Tag: Featured

Latest Headlines

Hooded U.K. youth whacking Papa John’s drivers with eggs; and singer Fergie’s got milk for her ‘primal’ spicy Taco Bell craving

A news summary focused on 10 big employers; updated 8:14 a.m.

PAPA JOHN’S: Police in south England are investigating a string of recent attacks where hooded youths are pelting motorbike-riding Papa John’s delivery men with eggs, causing at least one serious crash that sent  a driver to the hospital with a bruised shoulder and black eye. The latest incident in south England came after the same driver was attacked with 10 eggs several weeks ago in Cheltenham an hour west of Oxford.

“Even I have had eggs thrown at me,” the store manager there said. “It’s very dangerous, you do not know what is going to happen next. My staff say it is not safe out there” (Gloucestershire Live).

Back in the United States, Panera Bread claims the former top IT executive who left to work for Papa John’s this month wiped his work computer of critical trade secrets, a statement a federal judge said justified a temporary restraining order barring the executive from joining the Louisville pizza giant. In a lawsuit filed in its St. Louis hometown, the bakery chain says the executive, Michael Nettles, will use the secrets to compete for business from young consumers drawn to the latest ordering technology. Nettles’ LinkedIn profile says he was Panera’s vice president for enterprise architecture and IT strategy (Courier-Journal).

Meanwhile, in the Detroit area, the pizza chain was advertising yesterday for delivery people with a “keen sense of direction with the ability to read a map or use GPS” (Craigslist).

PIZZA HUT was also advertising for drivers — “awesome people,” in fact — to make $12-$15 an hour delivering pies in Cincinnati (Craigslist, too).

TACO BELL: Singer Fergie is still a huge fan of super-spicy Taco Bell food, turning a meal into what a British newspaper today called “absolutely carnage,” citing an interview in NME magazine. The 41-year-old megastar behind the recent hit “M.I.L.F.$” told NME: “It’s a binge meal for me, so I don’t do it all the time. But when I do, I go hard.” She added: “I’m like, primal.”

The singer-songwriter pledged undying love to the fast-Mexican chain six years ago in her smash hit single “Glamorous,” singing: “I still go to Taco Bell/Drive through, raw as hell/I don’t care, I’m still real/no matter how many records I sell” (Sunday World). Watch her (NSFW!) M.I.L.F.$ video: Continue reading “Hooded U.K. youth whacking Papa John’s drivers with eggs; and singer Fergie’s got milk for her ‘primal’ spicy Taco Bell craving” →

Jobs

All fired up! You, too, would be grinning if you got a fatty bonus just for signing up to be a reefer driver

time-clockBoulevard reports extensively on executive pay at big local employers. But we also look at what folks make down in the trenches — and off in the more unexpected corners of the Internet. After buzzing through recent Craigslist Louisville help-wanted ads, we’ve unearthed openings for truck drivers, sign spinners, trivia game emcees, and Asian egg donors (and we’re not talking about chickens, either).

Truck driver

The duties: Talk about smokey and the bandit! Could trucking for a living be any easier? Not according to Swift Refrigerated, which promises: “No gimmicks, no contracts, no run-around. Just open road and a career path you can meet head-on.”

You won’t spend your entire life away from home, either. Over-the-road drivers are typically out for 10-14 days at a time. Regional drivers will have varied home time, based on freight demand. And some even have daily home time, with consistent schedules!

What it pays: Swift offers a $2,500 sign-up bonus; more details when you contact the company. Employment site Glassdoor says Swift drivers make between $42,000 and $45,000 a year, but that’s based on just a handful of reader posts. In a 2012 story, CNN said truckers earned a median $37,930, with the top 10% making more than $58,000.

Related: Here’s every imaginable marijuana slang term.

Photo, top: That’s the 100% unretouched illustration Swift trucking uses in its Craigslist ad. Continue reading “All fired up! You, too, would be grinning if you got a fatty bonus just for signing up to be a reefer driver” →

Media and Marketing

CJ owner Gannett files suit to get court records on Donald Trump’s divorce from Ivana to see if she accused him of rape

Joined by The New York Times, Gannett Co. argues in papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court today that the rape allegation — which Trump has denied — is of public interest in the GOP presidential campaign of the twice-divorced and thrice-married New York billionaire, according to the New York Daily News.

The filing notes that a 1993 biography of Trump reported that Ivana Trump — his first wife — told friends her husband had “raped” her in 1989 during a fit of rage. Trump and the former  Czech model Ivana Zelníčková married in 1977 and divorced 14 years later in 1991. By 1995, they’d patched things up enough to star in a Pizza Hut commercial where they joked about their divorce settlement:

Gannett bought The Courier-Journal from the Bingham family in July 1986 for $300 million. With the CJ and USA Today, Gannett now owns 110 dailies across the U.S. and the U.K. Adjusted for inflation, $300 million would be equivalent to $660 million in today’s dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

Photo, top: While that photograph is undated, Ivana Trump’s hair screams 1980s; more hairstyles from that era.

Food and Dining

Soft and creamy: This master’s description of a special bourbon hitting stores next month sounds like classic food porn

“It starts off as soft butterscotch with candied orange peel. It transitions into a creamy vanilla in the middle and finishes with subtle anise and moderate spice. It’s like eating black jelly beans in the middle of an orange grove.”

— Jackie Zykan, Old Forester master bourbon specialist, describing the 2016 Birthday Bourbon commemorating Brown-Forman founder George Garvin Brown‘s birth going on sale next month.

Here are his additional notes: color, deep reddish umber; nose, complex and cinnamon, wood-spiced with nutty chocolate, dark caramel and rich oak notes all brightened with a dash of crisp citrus fruit; taste, mulled spice sweetness and fruity with bright citrus peel highlights; finish, long and warm with mulled fruit character lingering on.

(Ironically in a Sam Malone of “Cheers” way, Boulevard Publisher Jim Hopkins doesn’t drink alcohol.)

Executive Pay

As stock hits record high, Schnatter leads four top execs selling thousands of Papa John’s shares

Papa John's exec trades August 2016

Lance Tucker
Tucker

Founder and CEO John Schnatter and the three other senior officers sold the shares over the past week for prices between around $76 and $77 a share, according to new Securities and Exchange Commission documents.

The trades came just as Papa John’s hit a record high of $78.09, pushing the value of Schnatter’s 10.5 million shares above $800 million for the first time.

PZZA closed this afternoon at for $75.15, up 65 cents.

John Ritchie
Ritchie

So-called insider stock sales are an important barometer of where top executives at companies think share prices are headed. But they’re an imperfect measure. Sometimes, executives sell through what’s called SEC Rule 10b5-1 plans. They allow major holders to sell a predetermined number of shares at a predetermined time, a plan often approved in advance by the board of directors to avoid insider-trading accusations.

The Papa John’s filings don’t disclose any reason for the sales, however.

Wayback News

49 years ago today: in the Summer of Love, Vietnam came home to Louisville; dirty skies and risky steaks, and hep cats

By Jim Hopkins
Boulevard Publisher

CJ front page August 9 1967 150
Aug. 9, 1967

The 1967 Summer of Love was in full sway: 100,000 visitors converged in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in bell-bottoms and tie-dyed tops to drop acid, protest the Vietnam war, and listen to Scott McKenzie‘s recording of “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” on transistor radios.

In Louisville 49 years ago today, The Courier-Journal captured the Zeitgeist in stories about that increasingly unpopular war on the other side of the globe; opposition to factory growth in the east end, plus air pollution and the perils of barbecuing. This was the news that Wednesday morning.

‘Bright and white’

Cmdr. Ed Lighter of Louisville, stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany off the coast of Vietnam, flew a Skyhawk in a successful bombing run on a North Vietnamese truck convoy. Lighter, 38, said the sortie used 800-lb. bombs to destroy eight trucks. “They burned bright and white,” Lighter said, “so we figured it was magnesium going up.”

Courier-Journal August 9 1967
On the CJ’s page 16.

Ford unveiled plans to spend as much as $100 million to build a new truck factory, even as a group of residents tried to raise $15,000 for a lawsuit to block it.

Non-farm July employment in the area rose to 297,000 — 200 more than in June, and 12,000 more than July 1966. The unemployment rate was 3.2%.

The Will Sales Optical shop at Fourth and Liberty and at the Bacon Shopping Center in Shively appealed to a different sort of hippies in an advertisement on page 16: “All the hep cats are talking about Will Sales Teen Scene glasses, and on credit, too!”

The weather forecast called for highs of 89 degrees as the CJ’s editorial board bemoaned the city’s polluted skies — and a new medical study about that all-American pastime: backyard grilling.

Stoking up the grill

“Just as we had finished reading about Louisville’s 16th-place finish in the air-pollution sweepstakes, came a weekend to put troubled minds at rest,” the unsigned editorial said. “The clear, azure skies and the moderate temperatures helped us forget the besmirched air, even those invisible gases and fly-ash particles floating around us. We stoked up the outdoor grill and watched in delight as the steak turned charcoal-colored. The repast that followed was a reward.

Grilling dad
Ignorance was bliss.

“But no! It wasn’t a reward at all, we learned the next morning. Continue reading “49 years ago today: in the Summer of Love, Vietnam came home to Louisville; dirty skies and risky steaks, and hep cats” →