I’m in New York, attending to final arrangements for this weekend’s Hidden Pivot seminar at the West Side ‘Y’ conference facility. I am also tanking up on sundry pleasures that will not be available on my return to Colorado -- great pizza and in-your-face tabloid newspapers, to name two.  Cory Lidle’s flaming death has been splashed across the front page of the New York Post, with the Yankee pitcher’s photo on the left, a stock photo of a Cirrus SR20 airplane on the right, and the upper East Side high rise that he and his instructor crashed into ablaze in the middle.  On the inside pages, there are at least a half-dozen sidebars to arouse mourning Yankees fans to a dervish-like pitch, but also to send the ace reliever out in true Bronx Bomber style.

For most local papers, coverage of such a tragedy would deplete the resources of both the sports and city desks. For Rupert Murdoch’s Post, though, Lidle’s spectacular swan song was just a warm-up. And that’s too bad for Madonna, as well as a dozen other celebrities who were grist for Thursday’s gossip mill. “Shameless Star Buys an African Souvenir” was a Post columnist’s take on the Kabala Diva’s adoption the other day of  a one-year-old African boy: “No word – yet – on whether Madonna plans to nail her brand new bouncing boy to a crucifix, live, in concert,” wrote the Post’s Andrea Peyser. “Madonna, the sluttish , egomaniacal mother-of-the-century has topped even her most revolting self. She plans to remove a baby from the loving arms of his dirt-poor father, in one of the most desperate nations on earth [Malawi]. Madonna has traveled far beyond her bra-baring, intercourse-simulating, public girl-kissing, Jesus-emulating loser antics to grab attention – and flesh.”

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Not a bad likeness of the Material Girl, I’d say. But if the sinewy, low-rent chanteuse should decide to skip Madison Square Garden on her next “Hey-I’m-Still-Here!” tour, Ms. Peyser may need police protection, since fans are going to come looking for her. Skip to page 16 and we see that a Post cartoonist has taken another shot at the entertainer – one even less subtle than the “Shameless Star” column. Putin doesn’t fare so well in Thursday’s edition, and neither does Kim Jong Il. But who even cares once you get to Carmen Electra, all legs on page 17.