These are hard times for the old guard of A&R men at music companies who have clung on to power and perks for decades.

The greatest of them all, since the death of Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, is 76-year-old Clive Davis, who has just been removed as the chairman of the BMG Label Group at Sony BMG.

Mr Davis still has a touch: he signed Leona Lewis, the British singer, who has just topped the US album charts. But he did not exactly discover her in a smokey club - she was a winner of the X Factor television talent show in the UK.

Talent shows and internet social networks such as MySpace have become a bigger force in promoting new singers than the old-fashioned route of being discovered in said club by an A&R man.

That raises the question, which clearly occurred to Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, the overall head of SonyBMG, of why Mr Davis was being paid an estimated $10m a year in a shrinking industry in which all the old verities are being challenged.

It seems that Guy Hands, who now owns EMI Group (and perhaps wishes that he did not) is not the only one who doubts whether so many A&R men are needed, or must be paid so well. He has just appointed a new head of A&R for EMI.

As I wrote the other day, talent-spotters are still needed in music companies. But the days of the highly-paid, self-indulgent A&R person who styled himself as the star of the show, are over.

Mr Davis, it seems, finally overstayed his welcome.

I don’t think I have ever encountered a visual joke in a supermarket display before but I came across one yesterday in the Whole Foods Market in the Bowery in New York.

In the middle of the vegetable section, amid the onions and shallots, there was a basket full of quails’ eggs. They were the sort of same shape and colour as the items around them but they were also weirdly out of place. It felt like an absurdist work of art.

I don’t know who was responsible, but congratulations. Would that all shopping were this intriguing.

Manganese Bronze is one of my favourite company names because it is not only odd but gives no indication of what the company does, which is to make and service London taxi cabs.

I hope that it never succumbs to the temptation to rename itself something more relevant to its actual business. That would be like Shell, another of my favourite corporate names, giving itself a name related to oil.

Manganese Bronze comes from from the fact that it used to make engineering components including manganese bronze bearings.

Anyway, the FT records this morning that Manganese Bronze, which has a joint venture with Geely of China to make cabs, is planning to diversify by selling 500 of the vehicles around the world.

Being British in the city of yellow taxis, I have some nostalgia for black cabs, although a London taxi ride always seems fearsomely expensive when I return there, bearing my weak dollar. I would like to see them in other places.

Only yesterday, I was reminded of the homeliness of London cabs by Very Short List, the daily email recommendation, which forwarded a link of various bands, including the very fine Raveonettes, busking in the back of cabs.

But this is probably a metonym. I am really nostalgic not for the cabs themselves but the way they are driven. A London cabbie is an expensive luxury but he or she drives well and knows the route. A New York cab ride is cheap but can be a nauseating (literally) experience.

My Financial Times column this week is on the proposed Delta/Northwest merger and why the companies have failed to do enough to restructure in the face of fuel price rises and a possible recession. You can read it here and comment below.

The transfer of Wonkette by Nick Denton of Gawker Media, my former Financial Times colleague who went on to other things, is a warning to those thinking of launching new media ventures.

Nick has sold, or perhaps more accurately passed on, three of the blogs in his empire including Wonkette, which was the founding blog about politics and Washington DC.

It still has healthy traffic figures – 5.9m page views in March – and is attracting a lot of interest in this election season. So why give it away – or something like that – to Ken Layne, its managing editor?

The answer is, in short, that there is not much advertising in political coverage. Nick’s biggest sites, such as Gawker, Gizmodo and Jezebel, draw advertisers because they have high traffic and clear commercial niches.

Technology companies can advertise to readers of a gadget blog such as Gizmodo while, to judge by the ads on Gawker, film and television companies hope to drum up viewers by advertising there.

But Wonkette was the closest thing he had to a general news site focusing on a traditional subject. That did not make it attractive to any particular group of advertisers, so Wonkette was not very profitable.

Nick has himself put the sale in the context of hunkering down for an advertising recession. It raises the broader point that a lot of “free” content on the internet ultimately depends on attracting advertising.

If there is none in the segment, then the future of blogs as businesses is suspect. I wonder what this means for the newer online politics publications such as the Huffington Post and Politico?

Chrysler’s link-up with Nissan for the Japanese company to supply it with small cars for the US and European markets fills as yawning gap in its product line-up.

It also shows that Chinese manufacturers have some way to go before they can compete on equal terms with companies from US, Europe and the rest of Asia.

Chrysler has an agreement with Chery to make cars for the Chinese market and had longer-term plans to export Chery-made vehicles to North America.

But it became clear when the new management team under Cerberus Capital Management reviewed Chrysler’s outlook that Chery would not be able to supply cars that met US safety and environmental standards soon enough.

Now, Tom LaSorda, Chrysler’s vice-chairman, says that it may use the Chery joint venture eventually to make a car that could sell in Latin America.

That sounds like a sensible plan. But the episode illustrates that car technology is complex and fears that the Chinese domestic manufacturers are about to flood the west with vehicles are overblown.

From what I saw at the Detroit Auto Show in January, they are full of ideas and models, but they are a long way from competing with Japan.

Update: Oh dear, sorry. I’m going to be on leave for another week so will not be back on duty until Monday April 14.  Apologies.