HOLCOMB: NO NEWSPAPER STRIKE TONIGHT

“We’re not going to finish tonight,” said Local President Henry Holcomb at 9:42 p.m., during a break in negotiations. “We will keep talking as long as we are making progress, and we are.”
For that reason, a strike will not be called tonight.
Negotiators for both sides will continue talking until the federal mediator sends them home for the night. They will return tomorrow to resume talks.
This is not an “extension,” Holcomb said. Even though the contract expires at midnight, it will remain in effect.
“We will keep talking and keep making progress,” Holcomb said, although major issues have not been resolved.

IF THEY SETTLE: The ownership will have expended all goodwill and local-boys-make-good political capital earned from buying the Inky/DN out of Knight-Ridder indentured servitude and now leads a dispirited and mutinous newsroom aboard a creaking wooden ship into the darkening seas of print journalism’s final voyage, hoping against hope that the scout team sent to Online Island returns with news of a place to dock, potable water and low-hanging fruit that can sustain the captain and crew into the sunset of senescence.

IF THEY STRIKE: Guild puts out online paper and really gets the hang of this Web content thing and FINALLY figures out that there’s more to it than just printing your newspaper on the Internet. Or maybe not. The logo they’ve chosen looks like a brochure for a Rittenhouse dentist. Message to Guild: Go Wild! Think like a coed at Mardi Gras. And you will get all the beads you need. Meanwhile, back at the scab paper, things turn into the Metro pretty quick as readers fall away like leaves on a once mighty oak, joining the strange new flora and fauna of blogs and other online whatnot growing out of other once-mighty oaks now moldering on the media forest floor. Once the strike ends, Philly Media Holdings realizes just how short their legs have grown, and how tall every other player in town has grown in process. The Daily News keeps on keepin’ on and the Inquirer becomes like that tree in the woods that nobody realizes is long-dead until the day somebody leans up against it and it falls over.
SGT. BYKO’S STRIKE FAQ AFTER THE JUMP (more…)

ELIZABETH FIEND REPORTS: Pharmaceutical corporations hire PR firms to sell disease like they do sneakers. “Just do it” becomes “just take it” — the little purple pill, that is. Do you have a going problem, or is it a growing problem? One pill (Viagra) makes you larger and one pill (Avodart) makes you small. But the question remains, do they do anything at all?

Go ask Alice.

Alice went to sleep one night feeling perfectly fine. The next day she woke up to learn she had high blood pressure! Absolutely nothing about her changed, her numbers were exactly the same. But a committee redefined the definition of high blood pressure, and Alice and about a million others developed the medical condition, literally overnight.

Naturally, they need treatment. Wow, what a great marketing strategy! And that’s exactly what it is…. (more…)

THE WOOK REPORTS: Wait a second – am I to discern from yesterday’s news that Snoop Dogg’s an unrepentent and heavily-armed stoner? Exactly. That incredulous, “how far outside of the pop cultural beltway do you hover, Wook” sentiment is exactly how the LAPD must feel every time they have to do some limpin’ to the pimpin’, whether it be at LAX or outside the NBC Studios. The fact is that after a decade of extoling the virtues of the sticky icky icky clear across the commercial landscape – be it music, film, porn or kids books – “Snoop as stoner” is an accepted American institution, on par with “Kennedy as liberal” and “Paris as whore”. If an iniatitive was placed on the California ballot to legalize marijuana within five feet of the dude, it would pass overwhelmingly. Hell, the new issue of Rolling Stone is adorned with a practical campaign ad, positioning Santa Snoop as the cuddly, holiday-ready bad boy against societies true ills – the “SUPER-RICH” and “MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE”.

Wait, what’s this about cocaine, a gun, and hidden compartments? Oh, michaelricha’ please. Has Johnny Law learned nothing from America’s love affair with the Duke boys? Look past the obvious difference in skin tone and choice of wheels, and you still got a “good ole boy, never meaning no harm,” pursued by a negligable law enforcement entity that seems all the sillier for the rationale behind bringing the strong arm down. Speeding, doing acrobatic car leaps over drained ditches, moonshine, hot white women, weed, cocaine, guns – it’s all the same, filed under “things Americans love.” Hell, even Roscoe P. Coltrane had a fondness for dawgs! Remember Flash?

Ease back, Snoop. Someday in the not too distant future, the Oliver Stone of Generation Y will undoubtedly put two and two together and birth a cinematic opus to America’s bogus Drug War that’ll use your life and times as a pertinent backbone, for never has there been artist whose first accepted public utterance was a fitting byline for the biography that would unspool.

“There’s so much drama in the LBC, it’s kinda hard being Snoop D-O-double-G.”
I hear ya, brother. Now, more than ever.

F.B.I. ARREST PHILADELPHIA PHILANTHROPIST EX-CON

(CBS 3) PHILADELPHIA Philadelphia Philanthropist Joseph Mammana was arrested at his Bucks Countyjoe2.jpg

An F.B.I. arrest affidavit released Thursday states businessman Joseph Mammana, owner of Yardley Farms LLC, was arrested for a firearms violations.

The affidavit states, “…Mammana knowingly possessed in and affecting interstate and foreign commerce a firearm after previously having been convicted of a crime punishable by more than one year in prison… .”

Authorities said the F.B.I. searched Mammana’s home in the 600 block of Sedgley Avenue in Yardley, Wednesday, in connection to an I.R.S. investigation, seeking tax and business records.

During the search agents discovered a loaded handgun in a master-bedroom nightstand.

[...]

Mammana is well known throughout the Delaware Valley for making generous donations to the Citizen’s Crime Commission, providing reward money to help solve high profile criminal cases.

KYW: Joey’s Got A Gun

MICHELLE SAYS SO: Joe Mama Mammama Speaks Out

Authorities say attacker has a foot fetish

The Center City groper – who authorities now say has a foot fetish – yesterday sent police chasing after fresh leads and women shopping for pepper spray.

The man, armed with a black handgun, has robbed and groped five women, age 21 to 55, mostly in the early-morning hours in and near Center City since Nov. 18. In some cases, he has ordered them to remove their shoes so he could touch their toes, authorities said.

INQUIRER: No Word Yet From The Mayor About A Shoe Ban

(Got an event that needs some love? Well, you better have a badass flyer or ain’t nobody goin’ no how. Seriously. And send it to feed@phawker.com. Like, early and shit. We’ll let you know if it sux or not. Because, really, you should know.)

In ancient Rome, at night, when they were drunk and high, and feeling poorly about themselves, they used to toss bread in the alleys and shoot the rats with machines guns as they scrambled for the crumbs. And then they would feel better about themselves. That, as much as anything else, explains why Rome burned. Today, we shoot them with TV cameras and it makes us here at Phawker Industries feel very Roman. So much so that we burn every time Jim Gardner fiddles.

[Hat tip to The Wook]

Dear Mother Phawker:

My wife is a member of a book club whose members meet once a month, rotating from one house to the next. Two weeks ago, my wife was the host, and I watched as our living room filled with about 10 women. I played a support role in the proceedings, keeping the refreshments flowing and the food bowls filled. Everything was fine until I bumped into one of the club members in the hall.

We’ve been friends for several years, and she’s always been welcome in our home — maybe too welcome. She smiled at me and laid a hand on my elbow. “You know, I’ve always felt like I wanted to get to know you better,” she said. Then she squeezed my elbow and returned to the others.

Ma, I may not be the quickest study around, but I am not the slowest, either. My wife’s friend sent me a not-too-subtle sign that she’d like to add a new chapter to her life, with me playing a starring role.

I’m not taking her up on it, but I wonder: Should I mention this to my wife?

Signed,

Stunned in the South

(more…)

ATLANTIC CITY – Identifying the four women whose decomposing bodies were found facedown in a ditch behind a strip of seedy West Atlantic City motels last week had been the most pressing task for investigators.

Now police face the daunting task of finding their killer.

Yesterday, authorities identified the fourth victim – the youngest – as Molly Jean Dilts, 20, an unemployed fast-food cook from Blairsville in Western Pennsylvania.

She last spoke to relatives on Oct. 7, after going to Atlantic City with her boyfriend. Sometime after that, her family filed a missing persons report with police, authorities said.

“She was the first one. She was the most decomposed,” her father, Vernon Dilts, said in a phone interview from his home. “Maybe he got braver and braver,” he said of his daughter’s killer.

The medical examiner confirmed Dilts’ identity through fingerprints. Her body, which had lain in the watery ditch for as long as a month, was so decomposed the cause of death couldn’t be determined. That also was the case with Barbara V. Breidor, 42, of Ventnor, N.J., who was identified on Sunday.

The woman whose body was the last dumped in the ditch, Kim Raffo, 35, of Atlantic City, had been strangled with a ligature, according to the medical examiner. Tracy Ann Roberts, 23, also of Atlantic City, died from asphyxia by unspecified means.

All four deaths are being investigated as homicides, according to Atlantic County Prosecutor Jeffrey S. Blitz.
[...]
[Authorities] refused to call the deaths the work of a serial killer, but experts said the killings bore serial-murder similarities. All the women had blond or light-colored hair and their shoeless bodies were placed in a row in the ditch with their heads pointing east.

INQUIRER: Semantics Can Be Such A Cruel Pimp

From Sgt. Byko’s Lips To Our Ears: Guild And The Company are in FINAL bargaining meeting, could last an hour, could last 48 hours, but if THE STRIKE comes:

Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News staffers to launch competing online paper if workers strike
By Associated Press
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 – Updated: 08:14 AM EST
PHILADELPHIA – The largest union at Philadelphia’s two biggest daily newspapers is planning to launch\ an online newspaper to compete with the company Web site if workers go on strike after midnight on Thursday.
Employees from The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News would contribute local content that will be edited and posted online, said Stu Bykofsky, a Daily News columnist and spokesman for their union, The Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia.
“It’s to provide news and information for the community so they won’t be deprived,” he said.
In competing with Philly.com, the union’s PhilaPapers.com would sell ads and function like an online news site, covering major stories as well as the strike itself, said Tom Ferrick, Jr., chief steward at the Inquirer newsroom and a columnist.
About 200 people are expected to staff the site, which is to include news, politics, business, sports and entertainment sections. While there would not be any direct union advocacy, the site would have links to other sites that tell the union’s viewpoint, Ferrick said.
Jay Devine, spokesman for owner Philadelphia Media Holdings, declined to comment on the union plan but said talks are “making good progress and we’re hopeful.”

AP: Kind of Ironic That Print Is The Problem And Online Is The Solution, Isn’t It?
PREVIOUSLY: Hey AP, We Had This YESTERDAY, While You Were Sleeping Reading Phawker

FROM PITCHFORK:

Chan Marshall has recruited Dirty Three’s Jim White, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Judah Bauer, the Delta 72′s Gregg Foreman, and Lizard Music’s Erik Paparozzi to accompany her on the rest of her tour dates this year, under the appropriate band name of “Dirty Delta Blues”. Four of those dates feature White and Bauer as the opening act and two will be in California for New Year’s celebrations with Gnarls Barkley and the Flaming Lips.

PREVIOUSLY: Heroin Is Cool WILL Fuck Your Shit Up [PW]