Listen, I've got this thing and it's F-ing golden, see? And I'm not just going to give it up for F-ing nothing. I'm not going to do it.

'Cause, unless I get something real good, s---, I'll just send myself, you know what I'm saying?

Oh, wait - you mean I can't trade a bunch of Chicago and Northwest Indiana IDs from February 2008 for a Senate seat?

Well, can I at least have the full head of hair? No?

(OK, I'd probably settle for a Chicago hot dog, to tell you the truth...)

PS - Confidential to ex-Governor Blago: when you do finally get sent away to Marion, IL, we sure could use some updated IDs from the market for Toppy...and you should have plenty of free time to collect them, right?

Toppy welcomes Macon, GA to the list of cities with at least one legal ID on here. Along with that are a pair of one-off IDs for Tampa and Orlando, along with a pair of IDs out of Selma, AL from Chris Cuomo, one of which is from the recently flipped 107.9 WJAM.

...please stand by.

Nothing says "the holidays are over, let's get back to normal" like a massive computer failure. Earlier this week, my laptop threw its hard drive -- only to find out it wasn't a hard drive failure as much as it was a combo platter of hard drive and motherboard failure.

Luckily, I had just completed a backup, but it's one of those backups that's cut up and spread over multiple DVDs, and it's too cumbersome a process to restore more than once. So with that in mind, I won't be posting those Houston IDs I promised tonight, but rather later in the week when I'm back up to full speed. (I'm told the gent from Dell should be here Tuesday to fix my poor 'puter.)

Thanks for bearing with me.

Toppy's taking Thanksgiving week off. Let's meet back here next week, shall we?

Before I get to getting on today's update, I want to take a moment to discuss site contributions.

We were recently taken to task in a site comment on our slow posting time for contributions. I don't think it was entirely fair, as we've made it abundantly clear on both the site itself and the bounce-back e-mail that contributors get that it could be a good while before contributions are published. That said, there is something basically impolite about asking for contributions and then being as far behind on posting them as we are.

I'm of two minds on this: one is to not accept contributions anymore, but that not only hurts the site but reeks of "taking my ball and going home" syndrome. The other is to do what I'm doing as of this evening: closing the site to contributions until we get caught up and then re-thinking the contribution process at that time.

Understand that this is a hobby site. I've got two stations to be responsible for. Scott has the eighteen jobs that keep The Museum At Bonnie Brae in hot dogs and diapers. Lou's got to try not to strangle that freakin' duck for 40 per, Jeff -- well, I don't really know what Jeff does, but he's on the road a lot, and Blaine's got a gig that we simply don't discuss. *coughc.i.a.cough* My point is this: we all have too much to do for this site to become a drag, and it won't be. I'll shut it down first.

Comments are closed on this post. If you have comments or questions, please e-mail me.

Thanks to Joe for the tipoff of a Toppy mention in Richard Wagoner's column in the Daily Breeze.
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As always, we encourage contributions to extend the reach of Toppy, but to keep the site the best it can be, there are some guidelines we've set up. Before you start recording, peep these out to make everyone's life easier:

It's not only what the legal ID sounds like, but also the context in which it's presented. With that in mind, here's what we look for in an ID tape:

• Legal IDs should come from actual off-air airchecks. We won't post production pieces out of the automation or recordings off a webstream.

• The actual legal ID of the stations, even if it's a mumbled mess buried in the :50 stopset.

• At least 10 seconds of programming on both sides of the ID (not including dead air around the ID). Because context is so important, we will no longer post IDs without surrounding programming.

• If it's in a jingle, the whole jingle (including jock talk, SFX, etc), plus the 10 sec. of programming on either side.

• If it's done in a jock talk break, the entire break (or approximately 30 sec. of it if it's terribly long), plus the 10 sec. of programming on either side.

• On high quality cassette, CD, or high quality MP3 (no less than 128 kpbs/44 khz). We very strongly prefer stereo files to mono.

• We suggest just rolling tape for a few minutes to catch the ID.

• Please provide the month and year the recording was made. IDs without month and year won't be posted.

• E-mail ID audio to tophour@gmail.com. While e-mail is the preferred method of submission, FTP or a snail mail address is available. E-mail me for the scoop.

• For the lawyers (and yes, it's an issue): We encourage submissions to tophour.com and tophour.net under the above conditions. Tophour management reserves the right to select what materials will be used on-site. There is no financial compensation for contributions. All submissions retain original copyright by the radio stations who produced the broadcast(s) and their ownership. Files will be removed upon written request by station ownership. All submissions become the property of tophour.net and tophour.com.

E-mail questions here; e-mail audio here.

A large surge in traffic has hit Toppy this week, doubtless due to the nice piece by Ken R. in the new edition of Radio World. Should you feel so inclined as to send stuff in to the site, we'd love to hear it...but please read this first.

Now, then: kick off your shoes and make yourself at home. Mi casa es su casa and all that.

Don Barrett's excellent LARadio.com did a nice feature recently on our friend Scott Fybush and his radio geekdom empire, and Tophour got a nice mention:

Scott has another obsession -- he records station IDs for another Web site. "My box is out in the car right now rolling on 1220, as a matter of fact. Hmm, that's another weird hobby. I'm also a DXer. I love tuning into different stations. I always have. There's a certain fascination that a very, very small subset of the radio industry has with these top hour ID's and it probably goes back to Bill Drake who obviously did it best with Boss Radio. He made a big deal with the show intros. You can have millions of JACK format all over the country, but only one of them is KCBS/fm-Los Angeles. Out of all the KISS' in the country, only one of them is KIIS-Los Angeles. It's hard to get that little bit of tape there but it's also useful for me, obviously, doing hundred-thousand watts because that's all tagged by call letter. I am not the king of this, there is a guy who is in Wisconsin now by the name of Brian Davis and Brian has a Web site that is called TopHour dot net. Brian not only collects them, he posts them on the web and his Web site is a whole collection of just legal ID's, just the ID and the ten seconds or so from all over the country.

While Scott was in town he rolled tape across the dial concentrating on call changes at 1150AM and the stations in Temecula. "Last time I was here I got "K-DAY" but not KDAI-Ontario. I still have to do that but it's a fun and largely harmless little hobby. There are probably, I don't know, a dozen people I know around the country who do this. He gets a lot of visitors to the site and the people who contribute are passionate about it."

Thanks to Don and Scott for the love.

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...and so we answer it, or at least some of the more popular questions.

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