It's like seeing an old friend, the picture of robust healthiness, frail and gaunt. "If it can happen to Benny," you say to yourself, "who's immune?"

We've all read the stories about how long it took Major League Baseball to recover fully (and more) from its strike of 1994; if all goes according to plan and players and owners ratify the agreement reached Saturday morning, the National Basketball Association is about to find out just how much damage was done by the lockout of 2011.

The headline in the Wall Street Journal reads "GM's Volt Woes Cast Shadow on E-Cars." It is, of course, the kind of public relations nightmare no brand -- or technology -- in its infancy wants to face. It will be interesting to see how General Motors reacts in the coming months to the investigation launched by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Friday to assess the risk of fire in Chevy Volts that have been involved in a serious crash.

Is it just another snag in an ambitious deal? Or is it the death knell for AT&T's proposed purchase of T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion?

For a while there, Volkswagen seemed to be one of those brands sputtering along on the fumes of its glory days. Think Small and carry a big marketing wallop from the glory days of print advertising, and all that. But sales are way up this year in the U.S., the automaker continues to build on its long presence in China and, well, is world domination really that wacky an aspiration?

John G. Smale, who became the seventh CEO of Procter & Gamble in 1981 and was later credited with an early save of General Motors as its activist chairman, died Saturday from complications of pulmonary fibrosis. He was 84 and a native of Listowel, Ont., who grew up in Elmhurst, Ill.

Now that Black Friday and, to a lesser degree, Cyber Monday have pervaded the consciousness of the consumer nation and are no longer inside-baseball terms tossed around in retail trade magazines, we are witnessing an onslaught of variations of the theme and musings on the meaning of it all. To illustrate the former, consider my stumbling across -- I really can't remember how -- the fact that tomorrow has been dubbed Magenta Saturday by T-Mobile.

After a year of convincing music moguls to get on their cloud, Google finally queued up the music yesterday with an exclusive offer on some Rolling Stone concert bootlegs and an invitation-only party in L.A. that attracted "a colorful crowd of hipsters and music executives" who listened to live performances by Monogold and Busta Rhymes at the Hollywood studio of Mr. Brainwash, Alex Pham writes in the Los Angeles Times.

Profits are up but sales are down at Dell, another one of those companies that decided that the business market is more lucrative than consumers, who are even more conditioned by the likes of comparison-shopping sites like Bizrate, PriceGrabber and Nextag, deal sites like Woot and Groupon, and the reliability, convenience and selection of Amazon to shop around and go cheap on desktops and laptops that are increasingly viewed as commodity products.

Ostensibly, there are no draws in basketball. No matter how many overtimes need to be played, someone comes out a winner. But with the National Basketball Association putting a "take it or leave it" offer on the table last week that the NBA Players Association has rejected -- disbanding the union yesterday and, in the process, putting its players' future in the hands of the federal court system (unless a settlement is reached) -- it certainly seems like this game of PIG will have two losing sides, whatever the eventual legal outcome may be.