i had just returned from an amazing 9-day mission trip in central america.  (what a tremendous experience.  if you have the chance to do something like that — and you’re easy going, like to help and can deal with not having a tv, your computer, your cell phone…water, etc. — do it.)  the show is going well.  i continue to keep the weight off.  my cats think i’m the coolest.  i mean, it’s been a great week.

until today.  having purchased a new laptop (at a hell of a price — all hail microcenter), nobody, not even the engineering and IT departments can get it to work.  great.  next time i’ll just set the cash on fire.  but grand scheme, i can get that taken care of.  a minor annoyance.

so today, i’m leaving the office right?  i walk out the door.  there, sitting before me, gleaming like a beacon in the night, is the $800 miracle that is my ‘99 ford escort — the one with 170k miles on it. the one we relentlessly make fun of on the show.  the one with the rust and scratches.  the one ellen claims i drive “like a bat out of hell,” (as if it’ll go over 37 mph).   the one that no one can believe i actually paid a full $800 to buy.  so i hop in…nothing.  turns over but won’t start.  and eventually starts to make a noise that no earthly (man-made or otherwise) creature should ever make.

dead.  i could fix it.  but then again, i could buy 4 more miracle escorts too.

so i send out an email asking if anybody knows anybody looking to unload a used car.  the answer i get comes from my boss…the program director.  his answer: “ummmm, jayme.”

jayme is the exec producer of the show  and the owner of the only car in the lot that’s worse-off than mine (i mean it’s an utter disaster.  it’s a miracle to emerge from it alive.)  (i’m glad she doesn’t read my blog.)

and on top of that, manifesto is closed.

really?  really??

thanks gateway.  thanks escort.  thanks neil.  thanks borrowed liquor license.  you shall not destroy my outstanding mood (which i think almost drove ellen to violence on more than one occasion this week).

but…could one of you please come pick me up at 3:15 monday morning?

last week, i took some time off, but not for vaca, rather for a mission trip to nicaragua.  and what an experience it was!

cccckc has been doing mission trips all over the world for years but nicaragua has become a regular event.  20 of us left last saturday from kci and returned yesterday afternoon (28 feb).  here’s one of the neat things about the trip, half of us had never had the nicaragua mission experience, the other half had.

anyway, you can check some of the pix from the trip at facebook.com/ejbecker and you can read about the trip from my perspective (stream of consciousness is really big in nicaragua) and lori’s perspective right here. we kept blogs about our adventures.

thanks for checking it out.

- 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.)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.