Odds and ends, 3/29/07

Here's the way to reward people who have made you a household name: Fire them all and bring in someone cheaper. Or offer to re-hire them for less money.

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While surfing the Net for stuff to write about, I see sportswriters are beginning to make their predictions for the upcoming baseball season.

I don't care.

I don't care about the predictions, because really, I can guess as well as a sportswriter can.

And I don't care that much about the upcoming baseball season. The only rooting I'll do is for the Reds to finish higher than Pittsburgh. Since the 1994 strike, I have spent not one dime on anything baseball related other than for my daughter to play one season of T ball and two seasons of softball.

Moving over to football, if you want to see someone who has the whole world in his hands cry that he doesn't have enough, then see if you can feel sorry for the family that owns the Cincinnati Bengals.

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I don't know the guy who wrote this piece in the New York Times about Congress' approach to global warming, but I'm going to have to read more of his stuff.

His thesis is that there are three approaches to dealing with global warming: acknowledging the costs; letting the market work; and keeping the solution simple. At the end, he says ther is a bigger problem than getting America to do something about global warming, and that's getting China and India to do likewise.

As usual, I don't agree with everything the writer says, but he writes an interesting piece that goes beyond telling the rest of us to drive hybrid cars and to use fluorescent light bulbs.

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One more thing about how Bob Withers' retirement marks the end of an era in The Herald-Dispatch newsroom. He was the last newsroom person hired in the 1960s to leave. We have several who were hired in the 1970s (myself included) and several who were hired in the 1990s and 2000s. But we have no one who started work here in the 1980s. All those people, who would be in their 40s now, have moved on. It may have been a corporate strategy at the time to hire only people who would leave soon, or it may be a coincidence. But the 60s and 80s are no longer represented in this newsroom.

Also, Bob was the last newsroom person who was hired before Gannett bought The Herald-Dispatch in 1972 (I think).

Just an observation.