The world gets weirder, but what’s happening in the ocean? Salon reports that this week a Florida fisherman “reeled in a live missile in the Gulf of Mexico and kept it on his boat for 10 days”; William Saletan of Slate pondered recently whether the next terrorist attack will come from submarines; and the Independent continues its reporting on how the bluefin tuna is being fished to extinction. Don’t stir the waters.

Chicago’s lit world emerges from a long winter with two notable events next week: The Poetry Foundation will present its 2009 Pegasus Awards on May 19th to Fanny Howe, who will receive the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (along with $100,000), and to Ange Mlinko, winner of the Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism (Mlinko’s contributed to the first-annual 20 Interviews issue of STOP SMILING); meanwhile, the second-annual Pilcrow Lit Fest will host readings, panels and gatherings focused on small press publishing May 17th-23rd throughout the city.

For the third straight May, the United States Postal Service has raised the price of first-class postage (today a stamp climbed to 44 cents), but according to new statistics, some of which were compiled in last week’s issue of The Economist, there are larger problems for the postal industry — 2008 saw “the biggest decline in mail since the Depression,” with volume falling by 4.5 percent, “or about 9 billion pieces.” For years independent publishers, including STOP SMILING, have expressed dismay over postal increases — for an intelligent overview of what postage hikes can do to a small press, read Robert McChesney‘s plea, “Postal Rates = Free Press,” published by In These Times in 2007.

Earlier in the week we paid respects to Harry Kalas, voice of NFL Films — yesterday, the NFL lost another signature voice, when former Oakland Raiders coach John Madden, pictured here, announced he is retiring from the broadcast booth; loyal listeners of NPR are still tuning in, despite the recent cancellation of the programs Day to Day and News and Notes; in February, WGN radio icon and “one of the nation’s most familiar voices” Paul Harvey (“Hello, Americans!”) passed away at the age of 90; also in Chicago, resentment is still simmering over Clear Channel’s decision to yank Tom Joyner‘s syndicated radio show from V103 in place of Steve Harvey; and Sirius XM, the satellite radio company, continues to face the prospect of filing for bankruptcy. Stay tuned.

Many booksellers, librarians, and others who think teaching our nation’s children to read is a good idea have been outraged since last month, when a law passed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission went into effect and mandated that children’s books printed before 1985 be taken off shelves and pulped because their illustrations contain lead paint — some are resisting the law, and the situation may prove to be a righteous battle between protectors of cultural heritage and paranoid safety nuts terrified of peanut butter and spinach; meanwhile, Warner Bros has begun a service that allows people to order DVDs of vintage films that were previously unavailable in that format — the company will create them as they’re ordered, not unlike a pizzeria, in a novel effort to bring cultural gems of the past into the present in a financially sound manner.

Slate warns that “zombie banks” could be building vacant “ghost towers,” and urges cities like Boston and Brooklyn (both of which are prone to erecting monolithic financial headquarters) to avoid the fate of Bangkok; meanwhile, the New York Times posted video (perhaps video evidence was needed, given the ongoing development woes) confirming that the Freedom Tower has finally climbed to 100 feet; in Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper continues to reach heights that aren’t even visible to the naked eye from ground level; and Chicagoans still reeling from the announcement that one of its crown jewels, the Sears Tower, will undergo a cheap name-swap can rejuvenate with a bit of civic nostalgia — the city is celebrating the centennial of architect Daniel Burnham‘s “Plan of Chicago,” which can be read about in this New Yorker piece. Look skyward (and beware).

As major cities like San Francisco and Seattle face the prospect of having no major daily newspaper in circulation, we urge readers to take a look at the final posts from the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper older than the state of Colorado itself, which folded last month and left Denver a one-newspaper town (with the Denver Post still in business) — particularly of interest is this eloquent piece, “Rocky Kept Swinging Until the Very End”; also of note is the passing of James Bellows, the former editor of the New York Herald Tribune and supporter of the New Journalism movement, who died on Friday at 86. The media landscape continues its tectonic shifts.

The Iraqi government has given Abu Ghraib prison a floor-to-ceiling makeover that almost makes one forget that its floors were once covered with the blood of Saddam’s enemies and its ceilings supported the ropes that hung them, or that it acted as the setting for the most widely publicized instances of prisoner abuse by the US military during the Iraq war; its new plush carpets and colorful table dressings are so strikingly handsome that one can hardly be bothered to remember the reported 740,000 war widows in Iraq, many of whom live on the streets, a sixth of whom receive any state aid at all; and while we all know what types of nasty things happened to inmates at formerly unswank Ghraib, the CIA admitted yesterday that it destroyed 92 tapes containing record of harsh interrogations of “high-value” al-Qaeda suspects, and no one at the agency seems all that worried about it. -SS

Taking top-billing over Rourke vs. the Independent Spirit Awards, this week the Iranian government publicly denounced the “insulting” portrayal of “The Ayatollah” in Darren Aronofsky‘s film, The Wrestler; also taking a hit was 300, directed by Zack Snyder, whose “visionary” status was recently challenged by the New York Times; and admirers of The Wrestler may have noticed the Times investigation of life in the amateur wrestling circuit in New Jersey, featuring profiles of wrestlers whose names “cannot be printed in this newspaper.”

It’s been a rough start to 2009 for Manhattan cinephiles still lamenting the loss of Mondo Kim’s video archives to an eccentric Sicilian: New Yorker Films, the venerable distributor of foreign classics, has folded after 44 years; Film-Makers’ Cooperative, a distributor of avant-garde films fronted by Jonas Mekas, is facing eviction from its TriBeCa space; and the Film Society of Lincoln Center recently laid off a quarter of its staff.