Happy Pesach, Y'all!

For all of my Jewish friends and family (and Randy Bernstein, too!), here's a timely Passover greeting:

Friday Odds and Ends (Mostly Odds!)

If you have school age children, you know there's nothing more "fun" than "helping" your kid finish up a major school project. Our 10-year-old son, Spencer, had a social studies project due today - the class is doing biographies, so who do you think he chose? You get one guess, and here's a clue. It's a Matthews family obsession. OK. So we (sorry, I meant HE) had to make a lifesize representation of Walt... Most kids pulled out the crayons and went to work. Mrs. Matthews, being the perfectionist uberMom she is, pulled out the construction paper, and together we (HE) cut a suit for Walt... I tied one of my Disney ties, and scanned it at real size for the chest, and Robin gave him suit pockets and cuffs for the pants... Oh, and his "shirt" was real fabric, too. We spent the entire night constructing it on the island in the kitchen. So, what do you think of our creation? We (HE) better get an "A", that's all I've gotta say!

After more than a year of being pestered by me, my friend and former work associate Jen Richer, has joined the TiVo universe. As readers of my new website already know, I consider TiVo to be one of the great turn of the century inventions. Note, I endorsed TiVo, not your generic cable company DVRs... TiVo is simply more user-friendly and has better search functions than brand X, and those enlightened enough to have it connected through wifi also have access to a full array of nifty features, including the ability to send and receive home movies, view snapshots on your TV, download movie rentals, listen to internet radio and a bunch of other stuff you can't do with other DVRs. If this sounds like a paid endorsement for TiVo, unfortunately it isn't. It is an endorsement, but I wasn't paid!

Finally... When we moved into our current house four years ago, I made Robin get rid of all of our old record albums, because we had not played a single one of them in the 13 years we lived in our old house, and we had long ago replaced most of them with compact discs. However, I did save ONE album... a 1981 recording of Syracuse University's Hendricks Chapel Choir (Hear a clip of the 2007 version of the choir here). If you look at the liner notes on the album, you will see my name in the choir directory, along with that of Jonathan Greene, one of my best friends and the guy who introduced me to my wife! My friend, John Patti of WBAL has one of those turntables that can hook up directly to a computer, and he has agreed to transfer that old album to digital music files for me, so I can annoy the family by playing 18th century music on road trips. And I'm sure you'll soon be able to hear some old clips here at Life on The Beach as well! Lucky you!

Makes Me Laugh EVERY Time!

There is nothing I like more than shopping at Giant Food and using the self-checkout aisles... especially when the people around me are checking out fresh produce.

Nothing gives me the giggles more than hearing the automated attendant say in a loud, clear voice, "Please move your - YAMS - to the belt..." or "Please move your - GREEN BEANS - to the belt...". Of course, some fruits and veggies are funnier than others. Apples... Oranges... meh. Cherries... better. Zucchini... Bananas... a slight chortle, perhaps. Cantalopes? Melons? Gets me every time!

I'm Going Postal On The US Postal Service!

For reasons that are unimportant (except to say it was NOT my fault!), I had to wait until last night to mail my tax return. I knew this would be a pain in the ass, so I made sure yesterday morning to go to the U.S. Postal Service website to find which post offices would be open late. Sure enough, I was greeted by a banner on the USPS site promoting extended hours and extra help for April 15th tax filers.... But when I tried to find out which post offices were open late, was that information available? NO! I spent 15 minutes turning that website inside out, and the single most important piece of information that anyone would need was not there! So I went to the next step... I looked up my nearest post office, and found the phone number, which turned out to be an automated national USPS voice mail system. I needed to call three times to get the information I needed, because the first two times, the recorded message did not work.

Eventually, I did find an acceptable place to make my delivery - The Leisure World post office, which was closing at 6:30 pm. I pulled into the parking lot at 6:20 and found a line going out the door. Fair enough... I had expected a line. What I did NOT expect was to find that there was no one available to tell the customers what to do... No signs telling people where to drop their mail. No encouraging notices telling them that their letters WOULD be postmarked April 15th. There were two lines, and two postal employees scrambling to keep up with the traffic. In the line, people were asking each other what to do, because there was no information available.

At the stroke of 6:30, one of the two postal employees walked to the front door, and told everyone outside they would have to come inside because the post office was closing. Imagine about 40 people cramming inside a shop that's about the size of an average Starbucks. After everyone came inside, the postal worker locked the front door. Now - this was surely a CLEAR fire code violation, but I wasn't going to say anything. For the next few minutes, as two or three customers were ready to leave, the same postal worker had to stop what she was doing, and go unlock the front door so the customers could exit. Eventually, one of the customers volunteered to stand watch at the front door so it could remain unlocked and keep out the straggling late arrivals.

I need to mention here that the postal employees were doing the best they could do given the circumstances. This was not their failure... This was a big-time management problem. The USPS promised to deliver a service that ultimately it could not deliver. April 15th should be the one day a year that the USPS proves its value... but instead, it proved its incompetence!

Here Comes The Pope!

Pope Benedict will arrive in Washington tonight for a visit that will include a Mass to be celebrated at Nationals Park later this week. There was a time that an event like this would have merited live and locally-produced wall-to-wall coverage on WMAL. I would have been the manager in charge of putting the coverage together, just as I coordinated inaugurations, major funerals and state visits in the past. Those days are over for me for now, and for the first time in 20 years, I will be watching an event of this scale from the sidelines.

I must say I'm enjoying that fact just a bit. It's been a thrill to work through major news events, but you definitely miss something when you are caught up in trying to get people to the scene of the crime, or to get to the scene of the crime yourself. As tragic as that day was, September 11th was one of the pivotal moments of my career - yet in many ways, I wish I could have experienced it the way the rest of America did, by watching it on TV and sharing the experience in my neighborhood.

As I've mentioned before, I'd also REALLY like to enjoy a big snow storm from the comfort of my own home - I've literally never been able to do that, because I've always had to work. Hopefully, if I can enjoy the snow next winter, it'll be because I've found a job outside of news, NOT because I still don't HAVE a job!

You're So STUPID, Rose! (But You're HOT!)

Well, today is tax day... April 15th - which, for me, is always a reminder that it is also the anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, which sank in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage from Southhampton, England to New York on this date in 1912. I became interested in the Titanic saga after James Cameron's blockbuster film was released in 1996, and have read several books about the tragedy. I also became interested in Kate Winslet after the film was released, and with all due respect to the Missus, I am still interested in Kate Winslet to this day. You jump, I jump... right, Kate? Woof!

Hello, Stranger!

Faithful Life On The Beach readers (all 3 of you, including me) will recall that I recently joined Facebook, and found it to be a fascinating way to find people. I am now discovering that not only can I find people , they can also find me. I received an email today from Facebook, advising me that a Ms. Mandy Strasik (This is her Facebook photo to the right) was requesting to be made one of my online "friends". Now, I've never met Ms. Mandy Strasik, but I am a friendly sort, and I'm always telling my boys that they can never make too many friends in life, so I went ahead and made Mandy Strasik my official friend... although I'm pretty sure we're still a bit young in our budding friendship to go out and pick furniture or anything like that.

Now I must confess - although I have never met Ms. Mandy Strasik, I had a strong suspicion she was THE Mandy from Chez Copa - a.k.a. the women who party and sometimes cohabit with my young former associate Jennifer T. (Don't call me Jenny) Richer, who works at WMAL. A few clicks of the keyboard did confirm this to be the case. I am, in fact, delighted at my age, married with two kids, to be able to be part of any club made up almost entirely of attractive 20-something women. Just don't wake me up from this dream!

However, this situation does beg one question of Facebook etiquette that puzzles me. If I am going to receive unsolicited requests for friendship, am I bound by 21st Century mores to accept them all? I mean, how insulting would it be to say "no" to someone requesting an online friendship? I know in the short time I've been perusing Facebook, I have run across people from my past who I want to remain in my past... but there's no assurance they are not going to seek ME out to be friends. Is there such a thing as a "Facebook Witness Protection Program"? Maybe there should be! In the meantime, Mandy... let's do lunch!