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I'm taping Headline Saturday tomorrow, which airs on WRAL 7 p.m. Saturday. The show will be on the issues surrounding the growth in the elderly population, and how we're going to meet the needs of a rapidly increasing group of seniors.  If any of you have any questions you'd like me to ask, email me at dbarkin@newsobserver.com.  The show tapes at 9:30 a.m., and I'll check my email beforehand.

Alex Webb and Mike Zlotnicki have put together a Father's Day gift guide that will run in our Outdoors section in Sports Thursday.  This will be good for anyone who's trying to get a last-minute gift for the dad who hunts or fishes.  

Webb's day job is chief technology guru here at the N&O. He keeps stuff running.  Mike, our Outdoors editor, has been in Michigan at an outdoors writers conference, a gathering of guys who talk about things I have no knowledge of.  He's been blogging on it.

Tim Stevens, our preps editor, had an interesting post on his Preps Now blog about Rodney Purvis, a local basketball player who has justed finished up his eighth grade and is getting wide notice for his skills.  I'm expecting that recruiting sites on the internet will eventually start scouting promising third graders with exceptional crossover moves and quick first step.

This is the skinny from HoopsReport.com:  "Rodney Purvis-I can’t believe he is only an 8th grade. Nice looking prospect." 

There you have it. Rodney Purvis, projected high NBA draft choice in 2014 or so.

Seriously, one of the things Tim always tells me is that you can never, ever, tell what's going to happen to some promising 14-15-year-old.  Some kids just develop earlier, but then plateau, and don't amount to anything special. Some talented kids don't want to work hard and fall by the wayside, and never make it to college because of poor grades and a bad attitude.  The guys who eventually make it to Division 1 programs and to the NBA are not always the most talented basketball players on the planet. The playgrounds are filled with great players who lack the discipline and the mental toughness to stay in school, follow the rules and keep away from trouble.

So making any kind of projections about 8th graders is a dicey proposition at best.  

Bill Clinton, in town for the John Hope Franklin tribute, was eating dinner at Sullivan's, as was a group of graduating seniors from Leesville Road High.  They asked him if he would pose for a picture, and he did. Go here to see the photo.

Want to learn more about those server farms and data centers that North Carolina has been recruiting? The New York Times has a long story that will be going in its Sunday magazine. If you have an inexhaustible appetite for stories about these things, this is for you.

Last weekend we went live with the Triangle Price Book, which is a way to comparison shop for common grocery items.  This is the brainchild of our retail reporter and coupon gury Sue Stock, who developed this in conjunction with David Raynor, who is the database expert in our News Research Department.  Sue has given the Price Book a good start by filling it with items, but one of the strengths of this is that anyone can post their own price information about products. Check it out and see if you want to help.

Here is what Sue wrote on the Price Book page:

"Many shoppers keep an individual price book to track the prices of items they buy regularly. This allows them to get a good idea of what a good price is for those items. It also helps them figure out how frequently those items go on sale . . .
The goal for the Triangle Price Book is that we will all benefit from pooling our information to create a community price book that covers all of the stores in our area.
By participating, you will help other shoppers. And you will be able to see how prices on items you want to buy vary by store over a long period of time."

Mark Puente, who lived in Garner while he attended UNC several years ago, is the subject of a nice story in Cleveland Magazine.  Mark covers the police for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  Before he was a reporter, he was a truck driver.  His stories about funny business in the Cuyahoga County sheriff's office led to the resignation of the sheriff and a state investigation.

I had a shot at hiring Mark but lost out to the Plain Dealer. You can read more about Mark here.  There's also a video of Mark talking about one of his stories.

Long-time readers of the N&O may have noticed on the cover of Sunday's Arts & Living the return of a familiar staff byline.

Elizabeth Leland was the author of "You are the gift", a feature article about the concept of acknowledging a kindness by "paying it forward." The subject of the excellent piece was a Charlotte woman who paid it forward all the way to Cambodia after she was involved in a wreck on a Georgia highway and was cared for by a stranger. 

Elizabeth, an award-winning writer at The Charlotte Observer, was an N&O staff writer covering courts and politics some 20 years ago. Among her recent state and national honors are a Green Eyeshade Award from the Society for Professional Journalists, a Women in Communications Award and recognition for her work from the National Association of Black Journalists. We are pleased that a merger of the News & Observer and Charlotte Observer features staffs returns Elizabeth to the N&O pages under a staff byline.

Under the merger, features writers in both cities contribute content for features sections published daily by the N&O and the Charlotte Observer. We have a similarly merged state Capitol Bureau and a sports staff for the two McClatchy-owned newspapers.

The combination of the features staffs is our latest effort to maximize for readers in Raleigh and Charlotte the benefit of more reporting resources and writing talent.

Linda Williams

Senior Editor 

We had a story in today's paper by Jon Cox about the N.C. Commerce Department's plans to spend $137,500 on a trip to the International Air Show outside Paris to recruit businesses to bring jobs here. Much of the cost will pay for having an exhibit at the show, more than $107,000.

Whether this is a good idea depends on whether you think European CEOs are likely to decide on building a plant here because they went by the booth, picked up some brochures, smacked their foreheads and said "Zut alors! We must go to Kinston!"

I don't know as it works that way. I think that foreign CEOs probably know where North Carolina is and how it would fit into their global logistical and marketing network. But I could be wrong, because I have never personally tried to recruit a business to come here.

I am reminded that one of the biggest companies to set up shop here, Cisco Systems, found us just fine without going to a trade show.

Back in 1992, the head of Cisco at the time, a guy named John Morgridge, came here from Silicon Valley and met with folks at Centennial Campus. He was very secretive; basically, the folks here knew he was a technology executive from California interested in opening up a facility here. He also met with then-Gov. Jim Hunt for about an hour, a meeting that was supposed to last just 10 minutes. One of the great things about Jim Hunt was that if you were a businessman interested in setting up shop here, he'd meet with you. The man took recruiting seriously.

A couple of years later, after a lot of work by state and local officials, Cisco announced it was opening a regional headquarters in RTP that would employ hundreds of people. It has become an important part of the local economy.

This is how a lot of recruitment happens. Some company needs an East Coast facility, or likes something about our workforce, and gets in touch with the state. Big companies have people on staff who are constantly scouting new locations, or they hire people who do that for them.

It would be interesting to know how many of the companies who have come to North Carolina found us, and how many had the idea planted by state or local business recruiters. Commerce put out a fact sheet noting that from 2001 to 2008, European companies invested $1.1 billion in North Carolina, creating 5,800 jobs. What's hard to know is whether this would have happened anyway, even if no state recruiters bought booths at air shows or flew across the Atlantic to pitch North Carolina to foreign CEOs.

Answering that question would require a lot of analysis, but it's an important question to answer before we can say whether paying for a presence at an air show in Paris is a good or bad idea.

It is also worth noting that some of the best companies here were started by local people. Nobody wined and dined them when they were professors at N.C. State (like Jim Goodnight) or UNC (like Dennis Gillings) with an idea for a business that would eventually employ thousands.

The surest path to job creation is not to cozy up to some French CEO. He may open a plant here, but he'll close it in a hurry if he can get a cheaper workforce somewhere else. He doesn't care about North Carolina. The surest path is to have an educated workforce and smart entrepreneurs who live here, have roots here, and want to stay here. The only incentive they need is the prospect of getting rich.

In the last seven days, the most read story on newsobserver.com has been Bruce Siceloff's Tuesday article, "Corrosive goop mystifies RDU." Siceloff reported on mystery goop that has occasionally splattered and damaged cars in the Raleigh-Durham International Airport parking deck since the deck was completed in 2003. The airport has hired an engineering consultant to explain what the gunk is.

Siceloff was tipped off a few weeks ago by an aggrieved traveler. He phoned Siceloff, who covers transportation for The N&O. "He flies every week, his nice car had been messed up several times, this never happens in other parking decks and he was upset about it," Siceloff said. But he declined to give his name. Siceloff made a public records request from RDU, which revealed internal memos, e-mails and claims from travelers. Several of those who filed claims were quoted in the story. 

Siceloff's weekly column, "Road Worrier," runs every Tuesday in the print N&O and online. You can read his blog, "Crosstown Traffic," at newsobserver.com. 

--John Drescher