New Generation

Debuting on August 25, 2012, WWE Saturday Morning Slam has been a staple on the Vortexx on the CW. For many longtime WWE fans, watching the product on Saturday mornings was a tradition, the most coveted time of the week to catch your favorite stars. This includes lifelong fan and current WWE superstar Zack Ryder. "There's a whole new generation of fans who are, maybe watching wrestling for the first time or watching it in addition to Raw and Smackdown," Ryder said in a phone interview Thursday.

There's something about "Les Miserables" that keeps me coming back. It's not that "Les Miz," running through Sunday at the Hippodrome Theatre , is my favorite musical. Far from it. It's all too easy to point out the technical flaws in Claude-Michel Schonberg's melodies (bombastic) and Herbert Kretzmer's lyrics (unsurprising). The critics have been making these arguments for the past 27 years, and for the past 27 years, audiences have been ignoring the critics. Producer Cameron Mackintosh's much-hyped new staging incorporates brighter costumes and screen projections to simulate such effects as Paris' underground sewers.

A new generation of female philanthropists is growing up in Howard County thanks to the Women's Giving Circle and 14 teenagers who feel as passionately about helping others as their mothers and grandmothers. The Young Women's Giving Circle formed last year as a pilot project, with the goal of teaching high school girls how to become an informed and intentional force for good in the county. Led by high school seniors Jackie Dawson, of Mt. Hebron, and Julie Factor, of Glenelg, members of the small circle with big intentions spent the past 10 months attending workshops on grant making and fundraising, interviewing and visiting various nonprofits, all so they could learn how to raise money and then give it away to a cause they care about.

Debuting on August 25, 2012, WWE Saturday Morning Slam has been a staple on the Vortexx on the CW. For many longtime WWE fans, watching the product on Saturday mornings was a tradition, the most coveted time of the week to catch your favorite stars. This includes lifelong fan and current WWE superstar Zack Ryder. "There's a whole new generation of fans who are, maybe watching wrestling for the first time or watching it in addition to Raw and Smackdown," Ryder said in a phone interview Thursday.

I have been a member in good standing at my community swimming pool from almost the moment I knew I was pregnant. That's probably because my sisters and I grew up at a community pool. Literally. From swim team practices in the morning to afternoons of pool tag and, finally, to swim meets at night. We lived on French fries and grilled cheese sandwiches from the snack bar. Our fingers and toes were always so wrinkly that my mother felt safe sending us to bed without a bath.

Thirty years ago, the "generation gap" referred to the cultura clash between the great demographic fertility bulge of people born between 1943 and 1960 -- the "Baby Boomers" -- and the "GI Generation" (1901-1924) that fought WWII. Today, however, a new generation gap is emerging between the grown-up "Baby (( Boomers," now in their thirties and forties, and the teen-agers and twentysomethings of the age cohort just behind them.fTC The experience of these younger Americans, the 13th generation counting back to the peers of Ben Franklin, has been markedly different from that of the Baby Boomers who preceded them, according to Neil Howe and William Strauss writing in the December issue of Atlantic magazine.

Are you ready for some foosball? The 2012 Maryland Foosball Championships will be held Feb. 17-19 at the Holiday Inn Columbia in Jessup, with 150 enthusiasts of the table soccer game competing for $12,000 in prize money. According to tournament director Chun Lee, the competition that started in Maryland in the late 1980s will return after a year's hiatus. Lee said the event was not held last year because sponsor Tornado Table Soccer could not fit it into its schedule. Lee, who has been playing the popular indoor game for 20 years, said the type of foosball being played now is much faster than it was when he started.

Joan Rivers is having a manicure and a pedicure in her hotel room while juggling a phone. "I'm in Indianapolis," she says. "I just learned how to spell it, and now I'm leaving. What a waste. " This week, between gigs in Florida and Ohio, she'll stop by the Hippodrome to dispense her trademark observations on her own world and anyone, anything that catches her attention. "When I go onstage, I just talk about what's happening," Rivers says. "My life is an open book.

WASHINGTON -- Just after noon, the words we knew someday we'd hear came down from the Capitol and echoed over the long rivers of people on the West Front."

Washington. -- The New Generation is fed up with government, Washington and the two major political parties.The New Generation wants to be left alone to make a little money, hang out in espresso shops and surf the Internet.All of this comes from Douglas Coupland, who should know since he is the author of ''Generation X,'' the novel that gave the post-boomer generation that nickname.''The old left-right paradigm is not working anymore,'' he told U.S.A. Today recently. ''Coming down the pipe are an extraordinarily large number of fiscal conservatives who are socially left.

Joseph Bathgate calls them "the Hollywood questions. " When college classmates learn he was a machine gunner for the Marine Corps for two tours in Iraq, they want to know: Did anyone ever shoot at you? Ever get hit? And there's the big one. You ever kill anyone? "It's unusual, I understand that, what I've done," says Bathgate, 24, of Dundalk, now out of the military and studying kinesiology at Towson University. "Still, it's annoying. … Naturally, I feel different" from the other, mostly younger students on campus.

Over the years at Camden Yards — and, of course, I mean the many bad years — I would be drawn into conversations with parents with little kids, especially if the little kids were decked out in Red Sox shirts and hats. "Where are you from?" I'd ask, curious if the parents had driven from my native New England for a game. "Cockeysville," would be the answer. Or "Catonsville. " Or "Clarksville," or some other "ville" in metropolitan Baltimore. Then I'd ask if the parents had grown up in New England.

The way politicians talk, one would think that the only issues that matter to Americans over 55 or 60 are Social Security and Medicare. Of course, the future of these programs is enormously important to the well-being of older citizens (and everyone else who one day will be old), and their runaway costs threaten the nation's long-term budgetary health. But most of the 60 million Americans between the ages of 55 and 75 have other things on their minds than what will happen to these two huge entitlement programs.

A fellow named Joseph contacted me the other day. He's one of Baltimore's many drug addicts, still alive at 33, clean for once, and looking for a job. "I started smoking crack at the age of 14, shooting heroin at the age of 16," he says. "I am on parole and probation, and I can't find a job anywhere ... It seems like every time I get an interview, everything is great until they do a background check. I'm going to [violate my parole] soon due to non-payment of the [parole] supervision fees.

Joan Rivers is having a manicure and a pedicure in her hotel room while juggling a phone. "I'm in Indianapolis," she says. "I just learned how to spell it, and now I'm leaving. What a waste. " This week, between gigs in Florida and Ohio, she'll stop by the Hippodrome to dispense her trademark observations on her own world and anyone, anything that catches her attention. "When I go onstage, I just talk about what's happening," Rivers says. "My life is an open book.

Are you ready for some foosball? The 2012 Maryland Foosball Championships will be held Feb. 17-19 at the Holiday Inn Columbia in Jessup, with 150 enthusiasts of the table soccer game competing for $12,000 in prize money. According to tournament director Chun Lee, the competition that started in Maryland in the late 1980s will return after a year's hiatus. Lee said the event was not held last year because sponsor Tornado Table Soccer could not fit it into its schedule. Lee, who has been playing the popular indoor game for 20 years, said the type of foosball being played now is much faster than it was when he started.

New York. -- The historic new-generation nomination here this month has hundreds of well-known men and women, from World War II veterans to baby boomers, worried that the world and their own lives will never be the same. For some, for better or worse, this is the most important event of their professional lifetimes.I'm not talking about 45-year-old Bill Clinton running against 68-year-old George Bush. No! Who knows how that will end in November? I'm talking about the generational revolution that has already happened: Tina Brown, 38, being named editor of the New Yorker.

I KNEW the Soviet coup against Mikhail Gorbachev was going to fail when NBC News called upon "our reporter in the White House" to tell New York what was happening."

Gov. Martin O'Malley is pushing state energy regulators to consider renewable energy resources and to allow utilities to own plants again in their efforts to seek potential new power generation at cost-controlled prices. To prevent potential blackouts and reduce Maryland's reliance on out-of-state electricity, the Public Service Commission last month ordered the state's utilities, including Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., to seek proposals for companies that would build natural gas plants in return for guaranteed power purchases by the utilities.

I have been a member in good standing at my community swimming pool from almost the moment I knew I was pregnant. That's probably because my sisters and I grew up at a community pool. Literally. From swim team practices in the morning to afternoons of pool tag and, finally, to swim meets at night. We lived on French fries and grilled cheese sandwiches from the snack bar. Our fingers and toes were always so wrinkly that my mother felt safe sending us to bed without a bath.