Al's Morning Meeting

An Associated Press article says:

Block cheddar cheese -- the benchmark for mozzarella and other cheeses -- reached $2.08 a pound Thursday on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, up 78 percent from $1.17 a pound a year ago. Industry observers attribute the price surge to strong demand and higher production prices -- from the cost of milk to the cost for dairy farmers to feed their herds.

Some big pizza chains, which use mountains of cheese, already have responded.

Both Pizza Hut and Papa John's International Inc. have raised the price of their cheese-only pizzas to the same amount as one-topping pizzas at company-owned stores.

The higher cheese prices have exacerbated pressure companies already face from higher wages and fuel costs, said Chris Sternberg, spokesman for Louisville-based Papa John's.

Papa John's uses about 100 million pounds of cheese each year, and the cheese typically makes up 35 percent to 40 percent of the food cost in making a pizza, he said.

There are also predictions that farmers will thin herds because of high grain prices. That will cut milk production this year, and milk prices might hit a record high.

The Baltimore Sun is trying to help readers get focused on the city's homicide crisis. Halfway through the year, the city already has recorded 149 homicides. The newspaper created an interactive crime map that is worth a look and worth considering in your own town, crisis or not. It does show how crimes tend to happen over and over in predictable areas.

Urban planners have told me that in most cities, the highest crime areas have been high crime areas, in some cases, for decades. Look at your crime hot spots. What are the underlying causes? Was there ever a time when they were not crime hot spots? What changed?

Tomorrow in Al's Morning Meeting I will include a multimedia report. I sat in on a conversation this weekend with Canada's "Big Three" network news anchors at this month's RTNDA of Canada convention. These three are to Canada what Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric are to U.S. TV. You will hear what they say about the future of network news, about the use of polls in news coverage and about the ways TV news can compete with Internet information sources. You'll also hear about the effect Katie Couric has had on Canada's ability to have a female main news anchor.

You may have read about the government of New Zealand trying to stop a couple from naming their baby boy "4real."

The government already stopped parents there from naming kids Adolph Hitler and Satan -- which makes me wonder -- does this kind of intervention happen here in the U.S.?

Nobody stopped an old friend of mine in Kentucky from changing his name to Natty Bumppo. (He is an attorney and would have loved that fight. His given name was John Dean, and he changed his name in protest. Esquire included a story back then. And yes, Natty Bumppo is a character in James Fenimore Cooper's writings.)

Here is a collection of odd and interesting names that make "4real" look perfectly acceptable and tame. At one time in my life, I had an orthopedic surgeon named Dr. Bono and a dentist named Dr. Molar.