Red Wings beat Ducks 2-1 for 4th straight road win

NITTANY NOTES: Back to the grind

First Posted: 3/23/2013 LOS ANGELES &#8212; Jay Leno is keeping up a comedy assault on his NBC bosses even after being treated to a make-nice dinner.
During his monologue Friday, the &#8220;Tonight Show&#8221; host asked his Burbank studio audience if they&#8217;d heard about his &#8220;alleged feud&#8221; with NBC.
Leno started taking on-air potshots at the network this month amid reports that the network plans to replace him at &#8220;Tonight&#8221; with Jimmy Fallon.
According to a NBC transcript from Friday&#8217;s taping, Leno said he had dinner Thursday with a &#8220;bunch of NBC executives&#8221; who offered to make things up to him: He and his wife are going on an all-expenses-paid Carnival Cruise, he joked.
In February, passengers endured five nightmarish days on a crippled Carnival Cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico.
In another wisecrack, Leno cited news reports of a Canadian man who had a knife pulled from his back after three years. Sniped Leno: &#8220;He must have worked at NBC, too.&#8221;
NBC confirmed this week it&#8217;s creating a new studio for Fallon in New York, where he hosts &#8220;Late Night.&#8221; But the network did not comment on a report that the digs at its Rockefeller Plaza headquarters might become home to a transplanted, Fallon-hosted &#8220;Tonight.&#8221;
This isn&#8217;t the first time the &#8220;Tonight&#8221; stage has been used for a workplace dispute. In 2010, when Conan O&#8217;Brien briefly took over as &#8220;Tonight&#8221; host and Leno was moved to prime-time at NBC, the two traded on-air barbs.
Although late-night hosts are known for needling their network bosses, the timing of Leno&#8217;s latest jabs seemed to make NBC&#8217;s executives particularly uncomfortable, and they asked him to stop. They don&#8217;t want a repeat of the publicly messy turnover of only three years ago.
The 62-year-old Leno&#8217;s contract expires next year. For NBC, the 38-year-old Fallon represents a bid to launch a next-generation host for &#8220;Tonight&#8221; &#8212; though Leno has kept the show No. 1 in the ratings despite a challenge from Jimmy Kimmel&#8217;s ABC show, which was moved back an hour to compete with it.
&#8220;You know the whole legend of St. Patrick, right? St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland &#8212; and then they came to the United States and became NBC executives,&#8221; Leno joked on Monday&#8217;s show.
On Tuesday, he played off a news report about a Serbian woman with a rare brain condition that causes her to see the world upside down: &#8220;Isn&#8217;t that crazy? It&#8217;s unbelievable. She sees everything upside down. In fact, she thinks NBC is at the top of the ratings.&#8221;

Leno lobs as NBC tries to make nice