Mark was sitting alongside his PD Stella Schwartz on Tuesday morning, when (says the Orange County Register's Gary Lycan) he suddenly opened up about what life's been like since Amidon's contract wasn't renewed, during the year-end Clear Channel cutbacks. Schwartz says "I was shocked...but I did not want to chime in, because our audience needed to hear what was on Mark's mind." That turned out to be a great deal: about how welcoming most KOST listeners have been to him working solo, about what Kim's doing now, about how much money Kim walked away with ("hundreds of thousands of dollars") and his own responsibilities as a father, and his love for the job. Read Lycan's remarkable column about a unscheduled morning drive talkset on an AC station, here.