Everyone is wishing President Obama a happy birthday today, but I found out through this foodie blog that it happens to be Newswoman Helen Thomas' birthday, too.

This reminded me of Ms. Thomas' excellent chiding of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in early July.

Today, Obama brought Ms. Thomas some cupcakes, figuring, I guess, that if beer works on cops and college professors, then sweets work for reporters.

The headline on the front page of Saturday's New York Times, "Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud", should have been above the fold and more about freedom of speech rather than media moguls making nice in the name of making a buck.

The feud between Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann goes back almost seven years, but once it started to hurt General Electric in the wallet, the media guys decided to end the war, not Olbermann or O'Reilly. I wonder what's next. Huffington Post has an interesting take here.

Here's a snippet from the NYT piece:

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

"It was time to grow up," a senior employee of one of the companies said.

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.

“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”

I was furious on Sunday when the Arizona Daily Star reported that the Pima County Sheriff's Department was getting ready to station deputies at drive-through restaurants in an attempt to sniff out late-night drunk drivers. Check out the article for yourself.

The operation—named Operation Would U Like Fries, or Operation WULF for short—seemed ridiculous, and the name of it was so childish and goofy that it sort of insulted me. I mean, go ahead and bust me in a Los Betos drive through at 3 a.m., but please don't make me live in a world where cops are allowed to use smart-ass acronyms for programs that are about as close as I'm willing to get to the big brother brand of police action.

I thought about heading down to the next Board of Supervisors meeting to voice my concerns over all this, but the Star is reporting today that the article was in error, which is unfortunate, because the story was picked up by The Associated Press wire and distributed nationally before anyone was the wiser.

Apparently the idea was never more than just that, an idea, and the Star has done a good job of retelling the tale of this odd enforcement action here.

And to all you late-night drive through workers: Keep up the good work. I'll see you around 3 a.m. sometime this weekend.

The Internet offers us a personal window into the current post-election rage sweeping through Iran, from personal blogs, like Tehran24 and The Huffington Post, to of all things,Twitter.

If you're one of the twillions tweaked by Twitter-mania in general, and the twoubling twend of adding a "tw" to the beginning of every noun, verb, adjective and adverb, you may have reason to rejoice: A geek version of Nostradomus (Tweetstradomus?) is predicting a major Y2K-like event in the Twittersphere, sometime tomorrow.

Technically, the site www.twitpocalypse.com says 1:30:21 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, but I haven't the motivation to do the Google search to find out what that is in Tucson time. Apparently, the unique numeric identifier for each "tweet" is fast approaching the magic number of 2,147,483,647, which is the geek equivalent of 666. At that moment, the identifiers will become negative numbers, crashing some or many of the third-party software programs dorks like me use to manage our Twitter accounts.

There's even a cool count-up meter of tweet numbers on the Twitpocalypse site, so you can watch the imminent demise of civilization in real time.

There is late word from the Web site Mashable.com that Twitter engineers went ahead and moved up the end of civilization (by skipping some numbers) to right now, so that third-party developers can reboot the world as we know it and still have Sunday to rest (the way the former creator intended it).

If this is the end of the Tweetosphere, Twitterverse, or Twitter-whatever-we're-calling it, enjoy the prescient videos below from Current TV (and they say Al Gore didn't invent the Internet):

If not, feel free to leave your Twitter twexpletives in the comments. I'll even provide a handy link to words that start with "tw" to help you.

Services for Tess Martinez will be held at St Melany's Byzantine Catholic Church, 1212 N. Sahuara Ave. A rosary will take place on Monday, June 8, at 7 p.m.; the funeral services will be held at 10 a.m., Tuesday, June 9.

The family is also collecting donations for Tess' services. Donations can be made at the Bank of Tucson (4400 E. Broadway Blvd.), account no. 4038626; at Something Sweet Dessert Lounge (5319 E. Speedway Blvd., 881-7735) or at St. Melany's.

Maria "Tess" Martinez, a former Tucson Weekly intern, died Monday, June 1, in a single-car accident in New Mexico. She was 25 years old.

Martinez was student at the University of Arizona. In addition to interning and freelancing for the Weekly, she served as an intern at the Tucson Citizen and as an apprentice at La Estrella de Tucson; as a temporary writer at the Green Valley News and Sun; and as a freelancer for publications including Inside Tucson Business.

She spent the summer of 2008 as one of 10 students in the Academy for Alternative Journalism, a joint program of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The AAN announcement said of Tess:

At 19, Tess Martinez left her hometown of Tucson, Ariz., and headed to California, eventually settling in San Francisco. After a few years of goofing around in the Bay Area, she returned to Tucson and finished her studies in journalism at the University of Arizona. She works as a waitress at a sushi bar and enjoys tinkering with Volkswagens.

She was on her way to the Chicago area to look for work when the accident happened. Her Twitter page lists her last message—sent at 3:44 p.m., on Saturday, May 30—as: "driving to Chicago tonight."

The Weekly staff sends our sympathies to Tess' other friends, and especially her family.

Interesting to see how quickly this Princeton alert spread through Twitter this morning. The first tweet of a text alert from Princeton about a gunman on campus occurred 11 minutes before the posting on Princeton's web site.

Update: THE ALL CLEAR HAS BEEN GIVEN WITH REGARD TO A GUNMAN ON PRINCETON'S CAMPUS.

Shortly before 11 a.m., a suspect with a handgun was reported near the Dod Hall dormitory in the middle of campus. Princeton University's Department of Public of Safety and Princeton Borough and Township police are investigating, according to the University webpage.

The University issued an alert through the Princeton Telephone and E-mail Notification System just after 10:50 a.m. Warning messages went out via e-mail, text message and phone calls.

There are reports that law enforcement officers back set up barricades near Witherspoon, Little and Dod Halls. Students and their families in Dod Hall were asked to leave the building, many students reported.

It is also unclear whether members of the Class of 2009 have already been taken off the notification system, as many of them have said they did not receive the alerts younger students did. Many seniors are still on campus moving out after yesterday's Commencement.

There are reports that members of the incoming Class of 2013 also received the message.

ORIGINAL POST:

This hasn't hit mainstream media yet this morning, but Twitter users are rapidly retweeting an emergency notification on Princeton University's home page about a suspect with a handgun near a dorm on campus shortly before 11 a.m. (Eastern time).

Here's the text of the advisory, posted at 8:07 a.m. Tucson time:

Shortly before 11 a.m., a suspect with a handgun was reported near the Dod Hall dormitory. Princeton University's Department of Public of Safety and Princeton Borough and Township police are investigating.

Stay indoors until further instructions.

Check the Princeton home page at www.princeton.edu for updates. Campus community members can check their e-mails, as well.

Let's hope this is only a minor alert...

Here is a link to the Daily Princetonian's coverage:
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com

Um.

OK, so when the Tucson Citizen announced it was going to be reborn as the "Voice of Tucson" I expected rampant suckiness. But ... this?

Meet the new Tucson Citizen, coming to you on Word Press, a free blogging software.

We know Word Press. For three years, that's what we did our blogging on here at Weekly World Central. It's nice freeware. We used it because we launched blog.tucsonweekly.com with no budget and no tech department to speak of.

But for Gannett/Tucson Newspapers—with all their resources—to use it to launch the new "beta" version of the Citizen? Two words: Fucking. Joke.

This is not a criticism of Mark Evans and Ryn Gargulinski; they're doing the best they can, I presume, in a no-win situation.

But Tucson Newspapers and Gannett should be embarrassed. This is appalling. Gannett's getting half of TNI when this is their contribution to Tucson media?

Lame.

My nomination for worst media deal of all time: Time Warner buys AOL for $124 billion in 2000. Wasn't the tech bubble a fun time?

From Bloomberg today:

Time Warner Inc. will spin off the entire AOL Internet unit by the end of the year, reversing a failed $124 billion merger that triggered record losses.

AOL’s online advertising and Internet-access businesses will be separated into an independent, publicly traded company, New York-based Time Warner said today in a statement.

And:

Time Warner’s 95 percent stake in AOL is worth about $6.3 billion, including about $3.4 billion for the advertising business and $2.8 billion for the access division, David Joyce, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Co., estimated in a report yesterday.

When Google bought a 5 percent stake in AOL for $1 billion in 2005, it valued the unit at about $20 billion. Time Warner said last month it was in talks to buy back the stake. Google wrote down $726 million of the investment last year.