Brad Marley

For 30 days, I will be sharing random stories from each year of my life as the big three-oh looms. Consider it my way of coping. 

The year is 1982.

Little do I know that my parents plan to take away my freedom by introducing another baby into the mix.

A baby that will be living in my house.

Looking back, it was bad enough that our house was cramped with three people.  But four?

I only have a vague recollection of being shipped off to my grandparent's house while my parents went to the hospital, but this event has been confirmed whenever my Mom tells my brother the story of his birth. (My family is a sentimental bunch.)  I'm happy to report that I do not harbor regret from only having two-and-a-half years to myself.

Consequently, I imagine my daughter might have similar anxiety about welcoming a sister, even if that sister right now is just a blur of white on an ultrasound printout clipped on the refrigerator.

But wait until that blur of white is screaming her head off at 2:30 in the morning.

It's likely she has no idea what she's in for.  I can only hope that her recollections later in life, from what is shaping up to be a turbulent winter, are as vague as mine. 

For 30 days, I will be sharing random stories from each year of my life as the big three-oh looms. Consider it my way of coping. 

The year was 1981.

I had yet to reach the full mastery of the English language that is so evident in this blog, so I waddled around the house inventing new words much to my parent's delight.

Especially my Dad's.

It's easy to forget our parents used to be our age and probably used to resort to the same juvenile humor we do now when hang out with our close friends.

For my Dad and his good friend, Larry, I provided hours of entertainment because my "tr" sound sounded more like an "f", and my p's sounded like b's.

So trolley would become "folley" and pears was turned into "bears."

But what tickled my Dad more than anything?

Telling me to call Larry a dump truck.

For 30 days, I will be sharing random stories from each year of my life as the big three-oh looms. Consider it my way of coping. 

The year was 1980.

Al Michaels asked if we believed in miracles, and the country was about to be blindsided with the music that would define a generation – Totally 80's!

I, on the other hand, was likely more concerned with which toy felt better on my gums, conducting all-day experiments on the living room floor of the tiny ranch I shared with my parents.  They were still two years away from entering my brother into the equation, so the house likely felt larger than it would when we were squeezed into one bedroom.

Thus, I had the floor to myself. 

And that, my friends, is the gist of 1980 for me.

The only thing I can reasonably take away from that year, without remembering one iota, is that the choices I make today can be directly related to that single train of thought running through my tiny brain while I chewed on my toys: If it feels good, do it.

For the next 30 days, I will be sharing random stories from each year of my life as the big three-oh looms. Consider it my way of coping. 

The year was 1979.

Mr. Ed is dead and a new national sports network goes live, unleashing Chris Berman on the world.

I was ejected from my mother's womb at 11:13 p.m. on July 26.

I know this because I called my Mom and asked, even though she tells me the story every year on my birthday.  One would think I would have the story memorized by now, but I don't. 

Nothing particularly memorable comes to mind from my first five months of living; maybe it's because I spent a large portion of it asleep.

My parents do, however, have pictoral evidence of that summer, so I am assured that I wasn't given a fake backstory as part of some super-secret government plan to breed super-intelligent humans.

Key takeaway: My Dad liked posing for pictures topless.  Must've been a hot summer.

In case you're wondering, I share a birthday with Kevin Spacey and Mick Jagger.

It you were waiting for the day when you could finally write that case study entitled, "The Day New Media Made Old Media Look Really Slow and Decrepit," yesterday was the day.

Frankly, I was shocked at how much longer CNN waited to announce that Michael Jackson had died than everybody else did.

I think they actually waited for their sources to confirm the death before putting it out there for the public's consumption. Imagine that!

Seriously, though, here is a rough timeline that gives you an idea of how long they took. 

• 5:30 p.m. – I was driving home when the local sports talk station broke the news via TMZ.com that Michael Jackson had passed away.

• 5:45 p.m. – Flipped to "The Drive with Chris Myers and Steve Hartman" (because they broadcast nationally out of Los Angeles) and they already had experts on the show to talk about Jackson's untimely passing.

• 6:00 p.m. – "Broke" the news to my wife and parents, who were visiting for dinner.  My one-year-old was largely unconcerned.  Meanwhile, CNN was still reporting only that Jackson had been rushed to the hospital.

• 6:45 p.m. – Finished eating dinner.  (If you must know, my wife prepared a delicious meatloaf.) We convened in the living room.  CNN is now speaking with the family spokesperson who is unable to tell us if Jackson has, indeed, died.

• 7:00 p.m. – Finally, nearly two hours after the news first broke, the anchor interrupts entertainment reporter, A.J. Hammer, to say that they can confirm the King of Pop is no longer among the living.

Talk about one of the most anticlimactic announcements ever.

I read an article in the Chicago Tribune (via TechCrunch) that claimed it was the stalwarts of media, like the Los Angeles Times, who did the "heavy lifting" and reported the news with the most accuracy.  I can only guess they were implying other sites' news be taken with a grain of salt.

While I do not dabble on the sites cited in the article, the Tribune's claim that other sites should not be trusted is basically unfounded and provides a clear explanation as to why newspapers are losing out: they refuse to identify these new forms of media as anything more than a passing fad. 

All it took was the death of a pop star to show us what they really thought.