• Mariah Carey’s latest hit Touch My Body looks destined for #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, which will give her 18–one more than Elvis Presley and the most of any solo artist in history. I hope this doesn’t mean she has to wear ugly jumpsuits and eat weird food…
• The recent #1 success of Leona Lewis’ Bleeding Love was great news for composers Jessie McCartney and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, who have yet to hit the top spots as singers. Ryan’s bands’ Apologize hit #2 before peaking, but spent an amazing 25 weeks in the Top Ten–the longest since 199’s Santana/Rob Thomas duet Smooth…
• Miley Cyrus, who won a pair of Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice awards Saturday night, told a radio interview that the rumors of her looking for love on the web are untrue, adding, "I’m not that desperate yet!".  Besides, t here just aren’t that many cute guys in mullets anymore…
• Madonna said in an interview that rumors about trouble in her marriage to director Guy Ritchie are "ridiculous" but admitted that being married is "not easy" and requires a lot of compromising, adding, "We still have to take turns".  Gross–at what?
• Some Internet gossip claims that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie tied the knot in a New Orleans ceremoney on Saturday, which is questionable since sources claim they weren’t even there over the weekend.  Of course, who’s to say both sources aren’t the same tabloid?
• Hindu leaders in the US are unhappy with the upcoming Mike Myers comedy The Love Guru, who say the flim’s depiction of a spiritual leader played by Myers makes fun of their religion.  They should just feel fortunate that he didn’t decide to make the character Fat Bastard’s twin brother…

• A 2-year medical study has concluded that Merck and Company’s Vytorin and Zetia, among the best-selling drugs in the world, not only don’t appear to slow the growth of fatty plaque as advertised, but may even help speed up the process.  Merck says despite the results they will continue to believe in the drugs’ effectiveness–just like another of their products, Vioxx…
• Former President Bill Clinton said yesterday that Democrats worried that the close contest between his wife Hillary and Barack Obama may be hurting the party should just "chill out".  Of course, getting DNC chairman Howard Dean to relax occasionally involves drugs and restraints…
• CIA director  Michael Hayden called the situation on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where al-Qaida has set up a save haven,  "a clear and present danger" to the West.  Sounds like a job for Jack Ryan…
• New GPS applications that can provide a cell phone users’ exact location are being marketed to customers as a great way for friends to know where they are, but has privacy advocates concerned about its misuse.  On the other hand, it could single-handedly stop cheating by technically-challenged spouses…
• Shiite cleric Mutqtada al-Sadr said he was pulling his fighters off the streets of Iraq and called on the government to stop raids against his followers and free them from prison.  Vice President Cheney reportedly called the action "bad for business" and warned them to both "get back in the fight before I make you"…
• For the first time in NCAA basketball tournament history, next weekend’s Final Four will feature all the #1 seeds selected at the tourney’s outset–North Carolina, Kansas, UCLA and Memphis.  That’s gotta have more than a few folks choking on their brackets…

• Fall Out Boy was forced to officially abandon their quest to set a world’s record by performing on all 7 continents within a year when bad weather in Antarctica made it impossible for them to fly there for a concert.  So it’s true–Pete Wentz is truly not all-powerful…
• Taylor Swift may be a big star, but she still has time for her MySpace friends, saying she personally uploads pictures, checks comments, and writes the content on her page.  I personally think it’s just the way to stay a big star…
• Madonna told a radio interview that she doesn’t think she can ever sing her early hits like Holiday or Like A Virgin again unless, as she said, "somebody paid me, like, 30 million dollars or something".  She may have found religion and turned into a real mom, but she’s still our Material Girl…
• The fallout continues over a Los Angeles Times article that falsely suggested Sean "Diddy" Combs had advance knowledge of the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, as the apology by the paper for basing the piece on what turned out to be fake FBI documents has not satisfied Diddy’s attorney.  He wants one of two things–a fat check or an even fatter spread in their weekend edition…
• Forbes has ranked the hottest new recording stars based on what the financial magazine is known for–money, with Sean Kingston, Colbie Caillat, Jordin Sparks and OneRepublic in their Top Ten for huge CD and download sales.  Idol winner Taylor Hicks not only didn’t make the list, he couldn’t even get editors to return his calls…
• Plans for an X-Files movie sequel are in the works, featuring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in their original roles of agents Mulder and Scully.  The truth may be out there, but if the show’s "black helicopter" fan base isn’t, this thing won’t make it past the first popcorn refill at the multiplex…

• Even as President Bush said yesterday that "normalcy was returning back to Iraq", the State Department ordered all its personnel there not to leave reinforced structures, and to wear helmets, body armor and other protective gear if they must go outside.  Of course, maybe the president thinks that’s normal there…
• Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates has ordered a full inventory of nuclear weapons after a mistaken delivery of ballistic fuses to Taiwan was discovered.  This could be very unfortunate if someone didn’t understand that we’re not that friendly with Iran, North Korea and Venezuela…
• Both Democratic presidential candidates talked economics yesterday, each with different approaches to tackle the nation’s potential recession.  Barack Obama proposed more relief for homeowners and another $30 billion stimulus package, while Hillary Clinton prefers her own "Make Bill Pay" revenge/aid program…
• Puerto Rico’s governor is facing charges of campaign finance violations, but denied any wrongdoing and seems intent on his re-election effort.  I guess he was a lot more careful than Eliot Spitzer…
• A Seattle-area woman will receive a kidney transplant, thanks to a donation from an unusual source–the barista at her local Starbuck’s.  That’s gotta be a whole lot of grande half-caf skinny mochas…
• A judge in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania known for creative decisions sentenced three Spanish-speaking men convicted of robbery to learn English or go to jail.  They wisely agreed, deciding that speaking the same language as everyone would make them better criminals…

The company that owns the station that I work at is pretty big, but it’s only really gotten that way in the last couple of years.  Email-wise, it’s been just recently that there have been wide distribution lists created for corporate broadcast of various items (some of you definitely know what I’m talking about).  The impact of that has recently been demonstrated on a large number of my co-workers here and nationwide.

Someone somewhere in our organization decided to share some promotional offer that really only applied to a subset of our stations to every on-air person in our company (several hundred people at least).  That in itself wouldn’t have been that irritating–if it hadn’t been for an enormously huge number of the recipients of the message using the "reply to all" button to either make a comment (wisecrack or otherwise), or some request to be "taken off the list"–apparently assuming they’d been added to somebody’s cutesy distribution list.

As you can just imagine, the mushrooming effect of something like this bordered on the ridiculous after a couple of hundred of these hits your inbox.  But after a while, it just got to be funnier and funnier.  I couldn’t tell whether my talented co-workers either didn’t realize they were continually sending their messages to everyone or didn’t care that they were or just wanted to irritate everyone else as much as they were.  Occasionally, some of them were pretty funny and a few were insightful enough to wonder if we could all find some forum where we could share some of what we know with one another.

But just like the volume of messages themselves, that notion just quietly faded away.  I doubt we could no more creatively collaborate any better than we handled the "reply to all" button.  But who knows?  Maybe another, better message will come along that we all will get that will actually be worth discussing, and something worthwhile may actually occur.  There’s a first time for everything…