By Staff
Robert C. Baker, 84, a longtime professor of food science and poultry science at Cornell University, died last Monday, March 13.
Why should we care in the Midwest?
Because, quite simply, he changed the way we eat.
His innovative imprint on American cuisine included inventing chicken nuggets and turkey ham.
Baker created dozens of products, including poultry hot dogs.
His chicken barbecue recipe was such a Cornell icon that President Clinton asked for it during a 1999 visit.
Baker, who founded Cornell's Institute of Food Science and Marketing in 1970, always had a stand at the New York State Fair.
Anniversary: the Ant Farm, 50. Creator Milton Levine, 92, is still alive.
Irrational exuberance: Penguin Press “won” a bidding war to publish the memoirs of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
The deal reportedly will pay Greenspan an advance of more than $8.5 million, which would be the second-biggest amount ever for non-fiction.
Largest was the $10 million Alfred A. Knopf paid in 2001 for the memoirs of former President Bill Clinton. I read his whole book, which particularly lagged during the grade school years.
Wal-Mart parodist sues to sell products: Computer store owner Charles Smith designed T-shirts and mugs to lampoon Wal-Mart.
They're in bad taste, but Smith wanted to make a point by comparing the retail giant to the Nazis with his “Wal*ocaust” slogan. The Bentonville, Ark., company wasn't amused.
Wal-Mart launched a legal skirmish by writing a cease-and-desist demand that led Smith to file suit in federal court in Atlanta with the help of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen legal aid group. At stake, Smith said, is his free speech right to publicly criticize the world's largest retailer - or any other company.
Smith asks the court to rule that his products are protected by the First Amendment and do not infringe on Wal-Mart's trademark because there is no likelihood someone might think Wal-Mart sponsored them.
Soft landing: Harry Stonecipher, the former Boeing Co. chief executive who worked less than three months in 2005 before his March ouster over an extra-marital affair with a mid-level female executive, earned almost $11.5 million in salary and stock awards, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
His take-home pay topped that of all other executives at the Chicago-based aerospace giant, including his replacement as chairman and CEO, W. James McNerney Jr., hired away from 3M Corp. in July. Stonecipher was brought out of retirement in 2003 to help mend Boeing's reputation after two Pentagon contracting scandals. Stonecipher's compensation was bolstered by rising stock value, from $43.53 per share when issued to him to a five-year high of about $70 a share by the end of last year.
Whatever happened to the Dixie Chicks?: As war in Iraq enters its fourth year, the trio's untitled fifth album is scheduled for release May 23.
In the likely first single, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” President Bush critic Natalie Maines sings, “How in the world can the words that I said/Send somebody so over the edge?”
Retiring: Mike Wallace, 87, the last link to “60 Minutes” from 1968, when he and founding executive producer Don Hewitt invented television newsmagazines, announced March 14 he will retire this spring as a regular correspondent. He'll keep an office at CBS News and file occasional reports.
In 1979, Wallace was the first Western reporter to interview Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini after American hostages were taken.
Hewitt said Wallace will be remembered as a CBS legend alongside Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. He became a CBS newsman in 1963.
Class of 2006: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame March 13 inducted Blondie, Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Sex Pistols, but the British proto punks were no-shows.
The ceremony airs on VH1 Tuesday, March 21, at 9.
Neverland, Michael Jackson's 2,600-acre personal theme park purchased for $14.6 million in 1988, dismissed employees March 16.
California officials closed the ranch and ordered Jackson, who moved to Bahrain after his acquittal last year of charges he plied a young cancer patient with alcohol and molested him in the master bedroom in 2003, to pay $306,000 in back wages.