Reds fire Narron, and Hargrove fires himself Major league baseball teams are in form when it comes to making changes on the bench. The Reds tossed Jerry Narron from the last place dugout Sunday night.

That's got to be more like a mercy firing. It's almost July 4th and the Reds' season is pretty much over this year...

Reds General Manager Wayne Krivsky today praised Jerry Narron but said he and CEO Bob Castellini decided to fire him because the last-place team needed a "different voice … a different approach.''

Krivsky said advance scout Pete Mackanin, 55, will be interim manager of a team with the worst record in baseball. A search will begin for a permanent manager.

"Permanent manager" is an oxymoron in sports, kind of like "jumbo shrimp" or "pleasant airline travel." Everyone's hired to be fired in pro ball.

Mike Hargrove fired himself on Sunday night, but not from a dog-like cellar dweller. His Mariners have been playing well. They're playoff contenders on a winning streak. Whoever gets the Seattle job will be managing to beat Detroit for a wild card spot...

Hargrove left saying his "passion has begun to fade" after 37 years in baseball, even though Seattle is on its best tear in four years. He became the first big league manager since at least 1900 to depart while on a winning streak of more than seven games, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

He picked a weird time to bail out to be with his family. I'd think they would understand if he wanted to stick around for three more months. Imagine if the Mariners somehow win the World Series. Wow, Thanksgiving in the Hargrove household is really going to suck if that happens.

Pomeroy tosses out Pomeroy I think this is the start of a big family brawl. When a dad fires his son from the family business, and the son was the CEO and president, that sort of thing doesn't just go away quietly.

It comes back when everyone gets together for a family gathering. If there's alcohol involved, frank and direct honesty become part of the conversation real fast.

Daddy David Pomeroy isn't saying why Sonny Stephen Pomeroy earned a boot in the butt out the door...

"Steve’s conduct and his actions were in no way illegal or involving any financial impropriety," David Pomeroy said in an interview this afternoon, only hours after the company announced the decision.

David Pomeroy said Stephen’s firing had nothing to do with pressure from shareholders who had been demanding that they both be replaced.

If it's not a financial problem, maybe it's sexual harassment. That's the only thing that will get someone fired even faster than for stealing from a company. I pulled that fact right out of the perfectly grooved cushions of the Futon Of Love. It's as good a theory as anyone else's.

News anchor suspended for burying the mayor's lead The mayor of Los Angeles must have used the "half my age plus seven" calculation when picking out a Telemundo reporter for a spicy relationship. Antonio Villaraigosa is 54, Mirthala Salinas is 35.

I can tell the L.A. Times editors have to be dancing on the desks over this story. Check out this money shot quote from His Honor that they printed...

Villaraigosa, who called Salinas a "consummate journalistic professional," said she decided about a year ago that "our friendship had grown to a point where it was necessary to inform her management that she shouldn't cover me. She did that. And they agreed."

Really, Mayor, did you have to use the word "consummate?" He was bragging to everyone with a neat little play on words there.

The stuff has really hit the fan now. His sultry journalistic paramour has been suspended by Telemundo over the relationship. The Times thinks they've been playing "fish taco with chorizo" for 18 months. Oh it gets better too. Much better...

Meanwhile, Telemundo editorial staffers worried they might have said too much about the mayor in the presence of Salinas.

"They're all sitting here wondering, 'What did I say to her about him, not knowing that it could have gone right back to the mayor?' " said a Telemundo source who added that Salinas had earlier told suspicious superiors that she and the mayor were merely friends.

It's now clear that Salinas seems to have the strangest of fetishes — a thing for politicians. She was previously involved with Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez and state Sen. Alex Padilla.

Telemundo can't say Mirthala didn't put her body and soul into her political reporting, now can they?

Image by Robert Durell/L.A. Times

Hurricane boss forced out to sea After six months on the job, the chief of the National Hurricane Center found himself reassigned. That's not what 23 of his underlings wanted.

They sought a pink slip for Hurricane Bill Proenza. Was he mean to staff? Did he insist on having a bigger umbrella than everybody else?

Upon further review, or at least a casual glance from the Futon Of Love at the Internet, it looks like Hurricane Bill spoke truth to power...

Many of those employees said they feared Proenza's actions could affect the way they forecast and deal with storms this year.

Proenza has publicly questioned how aging equipment will hold up for forecasters.

Hurricane Bill wanted money to replace an aging weather satellite, too.

No one's accusing the guy of spending government money on pub crawls on South Beach, or trying to change the names of hurricanes to Pokemon characters. It sounds like he wanted more funding so the Center could do a better job.

The Feds ought to look into who's benefiting from the status quo among those 23 backstabbers. Someone's covering up something. C'mon, it's in Miami, Florida. Doesn't anyone read Carl Hiaasen these days? Florida and corruption go together like Bacardi and Coke.

Why would anyone be against doing a better job of hurricane prediction? Too weird, peeps.

Fired coal miner hits a rich vein I love to see big companies that retaliate against their employees get the equivalent of a Habanero pepper sauce enema from the courts.

It's event better that such a blog-worthy event happens as I'm reclining on the Futon Of Love and tapping out Fired Blog Post Number 300. An unnamed coal mine from Kentucky worked for four months with a broken arm in a cast.

It didn't heal, so when he took time off to let it get better, he ticked off his heartless employers...

In March, 2004 the injured worker's doctor told him that his arm was not healing properly. He stayed out of work for two months. When he was scheduled to come back to work in May of 2004, his employer, Rivers Edge Mining Company, fired him.

The worker claimed that he was fired in retaliation for his filing a workers' compensation claim. Kentucky law requires employers to reinstate employees when they return to work after they have been out of work on a workers' compensation claim.

Lawsuitalarity ensued. He won, with the jury stuffing a sock full of coal and belting the mining company with their verdict...

The jury returned a verdict against the employer which included $171,697.00 in back pay, $513,410.00 for loss of future earnings, $200,000.00 for "aggravation, inconvenience, humiliation, embarrassment, and loss of dignity." In addition, the jury awarded $1,000,000.00 dollars in punitive damages.

Little guy for the win.

Chicago reporter fired for aquatic hijinks Amy Jacobson has plenty of time to swim and work on her tan, now that a Chicago TV station has dumped her for what looks like a pretty astonishing lapse in judgment...

Although she acknowledged a "lapse in judgment" for going swimming with the estranged husband of a missing Plainfield woman, Amy Jacobson never imagined it would destroy her career as a reporter for WMAQ-Channel 5.

Yeah, anyway, the missing woman was in the middle of a divorce, and ready to kick her husband out of the house. She disappeared on April 30th. Hubby's still at the house with the swimming pool. Amy's been covering the case.

The hubby's sister invited Amy to come by his house to talk about the case on July 6th. Since she was on her way to go swimming with her kids anyway, she went over to the house.

Someone from a rival station shot several minutes of video, showing Amy in a hot swim top appearing at a back door from time to time. Other people were going in and out too, but none of them were covering the man of the house and his potential role in his would-be ex-wife's disappearance.

Check this out and see if you think Amy was trying to seduce her way to a scoop...

Throughout her 11 years at the station, Jacobson has been known as an aggressive reporter who ingratiates herself with sources and sometimes employs questionable methods to get stories. Though she was a lightning rod for rumors, her bosses generally looked the other way and praised her for bringing them the scoops.

Once that video came out, and you know the rival station agonized for about three seconds over airing excerpts from that, Amy's bosses told her to cover up her stuff and clean out her desk.

Politico golfs while government lays off thousands Pennsylvania's capital is in a massive mess. They can't hammer out a budget, which meant sending some 25,000 workers home without pay.

Not all the lawmakers in Harrisburg were diligently trying to get past the impasse...

As people went unpaid and waited to hear the fate of their jobs, one local lawmaker continued with his golfing plans.

Democratic Rep. Mike Sturla hosted a political fundraiser on the golf course.

Those laid off workers probably weren't invited, because, hey, they aren't getting paid, how could they possible donate to reelecting this pasty Tiger wanna-be?

Neither a couple of other Democratic representatives nor Democratic Governor Ed Rendell had any comment on Mike's short game. As if that's some kind of surprise.

Image from WGAL.com

A hiring story of yellow sticky notes I was just settling into the Futon Of Love to catch 'Roswell' this afternoon when Lucas showed up in my inbox. The boss is usually too busy to bug me with whatever it is marketing people do after lunch, so I pushed myself out of my comfy pose to make the long stroll to my work desk/card table/three and a half piece dining set.

It was worse than I feared. Lucas has fallen in love, or at least in like, with the former intern from AdRants.

Ok, fine, space aliens can wait a moment...

It's been a month or so now and I still haven't quite figured out what he's going to have me do. Right now, he has me coming into his office like 10 times a day to bend over and pick up this pile of papers he always has on the ground and then climb up this ladder to file the papers in this really cool, glass-floored loft he has above his desk. He's always leaning back in his chair, talking on the phone and watching me while I file. Is this just what everyone has to do during their first year in advertising?

Lucas, I hate to break this to you, but after several minutes reading that post, and some quality time with the full size image of Miss Stickies, I don't think she's in your future. Unless AdRants has started labeling their real-life stories of the industry under "Spoofs."

I'm telling Gautam to have your browser cache checked, unless I'm distracted by something arriving in my PayPal account by quitting time, capice?

NBC thinks reporters are really stupid I've got a mild chuckle for you today. It's about ex-NBC co-chairman Kevin Reilly. He had his job at NBC for a few weeks. Then all of a sudden he's at Fox and Ben Silverman has his job at NBC.

The bastard media, and I mean that in the most positive way, had some fun tormenting Benji over the circumstances of his NBC arrival...

The opening question tossed out to newly installed entertainment co-chairman: “What do you think about a company that pays an executive $6 million and fires him a month later?� The questioning reporter then added, “Is that a good company?�

Mr. Silverman was taken aback, but he managed to stay on message, gamely saying he had only just arrived and couldn’t address the regime of his predecessor, Kevin Reilly […]

[Silverman’s co-chair Marc] Graboff didn’t exactly offer a surfeit of candor about their predecessor, either.

“Let me address that if I could,� Mr. Graboff said in a helpful and serious tone, “because I think you’re obviously referring to Kevin Reilly, and I just want to kind of hit that on the head a bit. He wasn’t fired.�

The press room perked up, eager for clarification.

“What happened was when Ben became available, about three months after we made Kevin’s new deal, we jumped at the opportunity to bring Ben on board to the company. Kevin, when that happened, realized or determined, frankly, that there was just no role for him at the company and decided to move on.�

At this, the entire press corps burst into laughter.

Just think, Kevin could have sat around 30 Rock playing Solitaire on his PC every day, if you can believe NBC. That must have been awkward, Kevin comes to work, Benji's stealing his loose change from the desk drawer and dropping Kevin's personal effects into a wastebasket, some words are exchanged at an ear-splitting volume.

Anyone at NBC happen to get this on a camera phone and put it on YouTube? That's the best ratings potential NBC has in its lineup this year.

Severance? We don't do that here 'Here' being a company in Israel. I know, you thought this was going to be some run of the mill All-American firm putting a screwing to its workers. Happily, we've exported our venal corporate greed globally.

It reads like a logline from a mid-place finisher in Project Greenlight. Assis Tamang, a Nepalese man falls in love with an Israeli woman, relocates to her country to make babies with her, and gets a job.

Alas, his good work is for naught! His cruel bosses can him so they don't have to sweeten his pay packet as they boot Assis out the door...

But on December 3, 2006, eight and a half months after starting at Hashmira, he was fired without warning. Shocked, he called his boss, Gabi Lazarovitch, who explained: After nine months on the job, a fired worker must be paid severance pay. Therefore, the company fires all its workers shortly before the nine months are up and rehires them as new workers three months later. Lazarovitch stressed that Tamang had been a "fantastic" worker, but said he had no choice: This was company policy.

This happens all over Israel, thanks to a law that would cost the greedy corporate bastards 20 to 30 percent more if they kept their people for nine months. It's security guards, janitors, people like that getting hosed by The Man.

It isn't just jeans and cigarettes people copy from America. They've got our corporate evil down pat too.

Blogging? You are so fired I suggest you take the figures Wired cited for firings related to blogging with a grain of salt the size of a truck. They're saying about ten percent of companies have fired people for violating corporate blogging or message board policies.

Even the guy who wrote the Wired article politely suggested the survey may have a subtle essence of eau du bullshit. It's a company that sells stuff to detect such nefarious blogging and forum postings, I mean really be a little more obvious, people...

Nearly ten percent of companies have fired an employee for violating corporate blogging or message board policies, and 19 percent have disciplined an employee for the same infractions, according to a new survey from Proofpoint, a messaging security company.

The whole country would have fired-for-blogging people wandering around like the infected people in 28 Days Later. They'd be pulling me off my bike in front of In-N-Out, trying to take my phone and do some texting.

If you've got some kind of health condition, skip the grain of salt. Not to mention scary surveys.

Even Muggles like you should be celebrating Hey, Lucas? Fred here. How's it going?

Really? That's pretty cool, yeah. Look, I'm taking a break tonight. I'll post again on Monday.

What, no, I'm not sick. I've just got plans to embrace my inner geek today.

Yes Lucas, I plan to geek out and hang around a Harry Potter party and get a copy of the new book so I can read it and start surfing the Internet again.

Every freaking website has a spoiler or two on it this week. I've been afraid to launch Firefox.

Ha ha, very funny. 'Polishing my wand to celebrate.' My sides, they are splitting. The first hour of 'Schindler's List' was funnier than that, Lucas.

Look, the whole point about the readers this weekend is that there aren't going to be any. We've been waiting two years for J.K. Rowling to stop popping out little wizards and witches and finish Book 7.

Fine. Yes, ok, if anyone stops by here, they can visit this link and read about the Memoirs of a Lonely Policeman video. One cop fired, another one had to resign.

Seriously, they put it on YouTube. I can't find it, there's just a bunch of clips of bands doing covers of So Lonely.

Anyway, I've got to press my Ravenclaw tie. See ya.

Auditor's mistake as big as Texas Alfonso Gutierrez Jimenez got to live an outlaw's nightmare when the Texas Rangers came calling.

I don't mean they forced him to go to a ballgame at The Ballpark in Arlington. That would be just cruel, forced to see the Rangers play Kansas City or Tampa Bay.

Alfonso's association with the Texas Rangers extends to the law enforcement ones, not the baseball players. They heard some discouraging words about Alfonso...

The case does not appear to be related to drugs, said Elliott.

Texas Rangers had received information that Jimenez solicited a $5,000 bribe, in exchange for reducing a business owner's tax liability during an audit, a statement from the Fort Bend County sheriff's office said.

Poor Alfonso. He must have thought he was working in Chicago and lost his mind for a minute. If it was Los Angeles, he'd be either cheating on his wife or covering up for her driving escapades. Soliciting bribes is something they do in the Windy City or Florida.

Intern cries scapegoat after losing tape Poor little ex-Ohio intern. Jared Ilovar left a data tape in his car, and some thoughtless bastard stole it. Shame the tape had tons of stuff on it that will make ID theft as easy as surfing the Intarwebs.

No one's real surprised that a 22-year-old could be pretty thoughtless about other people's property. This fired guy is surprised that he's being blamed for being so stupidly careless...

"I am the intern who was made the scapegoat in the situation surrounding the theft of a data tape," Ilovar said.

He said he never was instructed on how "to properly secure, store or watch over the data tapes at night."

"The extent of my instructions on what to do was, 'bring these back tomorrow,'" Ilovar said.

He wants his internship back. That'll happen at about the time his old boss, the governor of the state, gives up his primo Ohio State football tickets without a fight. As in not today, tomorrow, or after that, ever.

Hey, hey Paula, did they fire you? Poor Paula Abdul, she's melting down faster than soft serve on Huntington Beach. Lots of places are saying she got fired from the Bratz movie.

When it comes to telling tales, few do it better than the Post. The New York Post, not the boring one in Washington...

Paula Abdul was fired via e-mail from the live-action movie "Bratz," as a TV camera recorded her tearful reaction. On this week's epi sode of "Hey Paula," Abdul's self-aggrandizing reality show on Bravo, the loopy "American Idol" judge is shown crying after she receives a mes sage from real "Bratz" producers telling her that her services are no longer wanted. She had claimed she was the film's choreographer, costume designer and executive producer. The episode shows perma-victim Abdul screaming, "How can they treat me this way?" Our source said, "Paula was not ever really a part of the movie, and she was a nightmare to deal with. There was no way that was going to work."

But wait! Paula wasn't fired! Straight up she's telling you...

In a statement released to UsMagazine.com, her representative says, "She was not only taping American Idol three days at week, she was also filming her Bravo reality series Hey Paula! five days a week as well. In addition, she was in the process of not only expanding her successful QVC jewelry line but also coming up with the first scent in her new perfume line Sexy Thoughts."

"Something had to give and ultimately that was Bratz."

So who are you going to believe? What Paula says now, or what she said on video?

Image by AP Photo/Stuart Ramson

Swastikas don't make a friendly work environment When did Connecticut become an outpost of the Third Reich? I know they tax the hell out of people who live there, but government employees usually try to downplay any overt connections to pure concentrated evil.

Not Craig Whitcomb. He thought it would be just peachy keen to have an employee redecorate the workspace of another worker with the next level in harassing someone over hailing from the land of great beer and drool-worthy automobiles...

Town officials said Whitcomb ordered a parks department worker to paint a swastika on the desk of another worker.

"This individual is a second level supervisor. It's up to the town supervisors to set an appropriate tone for town operations. This incident certainly failed that test," First Selectman Jim Lash said Thursday.

Whitcomb had been accused of harassing Otto Lauersdorf, a marine division foreman, about his German heritage and Lauersdorf's union had filed a grievance on June 7.

The employee who did the actual painting got a letter of reprimand. Craig picked up a different letter from the city of Greenwich - a 'see ya, don't wanna be ya' type of letter.

Monster staff being devoured Monster had its own Nightmare On Wall Street after their numbers made investors very sad. But don't worry, they're going to fix things faster than you can say, "how sweet, fresh meat"...

Monster expects the job cuts to save as much as $170 million a year. The company will spend up to $80 million to upgrade technology, such as software that lets employers place more ads without help, to rekindle growth in North American job listings, its largest business, Chief Executive Officer Sal Iannuzzi said.

I loved the next quote from some stock analyst. He said Monster had its worst growth in several years this past quarter, while the economy was booming along. That ain't a good thing.

If this was NFL training camp, Monster would be getting a visit from The Turk. "Sorry man, your ass is cut, hand in your playbook." Speaking of cuts, I'm betting no executives get the Freddy Krueger treatment when Monster starts slaying-off (see what I did there?) workers.

Some smart competitor ought to take advantage of this, and have something like a Monster Refugee promotion. If only there was a job search site with millions of listings and a cheeky attitude who could whip up a bunch of t-shirts and try this, I bet it would be pretty cool.

(Lucas, that last bit was aimed at you. Come on dude, this is tailor-made, gift-wrapped, silver platter gift horse riding in and making wee-wee on your carpet. It's not like you're busy blogging.)

Tour de Firing full of dopesvspac So many cyclists got busted and fired from their teams in the Tour de France, they're going to have to start drug testing bike riders in second grade just to possibly find someone who isn't cheating to ride in the race next year.

Floyd Landis got busted last year when his heroic ride turned out to be chock full of additives. Compared to last year, Landis was a picnic. A bunch of riders had a little special sauce in their pee this year.

Now they're saying the guy who won may have been a drug cheat too...

German authorities said Tuesday they have received documents from doping expert Werner Franke which he claims show Tour de France winner Alberto Contador was involved in doping.

Franke said he has documents from last year's Operation Puerto doping investigation in Spain which show that Contador, a Spaniard who won the doping-marred Tour on Sunday, had taken HMG-Lepori as a testosterone booster and an asthma product called TGN.

Damn dudes. One guy flunked out during training, then three more got tossed from the race. Oh wait another cyclist turned in some bad blood.

I've had it with this Tour de France drug nonsense. I'm going to watch Barry Bonds and see if he ties Hank Aaron's record instead of worrying about that cycling mess.