You’ve heard people say that companies could build lightbulbs that would last a lifetime, but don’t because then we’d never have to buy replacements?  I don’t know anything about lightbulbs, but I have a couple of recent examples of how companies take advantage of us, and I’d like to rant for a minute…

Over the last several years, I’ve bought 3 or 4 phones from the same manufacturer.  They were each upgrades of the same model and, as such, kept the same basic form and function.  However, each model changed just enough so that the battery, the car charger, stylus, etc. from the previous models wouldn’t fit in the new one.  Now that sounds petty to even bring it up- I realize that.  But, think about how much we spend with these companies each year.   We spend $200-$400 for some of these smartphone gadgets, and they make it  so we have to spend an extra $20 on a new car charger?  They talk about brand loyalty, well that should be a two-way street!

Not a life-changing topic today, just an annoyance that we all live with from day to day.  And a quick thanks to those few companies that work hard to give us MORE value for our money instead of LESS…

Tomorrow morning, Monnie and I will be broadcasting live from Children’s Hospital for our first ever- RADIOTHON!  This event is tremendously important to all of us here at Entercom Upstate (the company that owns Magic 98.9), but I wanted to take just a minute or two to share why it’s so important to me personally.

To me, Children’s Hospital has a face.  It’s the face of 7 year old Kayla, whom I met for the first time in 1996.  That year, Kayla was diagnosed with a rare type of leukemia that landed her in Children’s Hospital in East Tennessee for nearly a year.  At the time, I was doing a morning show in Knoxville and had just been to the hospital for the first time with my oldest child (he was just 6 then!).

Since I had two children, one of them accident-prone(!), I decided to find out more about the hospital and arrangements were made for me to meet Kayla and her family.  After meeting this sweet family and their precious kids, especially Kayla, I would never again take my kids’ good health for granted!  To talk about the unimaginable trials this little girl went through would take a LOT of time (you can read a recent article about Kayla here), but suffice it to say that, after all the tears and hugging, I was ready to do whatever I could to help.

Shortly after meeting Kayla and her family, I hosted the first annual TK’s Breakfast for Children’s Hospital.  I don’t have a lot of skills, but I can cook some breakfast, y’all!  Over the next 10 years, we cooked breakfast for thousands of families and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Children’s Hospital in East Tennessee.  And over the course of those ten years, I met hundreds of families who shared their stories and introduced me to their kids who were healthy and happy because of that hospital.

Now I’ve just recently started to meet people from Children’s Hospital of the Greenville Hospital System, but already I know they have the same dedication to our children.  Many of your kids, grandkids, nieces or nephews have been treated with care, determination and skill at this wonderful hospital.   And that’s why it’s SO important to support this amazing resource that’s right here in our community.   And why it’s important to make sure that they can afford the best equipment and treatment facilities.   And it’s why, for the next 3 days, we’ll be asking you to help…

Children’s Hospital Radiothon, October 9^th-11^th on Magic 98.9.  Get ready to give! 

Here’s a question for you;  How do you raise a daughter with a healthy self-image?

I have two daughters, Jordan (15) and Ellie (9), who are both as beautiful as their mother.  I’m so proud of them, too, for resisting (thus far) the temptation to “look like the girls on TV”.  Our media is constantly pushing the idea that ones value as a person somehow correlates to ones physical perfection!

Now this is probably true for men and women, but especially, I think, for women.  I also believe this obsession with being thin and perfect makes our teenage, and younger, daughters particularly vulnerable to self-esteem issues, in the worst cases, including eating disorders.

Here’s the example of this nonsense that set me off this morning.  Tabloids are gawking at Demi Moore’s supposed weight gain [A whole lot Moore of Demi as actress piles on over a STONE! -The Daily Mail].  The pictures above represent what the tabloids say is a 10-15 pounds difference.  Even if it’s true (?), can you believe there is an entire article devoted to this foolishness?

So I don’t have any answers to this problem, except for this - I don’t allow this kind of garbage in my house.  Period.  It’s too important.  And maybe that’s a good start…

OK, I’m just a guy who talks on the radio, but I have a question about politics and the economy:  Has everyone in Washington lost their ever-lovin’ minds?

It looks very likely now that the U.S. government will spend $700 Billion (that’s billion with a B) of our money to clear shaky, mortgage-backed securities from the private market.  Of course, we only see this number in print as the numbers 700, followed by the word billion.  Wanna know what it looks like when you write it out in numbers only? 

$700,000,000,000. 

Still hard to grasp how big this number really is, isn’t it?  Let’s start with a million.  If you decided to count to a million it would take you roughly 11 days.  That’s a huge number, right?  If you were to count to a BILLION, it would take you 30 YEARS!

How about another example?

If you had a 4” high, tightly-packed stack of $1,000 bills, you’d have a million dollars.  A BILLION dollar stack would be taller than a football field is long.  That’s a stack of $1,000 bills 358 feet high!  (Some experts say this bailout could easily reach one TRILLION dollars.  Stack a trillion dollars worth of those same bills and your stack would be 63 miles high!)

I heard my coworker, Russ Cassell (Newsradio, WORD) say today that the $700 billion dollars would put each American in debt (another) $10,000.  (Actually, since just over half (59%) of Americans pay income taxes, each taxpayer could owe almost $20,000.)  And nobody can guarantee that the bailout will do what they say it will.

As I say, I’m no economist and I don’t know if the bailout is a good idea or bad.  But I’m praying that our elected representatives consider this thing VERY carefully.  You should too.

BTW, if we wanted to pay down a billion dollars of this debt, paying one dollar a second, it would take 31 years, 259 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds.  Of course, that’s only one billion dollars.  Just 699 more to go…

Here in the Upstate, we’ve gone from having the lowest gas prices in the nation to the highest!  Whatever the reason- and of course, the reason you hear will depend on who you’re hearing it from- South Carolina gas prices are WAY up. 

For instance, when’s the last time we paid more for gas in Easley than they pay in SAN DIEGO?  Well, earlier this week, regular unleaded was $3.59 in San Diego county and $4.65 in Easley!  Just crazy…

Anyway, if you want to compare prices around the country for yourself, go to GasBuddy.com.  Or, on second thought, maybe it’s just best not to know!

Last Sunday afternoon the Clemson campus had to make do without power, all because of a single squirrel that got into some of the power lines and shut down most of the campus for the day.

On Tuesday evening, I met an official with the University extension office who had a theory.  He pointed out that Clemson has just started a squirrel contraception program to cut down on the campus squirrel population (if you’ve ever spent anytime on the Clemson campus, you know they have more than their share of the little critters), and implied a connection between this program and the power outage.  Sounds far-fetched, but this gentleman is a lot smarter than me so who knows…?  The theory, as I understand it, is that some of the male squirrels - denied their conjugal rights, turned their little minds to sabotage and revenge (A squirrel suicide-attacker?). 

One wonders, if there are other ways to cut down on the squirrel population than injecting the females with drugs.  Maybe family planning classes or abstinence training?   When I was in the army, there was this persistent rumor that the cooks added saltpeter to the food.  Saltpeter, a chemical compound used in gunpowder, was always thought to be an anti-aphrodisiac.  Maybe they could feed saltpeter to some of the little boy squirrels?

Not very many years ago, squirrel hunting was a popular past time with teenage boys here in the Upstate.  Seems like that could be a solution to the overpopulation problem, but of course times have changed…

Haven’t they? 

More and more studies are warning parents of the danger of Ipods, etc. damaging kids’ hearing.  So, since Monnie and I wear headphones for a living, we decided to have our hearing tested.  It was very interesting.  Turns out, I have some moderate nerve damage in one ear.  And- it turns out to be the ear that I keep my headphones on (I’m a one ear on, one ear off guy).  So, sounds like headphones have caused some damage to my hearing! 

Anyway, we had audiologist Bob Poland (Foothills Ears, Nose and Throat) on the show with tips for parents about how to protect their kids’ hearing.  Pretty informative…

Here’s some stuff we found out:

Noise-Induced Hearing Loss can occur by listening to headphones at high volumes for extended periods of time . This loss happens gradually and painlessly over time and can go undetected until it’s too late .According to a study commissioned by ASHA, more than half of high school students in the U.S. report having at least one symptom of hearing loss. By instilling a few listening guidelines early on in a child’s development we can change those statistics.

Here are some simple steps to follow, and encourage our kids to follow, to protect hearing:

1. Start by setting your volume control at a low setting. 
2. Slowly increase the sound until you can hear it comfortably and clearly, without distortion.
3. Once you’ve reached your comfortable sound level, set the dial and leave it.  (Parents, find out how you can lock your kids’ Ipods at moderate levels.)
4. So you aren’t competing with outside noises, consider purchasing noise-cancelling or sound-isolating headphones or earphones.  Bob says outside noises causes us to boost volumes without realizing it.

Remember, hearing loss is irreversible and it only gets worse as you age!  Protect your kids ears.

Was looking through YouTube a couple of days ago to find some age-appropriate comedy for my girls (Jordan, 15 and Ellie, 9).  Thought I’d share a couple of videos that I found…

Anniversary 2005.  How many women would agree to go whitewater kayaking for their anniversary? 

We were talking on the show last week about successful marriages, even getting tips from couples who’d been successfully married for several years.  As we wrapped things up, I realized that I’d been so busy taking calls and going through the mechanics of the show that I never said what I wanted to say on the topic.

So- here’s what I would have said if I had been a caller to last Tuesday’s show:

“Tammy and I will have been married for 23 years later this month.  We broke a lot of ‘rules’ along the way.  We started dating in high school.  We never really dated other people.  We married young.  We moved away from our support system (family and friends) after being married only a few months.  We were both self-focused.  Perhaps worst of all, my wife married a knucklehead.

Still, we now have a wonderful marriage despite doing so many things wrong, and here’s why I think we’ve been successful.

·  I loved Tammy and (after I worked on her a while!) she loved me.
·  Even so, we probably would not be together today if we had not found a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.  Our mutual faith and His ability to heal brought us closer together than we’d ever been.  I can take no credit for this.
·  We learned to submit to each other.  Simply put, I try to place her interests before mine and she does the same for me.  It’s easy to trust and communicate with a partner who wants the best for you and is willing to sacrifice for you.
·  We show our affection for each other openly and often.  At first, this wasn’t easy for Tammy, who came from parents who were not very demonstrative.
·  We say, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I forgive you’.  A lot.  (Okay, usually it’s me saying the ‘sorry’ and her doing the forgiving, but you get my point…)

I love my wife.  She is a devoted partner and ally to me, and a wonderful mother to my kids.  She is the very center of our family life and the best part of me.  I owe her more than I could ever repay.

I love my wife.”

The differences in the way men and women think is a constant source of amazement to me.  Here’s a recent example:

Last week, we gave away tickets to Celine Dion, who’s coming to Atlanta in January, and the stage production of Mamma Mia, which is at the Peace Center this week.  We were bombarded with calls!  We got a call from one young lady who normally gets up at 10:30 AM (no, I don’t know what she does for a living!), who got up at 5:25 AM all last week just to have a shot at the Celine tix! 

In all the hundreds of calls we got about these two shows… not one guy.  Not a single male caller.  Now how can something SOOO popular with one gender, get a collective yawn from the other?

I’ll give you another example- when the Momma Mia movie came out several weeks back, I knew my wife would wanna go see it.  And just on the off chance that she would expect ME to go, instead of one of her gal pals, I actually MADE A LIST of things I would rather do than see the Momma Mia movie! (I won’t reprint it here, except to say that it included drinking out of the Reedy River!  Yup.  I felt that strongly about it…)  

Here’s one more example- Greer and some other local communities recently passed water restrictions that include a recommendation for a 5-minute shower.  I don’t know one guy who has said to me, “How do they expect me to get everything done in there in just 5 minutes?”  We don’t even think about it as abnormal.  However, I have heard that very comment from a number of coworkers – all of them women.

Anyway there’s been a growing trend lately, especially in academia, of pretending that men and women are the same.  That our only differences stem from our social precepts.  People who believe that should stand on a street corner and hold up a pair of Celine Dion tickets!