Real World

Ithink letter-writer Mike Fera and union officials like him need to take a course in Economics 101 to understand why support for their cause and demand for their labor has been decreasing for decades. Although it sounds noble that unions such as Mr. Fera's "fight for the rights of workers," the sober economic fact is that artificially raising wages for workers above what the market would dictate has the consequence of reducing job opportunities. Union leaders should get their heads out of the sand and into an economics textbook.

RE ALL THE negative publicity the Teamsters at Local 107 have been getting since MTV arrived in Philadelphia: At no time did Teamster Local 107 participate in the picketing at the 3rd and Arch site. We have never sat down with the production company or anyone else from MTV. We have been quoted and re-quoted in the papers and on TV, but never with the facts. At no time did Local 107 ask Johnny Doc or Pat Gillespie to talk for us. When the time comes and trucks are moving around the MTV set, we will be there and our position will be stated by a Teamster, not anyone else.

More than 80 secondary schools sent entrants to the Pennsylvania Science Olympiad at Delaware Valley College. Students competed over the weekend in practical applications of science.

The Real World will successfully complete its third season at 10 tomorrow night, with a mostly sentimental half hour without any fireworks in it. Each season The Real World, one of MTV's most successful programming innovations, places a new group of seven young people in a new city and watches them interact in a real-life soap opera. This season's site was San Francisco, where the septet lived in a handsome house on Lombard, renowned as "the crookedest street in the world. " Two young men who could scarcely be more different, Puck Rainey and Pedro Zamora, monopolized most of the attention, even though the insufferable Puck was ejected from the Lombard manse in midseason because the other six couldn't stand him anymore.

Matricide and the emotional mayhem of adolescence are the themes of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. An amazing true-life story of two girls in New Zealand in the 1950s whose dark fantasy world spills over - with horrific results - into the real, this vivid drama is disturbingly beautiful, oddly funny and ultimately terrifying. Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet star, respectively, as dour Kiwi Pauline Parker and pretty Brit Julie Hulme, 14-year-olds who share an obsession for Mario Lanza and James Mason and a loathing for their parents.

LOOK OUT, Austin, Texas. "The Real World" is coming. Following a scintillating year in Philly, season No. 16 of MTV's navel-gazing whine-a-thon is heading south to the one place in Texas that's nothing like Texas. "We've been thinking about Austin for a long time," co-creator Jon Murray told the AP yesterday. "It's a great college town. It's a great music town. It's just a really young place. People go to college there and just don't want to leave. " The seven cast members will start arguing, hooking up and coming out in the Lone Star State early next year.

In the first three seasons of MTV's "The Real World," fans have watched cast members get arrested, struggle over an unwanted pregnancy and die from an AIDS-related illness. However, absolutely nothing can prepare viewers for one of the highlights of the fourth season: the half-severed tongue. "It's in the seventh episode and it happens to Neil," co-creator and executive producer Mary-Ellis Bunim said Monday, a week after the MTV production crew wrapped up the fourth season of the video verite program.

The Real World, the television series that seems to best define how young people live in the 1990s, begins its fourth season at 10 tonight on MTV. It is better than ever. There are many TV series that deal with young adults, and several are successful in the Nielsen ratings. But they are all imagined by scriptwriters. The Real World assembles real people and shows you how they interact, wondering all the time whether they are doing the right things. The fundamental approach of The Real World has remained the same since it premiered in 1992: Pick about seven young people from among the several hundreds who annually apply for this dream job, rent them a breathtaking house in a fabulous city, and for five months videotape practically everything they do but go to the bathroom.

The second season of MTV's cinema verite soap opera, The Real World, looks as if it will be even better than the first. The new group of seven young roommates looks more interesting than the seven who got the weekly series off to a successful start last year. The Real World will resume with a one-hour episode at 10 tonight on the cable channel that's best-known for music videos. The first half-hour features the first season's seven talking about what happened to them during and after their series.

CLASS REUNION. 9 p.m. Saturday, Channel 10. Only the producers of MTV's "The Real World" could sell this idea for a TV movie: Round up 15 former classmates and pay them to become housemates for the week leading up to their 10-year high school reunion. They sold it to NBC, which will telecast the results tonight as "Class Reunion. " It's not really a movie, but a documentary about the private reunion before the class reunion. That doesn't mean the results can't be entertaining.

Win a student competition, and you're likely to get a bit of money and a lot of accolades. Often, the most over-the-top and impractical idea scores first place. But in the last few years, corporate sponsors are taking a new tack: Welcome to Student Design Competition 2.0, where producing work that others want matters. That means instead of working in isolation and presenting a surprise design to a roomful of skeptical judges, teams are schooled in production, sourcing, and salability.

Maybe some college business-school graduates end up in an office (or at least a cubicle), working weekdays, quitting at 5 p.m. But it's nothing like that in retail, where a grad on the management track can have big responsibilities quickly. "This is some people's first job," said Nicole Monzo, 26, human-resources manager for the Target store in Oaks, Montgomery County, where she handles hiring, scheduling, and disciplining for the store's 100-plus associates. "It's not a sit-at-a-desk job. You are working weekends.

The Man Who Quit Money?By Mark Sundeen?Riverhead. 260 pp. $15 paperback ?Reviewed by Sandy Bauers   I have just read 260 pages about Daniel Suelo, and I'm still not sure I know what to make of him. I may never figure it out. It's just so mind-blowing. In 2000, when Suelo was 39, he put his last $30 inside a phone booth and walked away. He has not used money since. Author Mark Sundeen, who has written an extraordinary and thought-provoking book about this strange man, assures readers that Suelo "came from a good family and had been to college.

By Anthony Martin Philadelphia's African American and Latino Male Dropout Task Force issued a comprehensive report in 2010 that found the city schools' dropout rate is highest among boys, specifically African American and Latino boys. Forty-three percent of male African American students and 51 percent of male Latino students who had started as ninth graders in 2003 had dropped out of high school by 2009. The numbers illustrate a vast divide between male and female achievement, as "only" 30 percent of African American girls and 36 percent of Latino girls had dropped out. The reasons for it are many.

How unemployed see outsourcing As Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele made abundantly clear in their Nov. 20 article "Apple's American job disaster," Apple Inc., by moving its production overseas, left thousands of American workers struggling for survival, while creating lots of jobs for foreigners. Yet, a Monday letter writer not only doesn't find anything wrong with Apple's move, but goes so far as to justify and praise it. I wonder. If the writer were one of the 15 million unemployed, on food stamps, or lined up at a soup kitchen, with medical bills piling up for lack of health insurance, would he still believe that Apple's action is commendable and beneficial to the United States of America?

Observations, insinuations, ruminations and unvarnished opinions . . .   FOUND MYSELF reminiscing about the good old National Basketball Association this week as season openers were officially scrubbed. It is more and more likely there will be no NBA basketball played in the 2011 portion of the 2011-12 season. Owners want a 50-50 split of the billions. Players want a 54-46 cut. Don't any of these guys read the Wall Street Journal ? You can understand how the lordly A's and bottom-feeding Phillies were able to coexist here for so many years before World War II. Baseball salaries were so low you could pay the help out of a cigar box containing the day's gate receipts.

The labor impasse between the National Football League and its locked-out players continues. Imagine how much quicker things might be resolved if these people were subjected to the same financial stresses as the rest of us. DATE: June 8, 2011 FROM: NFL owners TO: All NFLPA members RE: Changes to your health coverage Greetings. As those of you who haven't suffered debilitating head trauma know, these are difficult times for our sport.

Nothing in the food chain is immune from genetic modification. Take the bagel. In the century since its arrival on our shores, the breakfast staple has mutated far from its Eastern European roots, mass-baked into doughy, institutional blandness, and supersized into a pneumatic white-wallness. The lone holdout in the Western Hemisphere is Montreal, which is to the bagel as San Francisco is to sourdough and Chicago is to the deep-dish pizza. Poppy purists rave about bagels in Montreal, where they're treated as an artisanal product.

Penn's Maalik Reynolds: The freshman delighted the home folks in the crowd at Franklin Field by winning the high jump, the first win by a Quaker athlete in the event since 1955. The resident of Atlanta cleared 7 feet, 31/4 inches for the win, and Penn coach Charlie Powell sees lots of higher jumps in his future. "What makes him special, he takes the high jump seriously, but he doesn't take himself super-seriously," Powell said. "I think he understands there's a difference between the high-jump world and the real world.

What's it all about, Hanna ? Saoirse Ronan - the soon-to-be-17 star of the propulsive new picture in which a girl grows up off the grid, trained in martial arts and weaponry, and then sets out into the world to wreak havoc on freelance thugs and CIA suits - has given it some thought. But not that much. "The only thing I can say is that Hanna is an action heroine that we definitely haven't seen before," Ronan offers, her sound bite glistening with native Irish chords.