The striking union of transit workers in Philadelphia are angry that they're not getting daily doses of Viagra. And amazingly, their bosses apparently caved on their demands after the union turned down a generous offer -- and threatened to embarrass the city during the World Series.

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority has agreed to cover almost all of its rising health-care costs, and to increase coverage for Pfizer's (PFE) Viagra and other erectile dysfunction treatments, the Philadelphia Daily News reports. Workers are unhappy that their health insurance plan only covers about 10 pills a month.

The howling-wolf T-shirt phenomenon it is not. Walmart Stores (WMT) has closed the lid on customer reviews of its caskets. As DailyFinance reported this week, the retailer is selling 15 caskets, and more than 130 urns and cremains containers, through its website.

As debatable as that business proposition might be, it proved a sure thing with at least one type of consumer: not the bereaved, but the wags who lurk behind high-speed Internet connections, waiting for an opportunity to heckle retailers with tongue-in-cheek reviews.

As the full extent of the Galleon Group's insider trading comes to light, its story is starting to resemble something out of the movies. Although Raj Rajaratnam's house has already been compared to the homes in both The Sopranos and Goodfellas, the sad truth is that the real-life criminal ring lacks both the class of Tony Soprano's gang and the gravitas of Joe Pesci's. As details emerge, the whole mess seems to fall closer to the cartoonish excess of Animal House.

The central member of the gang -- the Otter, if you will -- may well be Zvi "The Octopussy" Goffer. Robert Khuzami, director of the Securites and Exchange Commission's Division of Enforcement, noted Thursday that Goffer got his James Bond–originated nickname "because of his reputation for having arms in so many sources of inside information." Goffer used his web of spies to cut trades both at Galleon and at his previous employer, the Schottenfeld Group.

Imagine being asked to solve a problem so difficult that the smartest people you know have been trying to figure it out for months, even years, without getting anywhere. Now imagine doing it with one metaphorical hand tied behind your back.

That gives you an idea of the challenge Steven Waldman faces in his new job as the Federal Communications Commission's designated deep thinker on the future of media. As a special adviser to Chairman Julius Genachowski, Waldman will be asked to assess the health of the news business and come up with recommendations for improving it -- without exceeding the agency's relatively narrow charter.

Facing a contempt of court charge, BlueBeat.com, an obscure music website, has yanked Beatles remasters off its site after EMI, the band's record label, sued for copyright infringement, though some non-remastered Beatles albums and songs are apparently still available on the site. EMI had charged that BlueBeat "engaged in music piracy of the most blatant and harmful kind," naming Hank Risan, of Santa Cruz, Calif., as the head of the operation. As the songs came down, more details emerged about BlueBeat's "psycho-acoustic simulation" defense, which U.S. District Judge John F. Walter practically laughed out of court.

"Psychoacoustic simulations are my synthetic creation of that series of sounds which best expresses the way I believe a particular melody should be heard as a live performance," Risan argued in a letter to the Recording Association Industry of America. Say what?

Unbelievable. Guess which is the best-performing S&P 500 stock since Obama was elected.

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Good thing the FTC is protecting us from those monopolistic robber barons in the pretzel industry.

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Hedge fund manager James Matthews really hates me.

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On the eve of its 40th anniversary, Sesame Street is courting a strange political controversy. A two-year-old episode featuring Oscar the Grouch as a (what else?) grouchy TV news reporter for (who else?) the Grouch News Network has caused a minor Internet kerfuffle among steamed fans of News Corp.'s (NWS) Fox News.

In the episode in question, Oscar the Grouch is a reporter covering, in breathless cable-news fashion, the trials and tribulations of Horatio the Elephant, who's trying to extricate himself from a bathtub. Oscar's quest for "all grouchy, all disgustin', all yucky" news goes awry when there's "breaking news" -- namely, Cookie Monster breaking a cookie.

Borders (BGP) announced Thursday afternoon that it will close 200 of its Waldenbooks stores by early January, cutting as many as 1,500 jobs, most of them part-time. The move is intended as part of Borders's ongoing plan to streamline costs and find its way out of a money pit that's plagued it for years and led to a flurry of executive shuffles.

The shutdown will leave 130 of the mall-based WaldenBooks stores in operation; 45 branches had closed since the end of May.

"We believe there remains an opportunity to profitably operate a much smaller Waldenbooks segment that complements our core Borders superstore business and continues to serve readers in their communities," Borders CEO Ron Marshall said in a statement. The closings, he said, "will reduce the number of stores with operating losses, reduce our overall rent expense and lease-adjusted leverage, and generate cash flow through sales and working capital reductions."

Oprah Winfrey has been the queen of all media for most of the 23 years she's been on the air. But it looks like she's about to pull a Howard Stern -- packing up her free, over-the-airwaves broadcast and taking it to a more exclusive venue.

According to Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke, Winfrey is days away from announcing her decision to end her syndicated talk show with plans to resurrect the show on cable after the launch of the Oprah Winfrey Network, or OWN. The Oprah Winfrey Show would cease to exist in its current form in mid-2011, when her syndication deal with CBS Corp.'s (CBS) CBS Television Distribution expires.

The Walt Disney Company (DIS) recently announced that it will be doing the unthinkable. It's tinkering with Mickey.

The most obvious step in the iconic mouse's makeover will be an upcoming video game. Titled "Epic Mickey," it presents a vision of Mickey that can be naughty or nice, cunning or playful. Rather than the stiff corporate logo of yesteryear, Epic Mickey will offer a character who is more multifaceted, flexible, and fun. Along with the game, Disney is also re-imagining everything about the character. The studio plans to tweak his clothing, personality, and home, presenting a fresh face to the Disney Channel, Disney World, and the internet.

Media and newspaper companies have had dismal fortunes last year, and book publishing is no exception. Layoffs, mergers of imprints, declining sales, rising costs -- all put the biggest publishing houses deep in the red in the last two quarters of 2008. But the latest quarterly numbers coming in tell a more optimistic story for their massive parent conglomerates.

Lagardere's (LGDDF) preliminary Q1 earnings report, released Wednesday, won't have anyone popping Champagne bottles. Consolidated revenues for the first nine months of 2009 fell 3.7% (or 3.9% on a like-for-like basis) to €5.8 billion ($8.6 billion); the magazine and broadcast divisions alone fell 19.1% for the first quarter. But the publishing division, including Hachette Book Group USA, has been a rock for Lagardere -- thanks to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels, which have been a rock for Hachette.

I'm beginning to suspect the Parents Television Council is actually a front group controlled by the entertainment industry. The group, which calls itself "the nation's most influential advocacy organization," has trained its rhetorical cannons on The CW Network, which has been promoting an upcoming episode of Gossip Girl featuring a three-way sexual romp between its teenage characters.

"To include a storyline like this on a program that is expressly targeted to impressionable teenagers is reckless and irresponsible," says PTC president Tim Winter. "We are asking each CW Network affiliate to use their common sense and preempt this episode."

Fears about the spread of swine flu have claimed an unusual victim: food packaging. Kellogg Co. (K) said it is pulling labels from its Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals that make claims about boosting children's health.

The cereal giant began adding antioxidants to the Krispies cereals last year, as a response to "parents indicating their desire for more positive nutrition in kids' cereal," the company said in statement. Labels on the cereals' boxes read "Now Helps Support Your Child's Immunity." The nutrients have been shown in studies to boost immune-system health.

And so it goes on: the interminable wait for a deal that would make the Beatles music available on the Web. Instead, Apple Corps. Ltd., which manages the Beatles' legacy, and EMI, the band's record label, have announced the release of a limited-edition USB flash drive preloaded with Beatles songs for $280, just in time for the holidays.

Call it Beatles on a stick.

Separately, EMI has filed a lawsuit against BlueBeat.com, a heretofore obscure website, claiming it has been illegally selling songs by the Fab Four. The label has accused BlueBeat of "shocking," "willful," and "overtly defiant" conduct, and accuses it of participating in one of the largest piracy operations on the internet. BlueBeat has denied the charge by saying it is protected by its "psycho-acoustic simulation" -- whatever that is.

During the News Corp (NWS) earnings call, CEO Rupert Murdoch and COO Chase Carey both mentioned that the entertainment company's deal with Google (GOOG) to deliver ad space to social network MySpace was in trouble. Murdoch said, "It's quite simple. We've not been making our minimum guarantees so our search revenue will not be what our revenue was." "We're still losing traffic," Chase Carey, chief operating officer of News Corp told the Financial Times. "It's a business in transition."

The deal with Google, which runs from the first quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of 2010, was expected to bring News Corp $900 million. Murdoch indicated that the payments might come up as much as $100 million short because of traffic shortfalls at MySpace.