Pave It Over!

Watch out, folks... I feel a "soapbox" rant coming on!

A battle is brewing in Orange County, Virginia, where Wal-Mart is proposing to build a 135,000 square-foot store near the so-called "Wilderness battlefield", part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.

The Battle of the Wilderness involved more than 100,000 Union troops and 61,000 Confederates, when it was fought on May 4, 1864. The fighting, according to National Park Service estimates, left more than 4,000 dead and 20,000 wounded.

The parcel of land that Walmart proposes to build on was not part of the actual battlefield, but it is believed to have been a staging area, where Union troops waited around to go into battle, and civil war preservationists say it's an important piece of history.

The land has been zoned for commercial retail use for decades, but lawmakers are split over whether to give Walmart the permit it needs. Some say they'd welcome the business Walmart would bring to Orange County, not to mention the $500,000 annual tax revenue that would flow into the local coffers. Other lawmakers say Walmart would detract from the historic nature of the area and damage tourism.

This is a very familiar argument to me. Back in 1994, I was front and center in covering the controversy when Disney wanted to build a theme park five miles west of the Manassas battlefield. Opponents (who were well-funded by the wealthy residents of Middleburg, Virginia) were able to win the P.R. battle and eventually get Disney to throw up the white flag, even though Disney had won all of the political battles up to that point, including support in the state leguslature.


Disney CEO Michael Eisner told me in a 1996 interview that Disney had pulled out of Virginia because it did not want to continue to fight its battles on the front page of the Washington Post, nor in the courtroom, where opponents were promising to throw legal challenges which would have delayed construction for several years.

Now here's where the soapbox comes in.

Wars happen. We're lucky they haven't happened in the United States in a long time, but they DO happen around the world, and you don't see other countries preserving their battlefields the way we try to preserve them in the U.S.! What parts of Europe are NOT built on top of battlefields? How much more land do preservationists want to preserve? And why should this land, which was nothing more than a waiting room, be preserved?

I get steamed about this because the whole Disney saga was an exercise in hypocrisy. The land opponents were fighting over was not a battlefield - it was farmland located five miles away from Manassas. Opponents complained that Disney would bring strip malls and tacky t-shirt shops to the region, even though the very road that runs adjacent to the Manassas battlefield already had strip malls, convenience stores, and ironically, a huge Walmart less than a mile away.


"Disney's America" would have provided Prince William County with an industry and a tax base. Instead, Prince William largely continues its role as a bedroom community - a place where people go to sleep, but go to work some place else. As a result, with little industry to support the local economy, homeowners largely carry the tax burden there alone. In the current economy, this leaves the local government broke and has created a housing glut as prices have plummeted.

We have thousands of acres of land from Georgia to Pennsylvania preserved to teach our children about the Civil War, as well we should. There are many lessons to be learned from these important properties. But why is every square foot of land ever trod upon by a U.S. soldier worthy of being saved? One lesson that must also be taught is that after the war is over, life goes on. The airport on Long Island that Charles Lindbergh took off from on his flight across the Atlantic is now a shopping mall. At least they named the mall - Roosevelt Field - after the airstrip! Yankee Stadium is about to become a parking lot. Even Ground Zero in New York is being redeveloped into skyscrapers.

Is it really worth denying taxpayers a revenue source to protect a piece of land that is merely near a battlefield? I think my friend, John Butler, has the right idea about preserving land. He suggests, (in jest, I think) that environmentally sensitive land be paved over, in order to preserve it.

Sounds like a plan to me!

My, How Time Flies!

Many of you woke up yesterday no doubt wondering what happened to 2008! Well, just check out this video! This guy in Norway condensed an entire year to 40 seconds! He probably should have just left out the last quarter and skipped the whole Wall Street collapse thing, but I digress... Enjoy!

New Year's By Marriott

See that little pink blob in the upper right corner of this Pepco map? That is zip code 20833, home of the "Life On The Beach" world headquarters and souvenir shop. Unfortunately, the 60-mile an hour winds yesterday took a toll on our HQ, leaving us without power - which was OK with me because I was at work! However, as day descended into dusk, a frozen Mrs. Matthews called me at ABC News, and together, we assembled an evacuation plan.

Checking the trusty Marriott points account, I discovered we had enough in our account to get a room at the Courtyard by Marriott in Rockville, so off we went to spend New Year's with the book of Mormon!

We had planned a quiet family games night at home... Robin would have cooked a bunch of naughty food, and we had planned to sit at the kitchen table and enjoy it with a game of Scrabble and Dick Clark's stroke. But when God handed us lemons, we made an evening of it, and enjoyed a nice meal at the Macaroni grill, followed by Scrabble by the fireplace in the hotel lobby.

We were so focused on our game, that we missed the ball drop altogether - Robin was in the middle of playing the word "Resize" with the "z" on a triple letter score at the stroke of midnight... But we were decidedly warmer than those nuts in Times Square...

By the way - we could have gone home earlier in the evening - I called home at around 10:30 and heard my answering machine - a sure sign that power was back - but by then we had committed to our evening - So, except for the two boys wrestling for control of the bedsheets in the bed that they shared, a pleasant time was had by all!

We found the power outage to be a fitting end to a 2008 that was difficult to say the least for our family... Here's to hoping that our lights stay on in 2009 - or that if they do go out, it will be due to a storm, and not because we couldn't pay our bill!

Happy New Year!

Going To The Beach For A Pizza!

I have been blessed to be working through the holidays, as those with real jobs have taken off work to give us freelancers a chance. Yesterday, however, I had my one and only weekday off, so the family and I decided to go out for pizza - in Rehoboth Beach!

For those of you unfamiliar with the geography, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware is about a 2 hour and 15 minute drive from Brookeville, but gas has suddenly become dirt cheap, and we DID have a 65-dollar gift certificate to Grotto Pizza that I had won at an Associated Press convo a year and a half ago, and the certificate happened to expire on 12/31/08. It was now or never - plus, they had shopping outlets and no sales tax - so off we went!

It just so happens, Tuesday is "half-price pizza" day at Grotto, so our 65-dollar gift certificate not only yielded us plenty o' slices for lunch, but also gelato for dessert AND three large pizzas for the freezer at home!

Next it was off to the outlets, where all rumors of big price markdowns after the miserable holiday shopping season are TRUE! We dropped the boys off at the movies, while the missus and I found dress shoes for me (two pair - all leather - 40 bucks!), shirts for the boys and perfume for mama. Then on the way out of town, I found the biggest bargain at all at Wawa - we filled the gas tank for - get this - $1.41 a gallon!

A road trip with free pizza and cheap gas to boot! What more can you ask of the holiday season?

Camelot Is, You Know - Over.

Caroline Kennedy made a big mistake on her way to Hillary Clinton's U.S. Senate seat. She opened her mouth:

My Man In Mumbai

It is amazing to me that, as much as personal computers have changed our lives, they are still frustrating and confounding machines. When you buy a television, you more or less expect to be able to plug it in and start watching it. But computers are still tempermental, delicate creatures.

I have bought five computers in the past 18 years, and I have had major problems with all five of them at one time or another, from bad mother boards to bad CPU fans to viruses to planned obsolescence.

The newest computer arrived for my sons for Christmas - a new Dell to replace the six-year-old Compaq that can simply no longer keep up with 21st Century software. I opened the box yesterday morning and started putting it together. Everything seemed to be OK, and it booted up just fine... but there was just one problem. There was no sound.

I checked the speakers. I checked the audio drivers. The Windows Vista device manager became my best friend. I ran the machine through its paces, installing and uninstalling with wild abandon - all to no avail. Fortunately, my good friend, Bill, was coming for dinner last night. Bill and I have been through many a computer battle together, and he knows far more about them than I do. Bill and I spent more than an hour messing with the computer after dinner (and therefore avoiding doing dishes, too!), and we both concluded it was not a software issue. The sound card that had been built into the motherboard must have gone bad.



So, sometime around 11 pm, I called Dell support, and was routed to a "Mr. Williams", who I learned was speaking to me from Mumbai. "Mr. Williams" was a very pleasant and helpful-sounding man, who proceeded to ask permission to poke around my computer to see if he could ascertain the problem with my machine. I, of course, granted said permission, and was both bemused and amazed to watch him take over my screen from half-a-world away. He poked and prodded with my mouse cursor - and tried every trick that Bill and I had just spent the evening trying. Then he tried them all again. And again.

I was fairly certain "Mr. Williams" was under strict orders from his boss to find a software problem, and that he would be fed to the street rats if he found a hardware issue. Alas, "Mr. Williams" may now be Purina Rat Chow, because finally - at 12:40 am - nearly two hours after the phone call started, and long after Bill had gone home, he cheerfully announced that I must have a bad motherboard, and he assured me that someone in a Dell uniform would be by in the next day or two to replace it for me.

I was so relieved to A- get off the phone and B- have the knowledge that someone would be coming to my house to fix the computer, that it pretty much buried any outrage I may have felt that the machine I had spent several hundred dollars for was broken when it arrived at my house!

Thank you, Mr. Williams! Come again!

It's Barbie, Bitch!

America's favorite playdoll is turning 50, and she's copping a 'tude!

Building An Edgier Barbie
By Nicholas Casey
12/24/2008
The Wall Street Journal


Barbie turns 50 next year, and her luster has faded over the years. Now, Mattel Inc. executives have begun a sweeping makeover of the doll's marketing in advance of her birthday.

The company wants to return the doll to her roots, doing everything from revamping the corporate structure that oversees Barbie to changing the way the doll is photographed for ads. The goal: to make Barbie fashionable again with older girls, who are dropping her for other, edgier playthings like video games.

For years after her introduction in 1959, Barbie reflected and even shaped fashion trends with her bell-bottom pants and power suits. But the Barbie empire started to lose its focus in the past decade as Mattel put the Barbie name on everything from animated cartoons to golf clubs.

Goosing Barbie's appeal is crucial for Mattel. The world's largest toy maker is suffering from weakening consumer demand as the industry prepares for what's expected to be more than a 5% drop in toy sales for the Christmas season, the worst in a decade.

Sean McGowan, an analyst at Needham & Co., recently reduced his estimate of Mattel's fourth-quarter sales by $21 million to about $2.28 billion, citing weak sales before Thanksgiving. "They needed to be smokin' hot and they weren't," he says.

Video games and iPods aren't the only cause of Barbie's declining appeal. MGA Entertainment Inc.'s teenage Bratz line and, more recently, the Hannah Montana line, a Walt Disney Co. license whose dolls are made by Jakks Pacific Inc., have moved into Barbie's turf with sexy outfits and cutting-edge fashions.


Barbie had largely ceded the "tween" customer -- kids eight to 12 -- to Bratz and other toys, instead making do with an audience that skewed younger and younger.

"We had lost a whole piece of the business, the older girl," he says.

Around the time of the Bratz dolls' arrival in 2001, Mattel launched a new line with Barbie dressed as Clara, a character from "The Nutcracker." The new fantasy tack proved a boon to the company, leading to new characters each winter and spring. But it also pigeonholed Barbie as a doll associated with younger girls.

In the future, Mr. Dickson says, the company plans to anchor the brand more firmly in the world of fashion. Mockup ads for 2009 include close-up shots of Barbie's face and show the doll posing as a model in what Mr. Dickson says is a deliberate nod to fashion magazines like Vogue.

The company hopes to regain the "tween" customers with the edgier look, while holding on to the younger girls, who like to copy older siblings.