several months now, and while we are satisfied with the product, the question is whether it takes full advantage of the distribution channel."

He shifted his gaze back to me, graveness ringing his face. "You only publish on Fridays, but a blog stands ready for input 24/7. Why do you constrain yourself to one day a week?"

"That was the design," I replied innocently. "We talked about looking back at the week's more unusual or underreported stories while giving people something to look forward for. Or are you going to tell me that conversation took place with an underling who no longer works here?"

"Do I look like John McCain?" he said, punctuating it with an annoyed chuckle. "Whatever was said, it's pointless now. We are moving in a new direction. Effective immediately, I am calling an end to your Friday operation and reassigning your staff to efforts throughout the week. Our readers are hungry for content regardless of the calendar and we must adapt to meet that growth area. From this day forward, our audience will no longer have to wait for the weekend to hear from us."

Whew. It beats outsourcing to the Philippines. And Mr. Thidwicke kindly allowed us one last edition. We begin with another person who sees the end is near.

THE ONLY BAD PUBLICITY... It's a little late for it now, but Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee is hoping a national newspaper does for him what The New York Times did to John McCain.

He tells ABC News' "The Note:"

"Obviously, that one didn't seem to make a big difference. In fact, if anything it's helped John McCain and I'm kind of hoping the New York Times will take me on and run a nasty front page story -- may be the best thing that could happen to me, certainly was to him."

Huckabee has suggested recently that such a moment could be his ticket to the nomination.

"One word can end a guy's political career, one word, and it's over," Huckabee elaborated. "So when people say I can't be the nominee, until we get to the convention in Minneapolis this fall in September, we don't know absolutely, positively who that nominee is."

Oh, I think we do... Pat Paulsen! Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign is begging for equal time from the Times, after it ran an article depicting campaign workers depressed over the thought of losing Texas and Ohio.

Also from The Note:

According to the Huffington Post, the Clinton campaign says their [group] letter [to the paper] was rejected because the space is for "ordinary readers."

Clinton staffers and volunteers also submitted individual letters, which the Times also rejected, according to the Huffington Post.

Now if they had only dressed Hillary in Muslim garb...

KEEP IT CLEAN. They can't do anything about political dirty laundry, but a group of Australian researchers are working on clothes that clean themselves, according to Technology Review:

Researchers at Monash University, in Victoria, Australia, have found a way to coat fibers with titanium dioxide nanocrystals, which break down food and dirt in sunlight. The researchers, led by organic chemist and nanomaterials researcher Walid Daoud, have made natural fibers such as wool, silk, and hemp that will automatically remove food, grime, and even red-wine stains when exposed to sunlight.

If all goes well, Arizonans may never have to do laundry again... except during the monsoon.

I SWEAR... If only sunlight could clean up our kids' dirty mouths. Cursing experts say kids are swearing more than ever.

The Sacramento Bee reports:

Teens are more likely to drop casual expletives, or "fillers," than the generation before them and have more trouble adjusting their conversation to fit their audience. That means adults — especially strangers who cannot sanction the teens — hear more of the same language that the teens' friends hear, says [Timothy] Jay, author of "Why We Curse" and "Cursing in America."
He estimates that the average adolescent uses roughly 80 to 90 swear words a day.

Jay says kids pick up cursing from -- ta-da -- their parents.

Jay notes that the Internet, television and other media may be making adolescents more comfortable with swearing, but it is their parents' own language habits that are the biggest influence.

The solution, says Jay, is for parents to teach the etiquette of swearing.

"Kids should know about the power of language. Parents should remind them about how important words can be and when you should use them," agrees Leahy.

Etiquette of swearing? What ever happened to soap in the mouth?

YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT. The Smoking Gun is hot, but not as hot as wikileaks.org, the do-it-yourself depository of leaked documents from governments and corporations around the world. A bank named on the site sued, but since the site is located outside the U.S., the most a federal judge could do was order its domain name de-listed. A coalition of media groups is now fighting that order, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

Peter Lurie, deputy director of Public Citizen's health policy wing, filed a declaration saying that the organization frequently uses leaked government documents to bring attention to important public issues, such as the Food and Drug Administration's consideration of "a drug company plan to conduct research on its new drug in Latin America using a design that the agency acknowledged would be unacceptable in the United States." After the plan was exposed, the company redesigned its study, Lurie said.

"If Wikileaks is shut down," Lurie said, "the ability of Public Citizen and its members to access" information from whistle-blowers "will be significantly impaired."

Attorney William Briggs, who represents [bank] Julius Baer, said his firm was preparing a response to the briefs lodged Tuesday. "This is a case that presents a conflict between an individual's right of privacy versus the press' ability to publish private information about private individuals," he said.

"I think the individual privacy rights outweigh the right of the press to report that information because of reasons of identity theft. If financial industry customers do not think their information is protected, those institutions could go out of business."

And you can hear anti-globalizationists around the Internet saying, "That's the point!"

As for us, we're not going out of business, just adjusting our business hours. Be seeing you!