prepping for the friday round table (8am on 980 kmbz), i decided there are such good choices for newsmaker of the week, i oughta pick a couple, list’em and ask you to check out my facebook page and let me know which’un you think is the best choice.
- barack obama — for outlining the way forward in afghanistan and laying out the timeline for bringing the conflict to an end.
- jay leno — now he’ll answer to a cable company…the company that airs all the shows people switched to when he went “prime time.”
- texas charities — specifically the ones dressed in the green fuzzy suits denying free christmas toys to poor children (because they’re illegal).
and…
- the three iron! (’nuf said.)
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gotta remember to tell ellen that we’re back into that time of year when on occasion we’ll play a christmas tune during the show, talk about the holidays, shopping, etc. and every now and then greet or say goodbye to a guest with a holiday greeting of some kind.
that’s right, it’s that time of year when along with the merry christmases and happy new years’s (pronounced yearz-uhz) we might say happy holidays — not because we’re pagan, not because we don’t want to offend someone, but because it’s another acceptable greeting people use during the holidays (notice we call them “the holidays” as there are indeed multiple holidays in close proximity to one another).
anyway, i have to remind ellen to be ready for the emails that will come in accusing us of being p.c. or crazy libs or any number of other things we may get called when, for the sake of variety, we choose to say happy holidays instead of merry christmas.
of course, when i do get email like that, the one thing that always comes to mind: that’s the spirit! (sigh)
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no doubt at some point, you’ve heard ellen and me talk about what a terrible driver she is (as evidenced by the ridiculous number of tickets she gets) vs. what an excellent driver i am. and i’m also pretty good at parallel parking too. (having lived overseas and driven a car that was no bigger than a t-shirt with tires and having had to put that thing into parking spots the size of manhold covers…you get good at it. or you pay high insurance premiums). i’m no genius, but i can usually judge if the car will fit and get it into the slot on the first try.
what’s wrong with people?
you can literally drive another car through there. every time i go to the m&s grill, some one is parked like this. i’m not kidding. it’s like there’s a disturbance in the magnetic field in front of the restaurant…it’s like being in “lost” only hawaii is waaaayyyyyyyy over that way.
tonite’s brilliant parker was from illinois, the land of lincoln. you could fit two abe’s end to end in that gap.
anyway, the reason i’m convinced it has something to do with the natural forces of the earth and not bad parking, the cops never mess with these cars. they roll right on by without a second thought as if they know that stopping to rebuke the driver/parker will only suck them into whatever unhuman vortex of parking chaos rules the east end of country club plaza.
that’s why i only visit those parts. the west side is much less prone to such anomalies…and cap grill-goers wouldn’t be caught dead parking their own cars.
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perhaps the best thing about my job is interviewing people. and given the kind of show we do, we’re lucky that when the big story comes around, we’re often lucky enough to land the big interview.
this morning…er…saturday night it was kansas 3rd district congressman dennis moore in the moments immediately following the house vote on a healthcare (why isn’t that a compound word yet?) overhaul. only got to about half of the questions i had prepared for the interview, because the congressman said he had other interviews to give… and had to cut our chat off. here’s some of what we didn’t have time to discuss, questions i really wish he’d had time to answer.
what’s being cut from medicare and how are the affected people supposed to make up for it? will this eventually drive the private health insurance industry into extinction? republicans say this will raise taxes on the middle class and small business. are they right? immigration was an issue with this bill. will illegal immigrants be able to buy insurance through the government marketplace? how much jail time are we looking at if we don’t carry insurance? and how worried are you that your vote will put you out of a job in a year (that was the last question he wouldn’t let me get in)?
if you missed the interview, check it out.
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it’s 8pm and no plaza pumpkins have come a-knockin’ lookin’ for candy. that means more reece’s cups for me. (i was cheap and bought the little ones (cuz i knew nobody would show up).)
but at this time of year i am driven once again to wonder why “fun size” candy bars are fun. when i was a kid, trick or treating as the pillsbury dough boy (no pillow necessary then), i had the most fun when somebody handed me a full size snickers or a two pack of recee’s cups.
a small 3 muskateers, milky way or snickers was not fun. it was inconvenient. you knew that you would have to eat at least two to be satisfied (and that meant a fight with mom. dad would side with me as long as i slid him a pb cup under the table). and if you only had one, you were faced with the tough choice of which “incon size” bar should chase the snickers — there’s no good answer.
executive producer jayme tells of her t or t memories where the best houses were the ones handing out “pop.”
that puts things into perspective for me. given the choice between a fun size snickers and having to endure the word “pop,” i will grit my teeth, and choke down the candy bar.
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there are days you come into work and think…hmmm, this will be an interesting day. i think we can do this, and this, and this and then we’ll hit the round table.
then sometimes at 4am, noway steps in and throws a scandanavian monkey wrench into the works.
about 4:01 this morning abc’s michael barr, anchoring the national news broadcast, announces breaking news that the prez has won the nobel peace prize in oslo. at that exact moment, everyone in the newsroom looked at each other and said: “really?”
two seconds later, we threw this, and this and this out the window and began reshaping the show and the round table. we hit the phones to get you reaction from people who know the prez and the issues.
we refocus the questions for our guests, the way we get you involved changes (expanding from asking for comments on email or facebook to opening up the phone lines to get your feedback and talking to you on the street), and we shift our delivery to accommodate a sustained flow of information develops all morning long.
oh and we do traffic and weather every ten minutes since there were 102 accidents this morning.
and we look ahead to the rest of the day and make sure you know what you need to know before glenn, rush, s&p and darla grab the torch from us and carry it forward.
and then, bob comes in with biscotti and suddenly everything seems so much easier to manage again.
thank you norway. thank you president obama for a fun morning. and thank you bob for the best biscotti in the world.
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Every now and then (perhaps more often than you might think) Ellen and I run into something that makes us stop…makes us think about whether or not we oughta mention it on the air. This morning, it was the American Royal BBQ contest. Okay, not the Royal as such, but one of the teams participating in the sausage competition.
Team names are the best, right? You can tell that some teams take just as much time thinking up just the right name as they do putting together just the right BBQ sauce recipe. (And by the way, Howlin Wolfe’s BBQ catered the KMBZ party at the Royal on Friday and talk about a great recipe! These guys need a restaurant!). But a team name isn’t what you’d expect to catch your attention and make you ask, “Really? Can I say that? Really? (Chuckle like a 9 year old).”
We had one of those moments this morning. You can find the link by going to our highlights page. See if you can figure out which team gave us pause.
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when i was in third grade, mrs. hunt (boy was she a piece of work, but she pretty much straightened me out for the rest of my life) used to dock points from my assignments if i didn’t write my name correctly. “e.j.”, she would write, “is spelled with periods after each letter.”
always striving to achieve (read: i got annoyed when she would take points away for stupid stuff), i quickly adapted and have not, since the third grade, written “e.j.” as “ej”. (e.j. is not a radio name, it’s what i’ve gone by since day 1.)
what i find odd is that since coming to kansas city, i have rarely found anyone that spells my name correctly (most of the time, my name is written by someone at work). all my name tags at work read ej. memos ej. emails ej. no periods. not even a space. the e and the j always look so crowded and uncomfortable. i feel for them and it pains me to look.
it’s become so commonplace that i rarely if ever say anything. and i remain perplexed at how the misspelling of my name has only been an issue for the last 2.5 years and only here in the heartland.
i take from this that kc (or wherever my colleagues grew up) didn’t have a mrs. hunt (or they didn’t have a grade riding on the proper use of nominal punctuation). or perhaps the problem lies with me. do i need to change my approach? instead of spelling my name “e period j period” maybe i will adapt to the times and the lingo that folks are more likely to understand today — “e dot j dot.” i’m fine with that as long as i’m not asked to help change a flat or scrape an aminal from the road.
but i can’t help but think that either way, mrs. hunt would not be pleased.
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every time i see her now, in think of sneezing. in photos, she always has her elbow in front of her face. if it’s a video, she’s putting it in front of her face. if it’s a press briefing she’s having sticks moved around to puppet an elbow in front of a red, velvety face (i am desperately trying to avoid mentioning elmo here).
and when a national news guy sneezes into his hands, she manipultates (through her words and outraged facial expressions) his elbow too.
so the term ’secretary of sneezing’ came to mind this morning and as i ponder it more, i find myself looking for a more sleek, modern term.
secre-sneeze. sneezatary. secre…secre…secre-chooo.
kansas powerfrau (this isn’t negative, just german), former governor, pilates phenom and now sneezemander-in-chief.
anyway, let’s hope her efforts pay off. how can you not get nervous when you hear stories like the one we had this morning on kansas city’s morning news (weekday mornings 5-9 on newsradio 980 kmbz — tell a friend) — a 24 year old independence woman with the swine flu, died. 24 years old. 24!
scary stuff. and if it breaks out like they say it might, it’ll be nothing to sneeze at.
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Got the new crackberry today from at&t and I’ll never get to sleep tonite because of it.
And the stupid thing keeps putting caps on words.
Oh well.
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