Here's hoping that 2012 is off to a great start for everyone. It's been a strange winter here in the greater Nashville area where I live, with mild temperatures (fine by me) and today a rare January storm system that came through producing tornadoes (not so good). Luckily, since I work from home, I was able to reassure my girlfriend's yellow lab Clyde, who was nonplussed with the blaring from the warning siren and the barometric pressure change that he very clearly was able to recognize.

Luckily all is well here, though it was a bit troubling to be under a tornado warning and then see my neighborhood pulled up on the weather map on TV as an area where a tornado strike might be imminent. We dodged a bullet on that, but some others weren't so lucky. The only positive: no injuries or fatalities.

But you didn't visit this site to read about the weather. So, with a big thanks to Chris Cuomo, here are some legal IDs from the Tuscaloosa, AL and Selma, AL markets.

New tonight here on Toppy are some of the IDs I recorded during a visit to Staunton, Illinois earlier this month, a town where some members of my girlfriend's family live. Staunton is close enough to be able to get most (but not all) of the St. Louis radio stations, at least on the FM dial.

Picking up HD2/HD3 stations from distance can be a hit-or-miss proposition. But, thanks to having made multiple visits to Staunton, I've been able to record and extract the IDs from most of the available HD2/HD3 stations -- at least the ones that bother to do a legal ID.

With that in mind, there are a couple of HD2/HD3 stations from the St. Louis market making their debut on here tonight. Listen, enjoy, and have a great Christmas everyone.

My update for this week includes new IDs recorded earlier this month in Louisville and Evansville.

My contribution to this site for the week comes from the trip I made with my girlfriend Stacy to Evansville, IN this past weekend. I'm a 1999 grad of the University of Evansville, and I hadn't been back on campus in more than a decade before this past Saturday. It was remarkably disorienting in some ways, and in other ways it felt decidedly familiar.

There is far too much to write about from the trip to fit on here, and most of it would be off-topic for this site anyway. But I'll link to my forthcoming write-up on it when I add more IDs on here next week for those who might be interested in reading it.

Included in the new Evansville IDs today is the Toppy debut of 95.3 WKVN, the station that EMF ended up buying after supposedly trying to buy 91.5 WUEV (where I made my on-air radio debut some 16 years ago) from UE in 2006. It was a case of dirty pool with how a certain administrator (no longer at the university, thankfully) tried to sneak word of the potential sale of WUEV through as inconspicuously as possible, tucking it away in an intentionally out-of-the-way section of an alumni update email.

Fortunately the sneaky maneuver didn't go unnoticed, and ultimately my alma mater opted not to piss away its very valuable FM radio license for pennies on the dollar. It came close to happening before alumni (myself included) protested and pressured the school into not making a terrible mistake. Sometimes things work out the way they should, and there's something to be said for that.

Before I begin, for any of you on Twitter, follow me on there if you like by clicking here.

This isn't my normal day to post on here, but I have a few IDs from three different markets to share, and I'd prefer to do it now before the weekend blitz gets going.

-I'm going to Evansville, IN tomorrow to see Butler take on Evansville in a men's basketball game at the brand new Ford Center. My girlfriend Stacy and I went up there in February to the last game at UE basketball's now-former home, Roberts Stadium (oddly named since it is an arena in the traditional sense, not a stadium as you might traditionally think of an open-air ballpark), and now we're going to their first game at the brand new place. And, from that last visit, I have two new IDs up, including one from the station where I made my on-air debut, WUEV, as a freshman in college at UE in 1995.

-This past Friday night I found myself in Shelby County, which is where Memphis is located. We weren't in the city limits, but right next to it in the town of Cordova. My broadcasting role was to provide color commentary for the webcast of a high school playoff football game. Thanks to TSSAA rules, you either have to pay the TSSAA $750 to provide a live webcast with video, or you can pay them nothing and do audio-only. So it was audio-only for us, but that took me back to my WUEV days of radio sports broadcasting.

I rolled tape and recorded digitally what I could, and for now two IDs snagged during that trip are up on the site, including one from the newly-flipped-to-sports 790 WMC.

I'll be calling a football game in west Nashville tonight. The upside: no long trip to/from Nashville. The downside: it's supposed to be a cold night in middle Tennessee. I'll be bundled up for that; just past midnight in town here it's 26 degrees. Brrr.

-My aforementioned girlfriend Stacy took a trip to Louisville last month, and because she's so great she brought a recording device along and captured the legal ID for the very cool 100.5 Gen-X radio (WLGX), which is finally represented here on the site.

New tonight here on Toppy are more IDs from Athens, GA and a one-off out of Atlanta, all recorded by yours truly during my trip to Georgia earlier this month. Enjoy!

New tonight on Toppy are some legal IDs that I acquired during recent road trips. From Atlanta there is the legal ID for the new Journey 97.9 (which was recorded during a stop in ATL during my trip to Athens, GA). From my hometown of Nashville, I've uploaded an ID recorded last month of the new 102.5 the Game that I thought (incorrectly) that I had already uploaded on here. Finally, I've included a three-pack of IDs from Birmingham where I went last weekend with my brother to see the Mississippi State/UAB football game in a whirlwind day trip. All three were actually recorded from inside of Legion Field. Note that the ID for WAPI and WAPI-FM reflects the recent change in ownership from Citadel to Cumulus; the powers that be didn't waste much time updating that one.

I took a trip to Athens, GA this past weekend and had a blast. When I finish my write-up on my adventures from the weekend, I'll be sure to link to it from here. For now, enjoy some of the IDs I landed during my visit to the area.

This past Friday I found myself in Chattanooga, TN to broadcast a high school football game. This gave me a chance to roll some tape on the some of the elusive relatively lower-powered AM stations from there which have been missing from this site until now. Three of those are up tonight for you to enjoy. I'll have more from Chattanooga in next week's update.

Also new tonight are one-off IDs from St. Louis and Kansas City from my whirlwind trip from Nashville to KC and back that took place two months ago. Notice that the Kansas City ID is a dual ID of two stations licensed to "Kansas City" but in separate states... one to Kansas City, MO and the other to Kansas City, KS.

Last week I agreed, in a last-minute move, to help my uncle retrieve a Chevy pickup truck from Kansas City which he won in an online auction.

Now this is a whirlwind plan: find out on Monday afternoon and agree to it, meet my uncle on Wednesday at 3 a.m. in Nashville at his place on the west side of the city, then drive up through St. Louis and across Missouri on I-70 to Kansas City. My uncle completed the purchase, and he drove his newly-acquired truck while I followed behind in the Tundra we took up there, heading back home.

I tried my best to record what I could from stations not represented on here, though some of it turned out static-ridden, as you might imagine would happen trying to record various radio stations along the way.

We didn't have a set stop time, and my uncle considered having us drive all the way back that night, which would have been insane considering that I was going off 4 hours of sleep and this would have put us back home around midnight -- 21 hours since we left, and it's about a 45 minute drive to where I live (southeast of the city) in the Nashville area from his place.

Fortune intervened for me: not only did the truck he bought not have a working battery (which he remedied in Kansas City), but it turned out that the Chevy's headlights didn't work. Caught up in a road construction tie-up near the I-64/I-57 split, we waited a good 30 minutes to make it through the traffic congestion, which happened to hit right as the sun began going down. By the time we were through the traffic mess it was dark and, with my uncle's truck lacking headlights, we had to find a place to stop.

Heading down I-57, he followed behind me with his hazard lights blinking, allowing traffic to zip past us as we made our way as safely as possibly down the interstate. About a dozen miles from there we finally found a place to crash in the town of Benton, IL, at a dump of a hotel that is part of a chain whose name you probably know. I managed to snag a couple of IDs out of the Marion/Carbondale market before I fell asleep, exhausted.

By 6:30 the next morning we had enough sunlight to where we could make the rest of the trip back to Nashville. We made it back safely, though I was worn out for the rest of that Thursday. For those of you who drive long distances on a regular basis, you have my sympathy. I wouldn't have thought driving 1,100+ miles would be so physically taxing, but it really was, especially for someone like me who's not used to doing it.

With that in mind, I present new IDs from Kansas City, Marion/Carbondale, IL, and a couple from my home turf of Nashville. I wish I had more from KC (and I'm on the fence on the Jack FM ID I recorded as we rumbled into town enough to wait until next week to decide on it), but better something than nothing...