• by February 17, 2005

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S SWIMSUIT-LESS EDITION -- It's been a long time since we've run down to the local newsstand on certain Mondays in mid-February to grab a copy of Sports Illustrated, the only one we read annually. It's not that we don't like the magazine, it's just that we're not into the whole sports thing, at least not the sports it features the other 51 weeks of the year.

Now we simply go online and click for a gander at the latest in swimsuit fashion, and the beautiful gals who're sporting them. More or less. This year, we were surprised to see how much less. Normally, the SI swimsuit models "wear" at least some semblance of a swimsuit, even if it was one that was spray-painted on.

At least one of the "swimsuit" shots on SI.com doesn't even bother with the suit. Oh yeah, if you look close enough you'll see it lying draped on the sand next to the naked torso of super model Yamila Diaz-Rahi, but how many of us would notice?

WELL, YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: 'CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME' -- It's been a while since we've made a really good confession, so here's one we can't recall having told you before: Sometimes we struggle to write the Riff; sometimes it seems to write itself. Today's is one of the latter. We knew it as soon as one of our colleagues forwarded us a press release headlined: "Magazine Dedicated to Fostering Social Conscience Unconscionably Fails to Pay Former Editor."

According to the release, Inspire Your World, a magazine dedicated to encouraging and publicizing personal and corporate philanthropy "has demonstrated its own inability to meet basic standards of corporate responsibility by breaching its contract" with its editor and the production team that helped launch the magazine.

"Inspire Your World magazine has failed to pay the editor and production consultant team of its first four issues, compensation and other fees that are now long overdue for their significant work in the editing and production of the initial - and critically acclaimed - launch editions," the statement alleges.

Despite getting stiffed on the assignment, former Editor-in-Chief Angela Harrington felt inspired enough by the incident to reflect on its irony, observing: "The first ingredient in any successful recipe for public philanthropy must be individual responsibility. You cannot 'give to others' without paying your own bills first, and you cannot expect to be credible in a call to 'inspire' others to altruism if at the same time you are breaching obligations to the people working for you."

Aside from writing in clichés - something we wouldn't know anything about - it remains unclear to us why Harrington is now "former" editor, why she and her team got the bum shoulder, and why they're seeking to make the matter public, instead of simply taking it to court. But maybe the answer to the whole dilemma is in the magazine's slogan: "Celebrating the people, companies, and causes that inspire us to give back." Could it be that the publisher meant that literally and wanted the editorial team to give back its wages too?