Olympic-sized Shopping!

With the kiddies safely off at summer camp, the missus dragged me out for a shopping decathon at Virginia's retail mecca, Potomac Mills. I had agreed to go on the condition that we would hit the road to return home by 3 pm in order to avoid the Sunday afternoon rush hour on I-95... Robin had other plans, of course, but she wisely kept them to herself.

We started the morning at IKEA, which had just launched its annual summer sale. I kid you not when I tell you she dragged me around that place for 2 and a half hours - We would have stayed longer, but my constant whining finally found its intended target.


Our next stop - the Mall... We broke this up into three pieces... Shopping first at one end, then driving around to the food court to cover the mall's mid-section. This took another four hours, and by this point, my feet were starting to bother me. Robin told me "It's only walking", so I had to explain to her that I have no problem with walking. I can do MILES of walking at a time... It's walking four feet, then stopping... walking four feet, then stopping that kills me... and my feet died a million deaths yesterday!

We had one more stop at the mall - Robin wanted to go to the far end to see Nordstrom Rack. I refused to go, but offered to drop her for a quick peek while I bought gas. After stopping at Costco, (3.92 a gallon - not bad!), I returned to Nordstrom Rack and waited another half-hour for my soon-to-be ex-wife.

So by now, it's 6:30 - time to hit the road, right? HA! We hit the new Wegman's instead. For the uninitiated, Wegman's is a supermarket on steroids... massive muscle-building, hairline-receding, testicle-shrinking steroids! Think about the largest Giant Food store that you've ever visited, then double the size, and you have Wegman's. About 60 percent of Wegman's is like a typical grocery store, albeit a grocery store with a massive selection!

The rest of Wegman's is like a massive gourmet food court. The seafood section has its own sit-down restaurant serving fresh fish. There is a sushi bar... A guy standing at a kiosk making fresh crab cakes... Another person tossing salads. A woman making custom cannolis... There's a sub shop next to a pizza joint. There were two buffets serving Indian and Chinese food, along with an upstairs seating area for at least a couple of hundred people! Robin and I enjoyed a chinese feast at 8 bucks a pound, then went grocery shopping.

There is a bit of nostalgia for us in Wegman's... The chain is based in upstate New York, where Robin and I both went to college... And for whatever reason, the chain carries some upstate New York delicacies - food you cannot usually get anywhere else, like Freihofer's Chocolate Chip cookies and Hofmann's Snappy Grillers - white hot dogs also known as "coneys" that I spent my college years consuming prodigiously at a legendary Syracuse hot dog place called Heid's of Liverpool. So we filled the cart with all this stuff, and finally called it a night - after 2 hours and 15 minutes of grocery shopping!

So much for getting home by 4 pm... We pulled into the driveway at 9:45 - exactly 12 hours after leaving the house... It was a shopping day that we never would have put our children through... It was enough to make me miss those little buggers!

OMG! This "WTF" Story Will Make You LOL!

I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later... A controversy over common text message and e-mail abbreviations... Read on:

OMG! What is that on my car's license plate?
That's the question asked by 10,000 drivers who registered their vehicles in North Carolina last year and got registrations starting with "WTF."
Long just an innocuous combination of three letters, like OMG ("Oh my God!") WTF is now heavy with vulgar connotations: it is an oft-used email and mobile phone abbreviation that means "What the f***."

In North Carolina, WTF plates were issued to some 9,999 drivers last year, including elementary school teacher Mary Ann Hardee, who teaches computing and technology, the News and Observer newspaper reported earlier this month.
"She wasn't hip to the Internet-age significance of her new license plate -- until she caught her teenage grandchildren giggling at it," Dan Kane, staff writer at the paper wrote.

Hardee, 60, told the paper she "developed this real self-consciousness" once she found out what her number plate meant in techno-shorthand.
She petitioned the Department of Motor Vehicles, which ordered that she and everyone else who had a WTF number plate should receive new plates FOC -- free of charge.

This year, North Carolina registrations have three-letter combinations starting with the letter Y.
The Department of Motor Vehicles has carefully scrutinized the plates and deemed that none are offensive, according to the News and Observer.
They must have overlooked YBF, which means "You've been f****d."

I must say, to his total credit, my 14-year-old son, Brad, rebels against common text abbreviations and refuses to use them. He thinks they are immature, that they encourage stereotypes against teenagers, and they they are a crime against intelligence. Of course, the fact that I refuse to pay for text messaging for his cel phone may have something to do with it as well!

I do confess to using what are probably the three most common abbreviations - OMG, LOL and the dreaded WTF - more out of cultural sloth than anything else. The latter one, in particular, is a favorite of my former boss, who used to send it to me whenever he heard something on the air that did not meet his approval. The abbreviation became more powerful than the actual words themselves!

TTFN!

My Life As Word Art!

I was checking out the blog of my friend, Dr. Deb Serani, and she had this cool widget on there called Wordle... In essence, it takes a group of words and turns it into "word art" for lack of a better term. I took the tag words for all of my blog entries and entered them into Wordle, and here's what came out:



You can click on the art to see it in its full size... You can easily rejigger the Wordle to look any random way you'd like, with a variety of different fonts, colors and effects... The coolest part, for me, is that the size of the word is relative to the number of times the word is mentioned as a tag on my blog. Hmm... I must talk about myself a lot, huh? Check out your own wordle right here!

That's My Boy!

When I was a kid, the only way my parents knew what I was up to at summer camp was when I chose to send them a letter. But thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can follow my kids' exploits whenever I want! Brad and Spencer's camp provides updates pretty much 24/7... telling us what activities they've been doing every day and what they were served for lunch and dinner. They also upload dozens of photos daily so we can see them having fun (What a GREAT marketing tool, by the way!)... AND - we can send e-mail to our boys as often as we want, so it makes writing them much easier. The emails are printed out and delivered to the kids... They still have to write us by hand, just as God intended!

So last night, I checked in and discovered that 10-year-old son Spencer auditioned for the camp play, "West Side Story", and won the role of Officer Krupke! I suppose I should ponder the fact that Spencer's main responsibility will be to stand on stage and receive the verbal musical abuse of several other kids singing "Krup You" to him, but instead I'll choose to bask in the glow of my son getting his first dramatic role! As you may have read earlier, we're big supporters of musical theater for kids in the Matthews household!

We always knew Spencer would be our artsy child... He enjoys singing in the school chorus, and played clarinet in the orchestra this past school year. Hopefully, this taste of musical theater will make Spencer hungry to continue in the arts.

Now I just hope he'll pick up a pencil and write us to tell us about his good news - Last year, Spencer failed to write even one letter from camp - but at least he was having a good time!

Give Me A Break!

Do you ever get the feeling you'd like to throttle someone, even though you know that technically, the person you want to throttle is not in the wrong? I saw this op-ed piece in last Sunday's Washington Post - from a guy who was issued a written warning for driving too slow on I-95. I think the cop who stopped the guy deserves a commendation... and the driver deserves a special place in Hell! (OK - maybe that's a bit harsh, but read on!)

Saving Gas Could Cost You Money
Sunday, June 22, 2008; B08

There have been a bunch of reports in the media lately, including a June 15 Business article, about "hypermilers": people who try to increase their miles per gallon by altering their driving habits.

I am a modestly committed hypermiler; I have a Honda Insight. It's rated 66 mpg highway, 60 city. Some hypermilers shoot for 100-plus mpg with their Insights. But I am happy to average 70 mpg.

I don't use some of the more controversial tactics:
· I don't roll through stop signs.
· I don't push my car down the hill to start it rolling.
· I don't tailgate tractor-trailers (well, not regularly).
· I confess to driving with a gentle foot, avoiding hard acceleration and hard braking.

Mostly I get my mileage just by slowing down a bit. It not only saves gas, but it's also what various Maryland State Police safety advisories and various eco-Web sites urge me to do. Slowing down is touted as thrifty, patriotic and eco-friendly. Too bad it's also "criminal."

The other night I was on my way to pick up my wife at BWI Airport just after midnight. There was almost no traffic on Interstate 95. I was happily allowing the car to speed up to 65 mph or so going downhill, but not punching the gas going uphill until I got down to about 50 or 55 mph (like the speed pattern of loaded semi-trucks). All of this was going on in the far-right lane.

So what happened? Well, I was pulled over by a Maryland state trooper. After I came to a stop, I sat in my car for three or four minutes with the spotlight from the cruiser in my eyes. When he arrived at my window, the trooper announced that we were being videotaped. It sounded serious.

He asked me why I had been driving 50 mph.
I said, "Saving gas."
"Saving gas?" he repeated.
"Yes, sir," I said. "I'm getting 69 miles per gallon on this trip so far."
He asked me to tell him my address, which I did, while he compared it to the one on my license.

He went back to his patrol car for what seemed like five minutes. Later he came back, handing me a written traffic violation warning. On my "Violator's Copy," the violation specified was, "TRAVELING 50 MPH."

I could not believe it.
"You're giving me a ticket for driving 50?" I asked him.
"If you're going 10 miles under traffic, you're a danger," he said.
I objected.

"I've heard of minimum required speeds of 40 and 45, but I've never heard of one at 50."
"You wouldn't believe how many drunk drivers I catch this way," he said.
I replied, "Well, I haven't been drinking."
He snorted, walked back to his patrol car and drove away.

I wish I'd gotten a ticket -- points, fines, things like that. At least then I could have argued it in court. This way I have no recourse.

It seems that to be a good American, I have to drive faster. I need to use more gas. Go figure.
I e-mailed the state police asking about laws relating to minimum speeds. No response. Maybe I should write to the governor or my state legislators. Or maybe I'll just drop it.
I got 70.3 mpg on the trip.

-- Glenn Conrad
Columbia


Mr Conrad - whatever you do... PLEASE stay out of the left lane!

Exercising My Jewish Roots

The Matthews family made a quick up-and-back trip to New York over the weekend for the bat mitzvah of our good family friend, Jamie Karpf. (Great job, Jamie!) A couple of quick observations...

• After growing up in a well-mixed neighborhood in Silver Spring religion-wise, and after being married to a Jewish woman for 18 years, I must really be assimilating well to the Jewish culture. After the morning service, one of my acquaintances asked me if I speak Hebrew - which I don't. He thought I did because he noticed me apparently reading pretty convincingly during the bat mitzvah! I guess a career of faking phonetic pronunciations on the radio has helped me in that regard... plus, I had to learn a smidgin of hebrew for Brad's Bar Mitzvah 2 years ago, so some of it must have stuck!


• Gas where I live near Olney, Maryland is running about 4.09 a gallon right now. If you pay a similar price, be THANKFUL for it. I noticed on our trip that gas prices in New Jersey, the nation's cheap gas capital are running about 3.89 a gallon - frankly not that much cheaper... And up where my friends live in Putnam County, New York, it's bend-over-and-take-it time! Regular self-serve up there averages about 4.45 a gallon - and folks in the hills of cold and snowy upstate New York actually NEED to own SUVs... OY!


• Every time I attend a wedding or bar mitzvah, I am reminded just how bad today's music is. I know this statement makes me sound like an old fart, but without fail, the proof lies in the music at events like these... What are the songs that get people - young and old - to get up and dance... even today? Motown... Barry White... Kool and the Gang... Sister Sledge... Party music - even for young people - is firmly stuck in 1980! Even the group dances are showing their age now, but those are the songs that get people on their feet... the Macarena, the Electric Slide... the Cha Cha slide... I am fully convinced that if "Shout" and "Hot Hot Hot" had never been written, weddings and bar mitzvahs would have ceased to exist a long time ago!

After racing back from New York, we spent Sunday packing up to send the boys to camp for a month... Actually, my control-freak wife spent Sunday packing. I spent Sunday asking Robin if there was anything I could do to help... Being a Jewish mother (sorry for the stereotype, but this one happens to be true!), Robin had to personally make sure that she and only she ironed on labels in both boys' underwear! My wife readily admits that if I had been left in charge of packing, the job would have taken half the time, but she would have worried that I had missed something.

So I left the task to her, and she proceeded to overpack - sending the boys to camp with 20 pair of undies and 20 pair of socks each, even though the boys will get laundry service once a week! I awoke Monday at 6:30 am and found Robin racing around the house looking for clips that the boys could use to clip their yarmulkes to their heads for Friday night Shabbat services. This caused me to wonder... what makes Robin think the boys will actually wear their yarmulkes? And even if they did - what makes her think they would use a hair clip?

When we got to camp, Robin went off with our younger son, Spencer, to unpack, while I was left in charge of unpacking Brad. I found a laundry bag filled with at least 15 bath towels. I put four of them in a drawer and asked Brad what to do with the rest, and he said... "Shove them in my trunk, and I'll bring them home clean. That's what I've done every other year!"

That's what I love about summer camp... No matter how much the parents try to overprepare, the kids find a way to ignore it all - and get by with only what they really need. What they really need is a break from their Jewish mothers! (I love you, Robin!)

Remembering George Carlin

I am beat to hell today, and I have TONS to blog about after an uber-busy weekend of New York bat mitzvah-hopping and getting my kids off to summer camp for a month. All of that will have to wait until tomorrow, but one thing could NOT wait.

Today, I lost a true childhood hero - George Carlin. George was a hero to me on two levels... First of all, he was to me what "Family Guy" and "South Park" are to my 14-year-old son. My first adolescent taste of counter-culture... The first opportunity I had for my parents to look the other way as I listened to Carlin's record albums with my friends behind the cliosed doors of my bedroom. Carlin was everything I was NOT... Long-haired... stoned... and COOL. Talk to any guy of my generation, and I can almost guarantee you he'll remember at least a small bit of George Carlin's humor.

Secondly, and most importantly to me, George Carlin was one of the real inspirations I had to launch a career in radio. His radio bits were not only funny as hell to me... it also was performed at a comfort level and at a rhythm that I mimicked time and again as I fooled around with being a budding disk jockey in junior high and high school.

Carlin's obituaries will remember him most for the seven dirty words you can't say on television, but to me, the quintessential George Carlin is wonderful WINO radio... Thanks, George.