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Tabloid Dreams

Some people have way too much fun at work.

This fall I will celebrate my 15th year at the Philadelphia Inquirer, though I have not spent all 5,475 days at 400 North Broad. I worked for two years in our Conshohocken Bureau, two in City Hall, then a few more at a desk in South Jersey where the antidote for writer's block is a quick shoe-shopping mission to the Cherry Hill Mall.

In the big house, aka Ivory Tower of Truth, I sit on the 2nd floor. Which, if you've never been here, is about as staid and quiet as the first floor is bawdy and boisterous.

I adore my colleagues at the Daily News and today's cover -- "Adult Supervision Needed" -- marks yet another morning when they prove that some people have wayyyyy too much fun at work.

The image of Arlene Ackerman as a smirking toddler rivals those ETrade commercials I still laugh at hysterically even though cool people insist they're not funny. (This bad baby wears reading glasses and hoop earrings. She's not stacking those plastic cups; she's getting ready to throw them at the heads of in-house critics and would-be whistleblowers.)

The best part of the Daily News' visual takedown of the imperious Philadelphia Schools Superintendent? The sly placement of a photo of Barbaro, the racehorse, in the column to the immediate left of Ackerman's derriere.

Huh, you ask? Take another look. Say it out loud. Then giggle.

-- Monica Yant Kinney

(to read more, please see philly.com/blinq)