It's a reporter's dream. How often do you get a constellation of stars like this:

IBM is trying hard to ignore the fact that one of its own, a guy that was supposedly a heartbeat away from someday becoming its CEO, is currently looking at doing six months in jail for whispering family secrets in the ear of his mistress, a rapacious equities trader.

HP is reeling from the sudden dismissal of its star CEO for - take your pick - hiring a jade as the company's meeter-and-greeter, hitting on her but not getting anywhere - HP's the only company boring enough to have a sex scandal without any sex - then not giving her more work and giving the Playboy model-turned-single mother and her lawyer the chance to hold HP's toes to the fire.

And now 25% of Dell's long-suffering stockholders - recently informed that the company's success from 2002 to 2006 was due to millions in kickbacks from Intel that kept Dell shot of AMD - have withheld their support of Michael Dell returning to the Dell board.

Dell, the company, had to pay the SEC $100 million for a mess of financial peccadilloes - like misstating its real numbers and, separately, Dell, the CEO, had to pay $4 million out of his own pocket for not disclosing Intel's importance to the company. The company's been in the toilet since the payments stopped.

Apparently the share-owning pension funds of the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who called for a protest vote at last week's stockholder meeting, aren't the only ones to think Dell should get itself a new chairman.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Patrick McGurn, special counsel to ISS, the proxy advisory firm, as saying "Anything over 20% is something that boards take notice of - and pay attention to." All Things Digital recalls that even Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang had better numbers than Dell and look what happened to him.