Rest In Peace, Old Friend!

Do you have an old, outdated thing in your house that coulda and shoulda been replaced years ago, but that you just can't bear to part with? I do... or rather, I did... until last night.


Last night, my trusty 24-year-old General Electric clock radio/cassette player suffered a life-threatening injury. I went to change the dial and found that, while the knob still turned, the dial did not move with it. Now, the AM band is set to nothing, and the FM band is set to a low-watt Latino station in Silver Spring that I don't think even broadcasts at night. I am going to pull out a screwdriver and see if I can perform some kind of miracle surgery (kind of akin to opening the hood of your car when it's dead even though you know damn well you can't fix anything under there), but otherwise, I think I'm going to have to say goodbye to the old gal and get me a 21st century model.

You can't possibly understand how this upsets me. I bought this big clunky radio at Christmas time, 1983, with a W. Bell gift certificate that I had received as a gift from WMAL. I was a receptionist at the time, and the station had gotten a ton of gift certificates as trade, so everybody got one as a holiday bonus. How many of you can remember where and when you bought YOU last clock radio?

This device was truly state-of-the-art.... a wood-grain plastic cabinet surrounding an LED clock with a solid state cassette player to boot! I woke up to that clock for my entire career, through literally thousands of 2 or 3 am wakeup calls... My hands became so familiar with the controls that I learned to set the time and the alarm without even looking at it.... a significant feature when you work the hours I work! In addition, the wide, flat top of the clock radio gave me plenty of room on which to lay my watch and glasses every night. We grew very comfortable together.

Now I face the hard task of finding a replacement. I'm sure today's models have all sorts of attractive features, but none of them will have the same feel as the old clock. Learning how to set it will be a chore. Feeling for it in the middle of the night will take a long time to get used to. Sure, I could try waking up to the alarm or the cassette player instead of the radio, but I have always found alarms to be too jarring, and honestly, the sound of the cassette player was never that good even when the clock was brand new.

No, I think I'll have to give the old gal a decent burial and find a new model - one that can play the AM band.

I wonder if they still make those!

Reality TV May Suck, But REAL Reality Is Worse!

I have never been shy about admitting to a certain guilty fondness for Reality TV... I enjoy many shows in the genre, including most of the biggies... Survivor, Race, Idol, Dancing, etc. But there is one major reality show that I gave up on long ago - "Extreme Makeover Home Edition".

My biggest issue with the program has always been that the producers build homes for disadvantaged families that are WAY out of character with the neighborhoods that the homes are built in.... You'll see mile after mile of tract homes, followed by a McMansion suddenly squeezed into a corner lot. In addition, the residents of the home are stuck with over-designed rooms that they will never be able to afford the upkeep on, let alone be able to redecorate if and when they choose. Show me an eight year-old boy whose bed is a pirate ship who will still be wanting to sleep with Jack Sparrow when he's 12!

One other issue - the families that receive these homes are usually well-intentioned people who, for one reason or another, are down on their luck. The hidden dirty little secret is that many of these people became downtrodden by their own hands... so it should come as no surprise when they are handed a free house - and still manage to screw things up. That's exactly what happened in Georgia this week...

Read on:

More than 1,800 people showed up to help ABC's "Extreme Makeover" team demolish a family's decrepit home and replace it with a sparkling, four-bedroom mini-mansion in 2005.

Three years later, the reality TV show's most ambitious project at the time has become the latest victim of the foreclosure crisis.

After the Harper family used the two-story home as collateral for a $450,000 loan, it's set to go to auction on the steps of the Clayton County Courthouse Aug. 5. The couple did not return phone calls Monday, but told WSB-TV they received the loan for a construction business that failed.

The house was built in January 2005, after Atlanta-based Beazer Homes USA and ABC's "Extreme Makeover" demolished their old home and its faulty septic system. Within six days, construction crews and hoards of volunteers had completed work on the largest home that the television program had yet built.

The finished product was a four-bedroom house with decorative rock walls and a three-car garage that towered over ranch and split-level homes in their Clayton County neighborhood. The home's door opened into a lobby that featured four fireplaces, a solarium, a music room and a plush new office.

Materials and labor were donated for the home, which would have cost about $450,000 to build. Beazer Homes' employees and company partners also raised $250,000 in contributions for the family, including scholarships for the couple's three children and a home maintenance fund.

ABC said in a statement that it advises each family to consult a financial planner after they get their new home. "Ultimately, financial matters are personal, and we work to respect the privacy of the families," the network said.

Some of the volunteers who helped build the home were less than thrilled about the family's financial decisions.

"It's aggravating. It just makes you mad. You do that much work, and they just squander it," Lake City Mayor Willie Oswalt, who helped vault a massive beam into place in the Harper's living room, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

So let me get this straight... The family gets a free house, 250 grand for their kids' college, and a free trip to Disneyland, while their neighbors build them a new mini-mansion... and then they lose the house?

Screw the foreclosure auction... Where are the tar and feathers???

Hey - Everybody Needs A Hobby!

From the "Life On The Beach" Canadian bureau -

A Romanian immigrant has given birth to her 18th child in British Columbia, making her the province's most prolific mother in 20 years.

Proud dad Alexandru Ionce said Saturday that his 44-year-old wife, Livia, gave birth on Tuesday. Their daughter Abigail weighed in at seven pounds, 12 ounces.

"We never planned how many children to have. We just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that's the reason we did not stop the life," said Alexandru Ionce.

The couple immigrated to Canada from Romania in 1990 and now live in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Their 17 other children range in age from 20 months to 23 years old.

Ionce said he did not know if the couple would have more children. The family now has 10 girls and eight boys.

"We would have liked a boy to be even," he said. "We thank God all of them are healthy and happy."

Ionce said the family has received calls from Germany, Romania and England, as well as from media outlets across Canada.


Life On The Beach congratulates the Ionce family and offers them nothing but all the happiness in the world - along with a box of condoms and this gift - a clip from my favorite Monty Python film, "The Meaning Of Life". Enjoy!

Support Your Childrens' Teachers!

It may not feel like back-to-school time yet for you, but we're in full late-summer swing here in the Matthews household, where Robin is gleefully traipsing through the Sunday fliers looking for all of the one-penny pencil sales at Staples and Office Depot. This truly is Christmas in July for my wife, who not only is an Olympic-caliber shopper, but also a Mom, and - worst of all - a school teacher! To make things even worse this year, Robin is switching both schools and classes, going from being a special education pre-school teacher in Gaithersburg to being a regular ed Kindergarten teacher in Brookeville... that means having to outfit a whole new classroom for older children.

As gleeful as Robin is this time every year, as the spouse of a school teacher, it is a time of great anger and frustration for me. You see, while Robin does the shopping, I still pay the credit card bills... And when I see her spending literally hundreds (and, on occasion, thousands) of dollars each year on her classroom, I see nothing but RED.

Robin really doesn't have much choice... She really does need the stuff that she is buying, and there is simply no money coming from Montgomery County to pay for it all, whether it's materials to decorate her classroom with, or books for her reading center, or toys and games to entertain the children with when bad weather forces recess to be cancelled, or any number of other expenses.

Most parents have no idea how much money teachers pay out of their own pockets to support their classrooms. In fact, during the first two years after Robin became a teacher, she spent more money getting her classroom together than she brought home in her paycheck. One year, Robin needed a specific software program in order to create picture symbols for her special ed students... and after much fighting and pleading with me, we bought the program - for 250 dollars! I must say I admire my wife's passion for her work, even as I want to murder her!

Today, we nearly came to blows over an electric pencil sharpener. Being a kindergarten teacher, Robin needs one that will sharpen one of those super-wide pencils for little kids. The problem is that the model carried at Staples costs 45 dollars. I nearly bust a gut over it - why should I be subsidizing the education of children whose parents, in many cases, earn more money than my family does - even when I am working??? Robin managed to save the day by finding a cheaper battery-powered model in another store for about 8 dollars.

I've been told this is a common complaint of all teacher's spouses... Well, I don't know if any of those people have a blog, but I do, and I have a plea to make to you parents today.

Appreciate your child's teacher. Please realize (because many parents don't) that when your teacher asks you to send in Kleenex and hand sanitizer and extra crayons that your contributions are just barely scratching the surface of the classroom's needs. Before the school year is over, your child's teacher is going to reach into his or her pocket dozens of times to buy materials needed for lessons or to replace school supplies that your child used up or lost. If you want to make your teacher happy and earn his or her everlasting devotion, slip them a Staples or Target gift card from time to time. Believe me, that money is going to be spent in the classroom. If you don't feel comfortable donating cash or a gift card, ask your child's teacher what she'll be needing in the coming months, and then go buy it for her.

Who knows? You might just save a marriage or two!

XM AND Sirius Merge - WHO CARES?

In what has to be the most overblown story in radio history, the FCC has finally blessed the marriage of XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. Sure, this forms a monopoly, and hurts the consumer in the short run, but it will ultimately be a virtual non-story in the timeline of radio. Here's why!

• First of all, satellite radio is already a failure. Yes, many of you have it in your car, and you enjoy it a lot, and yes... you do keep hearing stories in the news about how many people are subscribing to it. But consider this... If you add up the total of XM and Sirius subscribers in the U.S., you will still get just a tiny fraction of the entire radio universe. These companies are only merging because they are desperate to stay afloat, and they had to agree to a number of hardships in order to be allowed to merge, uincluding several years of price freezes.


• Most new XM and Sirius radios are sold through new car sales, which are not exactly booming in this economy.


• Most importantly - even as the two companies merge, satellite radio is already becoming obsolete. You may be willing to shell out 13 bucks a month for the service now, but in another year or two (at most), you'll be able to get all the same stuff (and much more) for free - once internet car radio arrives. It's just a short matter of time before that technology arrives, and once it does, it might just boost terrestrial radio instead of killing it. Stations that currently have signal problems in their far-reaching suburbs will now be able to potentially reach millions more listeners by simply streaming their audio, which listeners will be able to hear while driving. In fact, internet radio is already arriving. Looky here:
  

By the way - one technology I have not mentioned is HD radio. For those of you who pay no attention to the business, HD radio was terrestrial radio's answer to satellite - a way to give you hundreds more listening options commercial-free. I personally think HD radio is dead on arrival... Several companies have rolled out HD stations, but both the programming and the signal for those stations have been spotty at best. There's been a ton of money spent on technology and marketing, but despite all that, virtually no owns an HD radio, and for now, there's really little to no incentive to own one.

Just stick with AM radio, people... yeahhhh THAT'S the ticket!

Just Once - Wouldn't You Like To Be Like This Guy?

His lawn mower wouldn't start - so he did the sensible thing... He shot it!

Brett Favre And Me - Two Peas In A Pod!

It looks like Brett Favre is eventually going to get his wish - to leave the Green Bay Packers and to finish his career in the uniform of another team. When that happens, it'll be a sight that will take a LOT of getting used to... seeing ol' number 4 in colors other than green and gold - similar to Joe Montana finishing his career as a Chief instead of a 49er, or Johnny Unitas looking absurd in a San Diego Chargers uniform instead of his navy and white Colts jersey.

Closer to home, perennial all-pro defensive end (and dancer!) Jason Taylor was traded this week to the Redskins after spending his entire 12-year career with the Dolphins. In a move designed to mark a fresh start in DC, Taylor abandoned the number 99 that he wore in Miami in favor of number 55.... Still, Taylor admitted to feeling a bit odd putting on his new team's uniform... Something felt kind of strange and somewhat out of place.


I think I know now a bit what it's like for a veteran sports star whose spent his entire career in one city to be traded (or in my case, picked up off the waiver wire) to a new team. The game is the same, but you have to learn a new playbook and new technology, and get used to working with a new set of teammates wearing new uniforms. That's just what I'm facing at WBAL.

Right now, it feels like I'm on some sort of exchange program, and that I'll soon be back in my familiar digs on Jenifer Street, pounding out stories in the WMAL newsroom just as I did for more than 20 years. I know, of course, that that is NOT going to happen, but for now it still feels odd to be doing what I have always done - just in a different environment.

Imagine then how strange it was for me to do a news report this morning with a different ending than I've ever had to use before - Here's my very first report on WM - er, WBAL!

Please don't get me wrong... I am very much enjoying my time at WBAL. It's just kind of an out-of-body experience these days...