Shooting a story on the cherry blossoms in DC today…I was standing on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial getting shots of the Tidal Basin and the White House with the cherry trees.

Everything was going great, we had all the shots we needed for a little different story on how people abuse the trees, let kids climb all over them, break off branches, that kind of stuff. Then a security official walks over to me and says “Excuse me, do you have a permit?”

Now I assumed he wanted some kind of permit for shooting on the mall, or shooting at a monument. No no. He wanted to see my tripod permit. That’s right, another person wanting me to have a permit to use a tripod. What is this world coming to.

You would blog too if it happened to you.

Moving on. First of all, NEW SHOW (March 30). Pretty Good one I think.

Two news items caught my eye this week. The first, Rep. Cynthia McKinney running afoul of the Capitol Police. Glad to see I’m not the only one they’re out to get. Though I’m not black and not a woman, so I guess their “motives” differ in our cases. For the record, I was wearing my credentials BOTH times I was questioned by Capitol Police officers, and NEITHER time did I hit one of them.

The other article that got the noodle going was about Indiana finally joining the rest of the country–except Hawaii and Arizona–in observing daylight savings this year.

That got me thinking all about time zones and time differences. You know, how it’s like 8 am here on the East Coast, but in Sydney it’s like 3 pm tomorrow. At some point someone came up with a system and said “startiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing NOW!” right? Turns out some Canadian fellow came up with the idea for world time zones back in the day, but being Canadian, he also threw in that there should be a central clock located at the center of the Earth…

So my question is, if there was a point in time where someone just hit “Go” on this system, how did the people at the very front of the time zones feel about basically losing time, while the people at the back got to have that one day almost twice? I know I’d be pissed. Just think about how you feel each Spring when you “lose” just one hour, which you get back in the fall. Those people in Japan lost an entire day on “Go,” one they’ll never get back.

So today was one of those days where you wake up and think “Either everything is going to go perfectly and today is going to rock, or it’s all going wrong. No in between today.”

And boy did it come through. I took the Metro to Capitol Hill to cover a senate hearing on port security. I was also interviewing a representative for the same story. So that required a lot of walking between the two sides of the Hill as I tried to get both of those things done as quickly as possible so I could get back to campus, edit the story and anchor the show.

Well the hearing went well, took a lot of good notes and had a script written by the time I left. The only thing that could have derailed me was not getting a tape from the hearing from FoxNews, who had the pool camera there. (sidenote: at hearings or events where it’s expected to be very crowded, a “pool” camera will provide video for all of the networks so that they don’t all have to try to fit in there).

So I go to the lawn area in front of the Capitol to shoot my little reporter standup. I’m all set to go when I hear the rumble of a U.S. Capitol Police motorcycle. “Excuse me, do you have a tripod permit?” I’m sorry, WHAT? “Do you have a tripod permit?” I’ve never heard of that. I need a permit to use a tripod? “Yes, on the Capitol Grounds you must have a permit to use a tripod.” Oh. Ok then.

The conversation about this tripod permit was about 10 minutes long, and perhaps the must utterly idiotic thing I’ve heard in my life. Apparently years ago there were problems with tourists tripping over tripods and hurting themselves as they fell to the sidewalk. Now I’m all about safety, but it was about 37 degrees, borderline raining and the beginning of March. There was not a tourist within a half-mile of where I was. But still, I needed a permit to use my tripod.

So without my standup, I head off to interview the representative. As I wait for him to finish another meeting, I call about getting the tape from Fox. No dice. Awesome. No story for me today. I get the interview, and 13 seconds of it ends up on the newscast. So if you’re scoring at home, that’s leave home at 6:30, spend 3 hours in a hearing, leave the Hill at 2 pm, and have 13 seconds of that time end up being worth the effort.

Oh and there was the extremely witty and helpful gentleman on the elevator ride down from the representative’s office at the end of all of this. He sees me carrying a backpack that weighs like 15 pounds, a tripod and a camera that I have been lugging around all day…”That looks heavy.” Yeah, it is.

Thanks buddy.