It was a really nice end to the ski season, a great Sunday for the last tram at Snowbird. Now the tram is down for 40 days of major maintenance, a few chairs remain running on the weekends and my knees are ready to move on to something less damaging. It was the first time in many years that conditions were good enough for me to stick around until the last tram day and forgot the fun involved: Gaming the last tram boarding, the ride up, the "reception committee" with snowballs on the peak, the peak party, the party on "The Beach" above Lone Pine with Mt. Superior in the background, and the follow-on parties in the valley after finally making our way to the bottom.

The last tram of the season was received with a traditional fusillade of snowballs on the top of Hidden Peak at Snowbird

After everybody was kicked off the peak, the party continued out on "The Beach" at the end of the traverse. At least until the ski patrol kicked us out of there too. And somehow I missed my flight home

Now it's truly back to reality.

• I did get a call from the manager of the Walgreens (NYSE:WAG) store that I complained to on Sunday. She said the problem had been related to training and she went over things with the employee. Good enough for me, and a pretty good indication that this company does still care about their reputation. For better or worse, the labor market in Salt Lake is such that she probably doesn't have the greatest material to work with. More on that later
• I just got an invitation to the Anderson School's John Wooden Global Leadership Award ceremony (formerly known as the Exemplary Leadership in Management Award). I've commented on this one in the past, suggesting that this award tends to be really good at picking guys who are either peaking or past their peak. So it's no great surprise that this year's award goes to Howard Schultz of Starbucks (NasdaqGS:SBUX). His getting this award certainly would not give me the warm and fuzzies about owning the stock.

A few weeks ago I noted that I had encountered the term "Voluntary Simplicity" during an Anderson School-sponsored career options exercise.

The MBA Indicator

That's 12 people, in the most image-conscious city on the planet, all of whom have had significant business success, who in fact went to school to get ahead in business and who are used to 60-70 hour workweeks, all of whom are looking at their lives and thinking that maybe wanting less and having less could be a better way of living.

There's been more and more evidence that this idea could be a force in the economy in the coming years

Yeah, it's that time of year and it's been the best season in years. I've also had a girlfriend up in Utah, who has made getting up there a lot easier than in past years.

So I've been offline a lot.

Got one more long trip to Snowbird in a couple of weeks, and probably a bunch of shorter ones through April, but also slowly getting back into the swing of things here and should be commenting more often.

Hard to beat days like this one at Alta though:

-btc

I've been in Utah a lot, enjoying the incredible powder this season, as well as a bit of a winter romance. Thus, I've been offline.

• Noticed this one in the LA Times a few days ago. Trying to tap into home equity? We'll see The most incredible quote in the whole story was this one:

  "We didn't deserve this," Thaleia Georgiades, a real estate agent in El Dorado, Calif., said Thursday, two days after she and her husband, a builder, learned that their Countrywide credit line had been frozen.
  
  "When you are self-employed, that's the money you count on to bridge the gap during tough times. And this is a particularly tough time in both the building and housing industries," Georgiades said.

  I can remember when the advice to entrepreneurs was that you had to have a year of money in the bank to survive on when things were slow. To accomplish that you had to scrimp and save when times were good and not spend it all. Today, it seems that the word "money" has been confused with "debt." I mean, get real! Two people whose incomes are leveraged to real estate are counting on the equity in their real estate to bail them out during tough times, when real estate -- by definition! -- is screwed? Do people have brains anymore?

• John Succo at Minyanville has been noting this same problem -- the confusion of debt for savings -- for some time. But I've never seen it quite so clearly called out by the statement of a random individual outside the government or Wall Street. This is actually fairly scary.
• Mish commented on this same article more extensively.
• It should be noted though, that this has been going on for months, with no official announcements until recently. New lines have not been extended and older ones have been killed off for even the slightest misdeed, missed payment, etc. Moving to cut off credit lines that are in good standing does ratchet things up a notch.
• Kudos to Barry for pointing out that sometimes Cramer can be right, and that our government more often than not is wrong. For the record, Cramer was right on this from the beginning, and called out the obvious investment implications and socially negative consequences.

As I sit here in the bar at Snowbird, many things come to mind:

• Isn't it amazing that Utah Hwy 210 (aka "Little Cottonwood Canyon Road") is the most avalanche-prone road in the country, despite being only eight miles long?
• Isn't it even more amazing that I've never been caught in one of them? (And yes, I'm one of those nuts who sometimes wears an avalanche beacon in the car...)
• How is it that Larry Kudlow can go on TV every day and sloganize the benefits of free-market capitalism, then simultaneously demand that the government and it's agencies -- like the Fed -- do something to save the economy? I thought the idea of a free market is that the government butts out?
• What is it with me and female river guides anyway?
• Does anybody really believe that Angelo Mozillo didn't know exactly what he was doing when he sold all that Countrywide (NYSE:CFC) stock?
• Why don't any of my friends in LA want to ski when the conditions are so good? Do I need new friends?

-btc

Looks like a quiet one this year, with many friends out of town and me planning on being away next week.

• One of the things that has annoyed me to no end about the endless rounds of attempts to bail out mortgage lenders is that for the most part they got themselves into this trouble and deserve to go down for it. The LA Times details how those banks did nothing to even attempt to identify even the most obvious fraud rings. While certainly those who perpetrated the fraud deserve jail, the banks that should have been smart enough to detect it certainly don't deserve a bailout from public funds, or for that matter the assistance of any branch of government. As Taleb's fictional character "Fat Tony" notes, the banks are usually the perfect marks.
• On the menu for New Year's Eve is some home baked chicken, a nice Rosenblum Zin, and a bottle of 1989 Veuve Cliquot Reserve that has been in storage for some time. After that, perhaps a couple of hours at my local bar, which will be open to us natives after dinner, at about 10:30. In the meantime, the Law and Order marathon is keeping me busy.

Lots going on this week:

• Adding to my comments on retail a couple of days ago, I stopped by Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) yesterday to pick up a couple of essentials. It seemed quite slow for a pre-Christmas week evening. Their latest earnings report notwithstanding, I think this is a further sign of things being very slow. Still, I wouldn't short them. Might consider a paired trade against Circuit City (NYSE:CC). As Macke notes, you don't want to short the leader in a business, regardless of what you think of the macro picture.
• It's nice to have sorted things out so that I can go back to my regular bar again on weekends. And quite a weekend it was. Met somebody quite nice on Friday. Then discovered how really wonderful one of my neighbors is on Saturday. The only fly in the ointment was the woman I've been most interested in lately deciding to show up there on Saturday with her girlfriends just as I was making the new connection...

It's been a busy few months. I've been dating, working and considering new career options. In between I've been writing very little. The Casey Saga came back and then went away again, as did fellow blogger Aspeth. I switched bars due to a minor fling with a regular at my previous regular bar. My neighborhood coffee place raised prices again, despite government assurances that there's no inflation.

In other news:

• Jeff Matthews has a take on the Google Guys that is spot on. I always thought that "Don't Be Evil" was an impossible goal for a company that was as large and influential as Google. Power corrupts. Absolute Power corrupts absolutely. And Google is pretty powerful. A better goal might have been to set up the company in a manner that kept the evil in check. But when 2 guys control the bulk of the stock with super-voting rights, there is absolute and unchecked power over what the company does. Thus the squandering of company money on a 767, pet initiatives unrelated to their business focus, and other things that may eventually be the undoing of this great company. And yeah, I hate hypocrites, no matter how much I like their companies' products.
• Mish points out why the subprime bailout is a government sham, designed to make it look like they're doing something when they're not. As I pointed out to Mish in an email this afternoon, this proposal also ignores another fact. The people who might be helped by this are also the people least likely to want to stay in their homes for five years. In fact, they are the people most likely to have to move due to career, family or other considerations. When they need to move, sending in the keys to the bank will still be the best option.

I've been a Delta frequent flyer for several years because their route map suits me, but I've just dropped them, perhaps with the exception of my occasional trips to Utah. The primary reason is their antiquated and disastrous Terminal 2/3 complex at JFK, which has devolved into something reminiscent of a third world travel experience. It was inadequate 20 years ago, has gotten worse since 9/11, and now has gotten even crazier with many domestic departures going out of terminal 2, but all check-in at terminal 3 (the old Pan Am terminal) which has completely inadequate space, and forces you into going all the way around the perimeter of the place just to get over to the walkway to the terminal you're actually departing from!

Unortunately, the City of New York, in it's great wisdom, has decided that certain airline terminals deserve to be considered historic landmarks. The old TWA terminal, designed by Eero Saarinen is one of these buildings. It's completely useless for any kind of modern aviation, but there it sits, unused. It has been surrounded on one side by the new concrete superstructure of the AirTrain. On the other side, it has been cut off from the tarmac, it's satellite gate areas knocked down, and the long spindly corridors that used to connect to them now suspended in mid-air, terminating at the edge of a new roadway which will access a replacement terminal.

Wrath of the RHIGF

I spent my day snaking hairballs out of my shower drain.

The drain has become progressively worse and worse since my Raven Haired Italian Girl Friend (RHITF) stayed here a while back.

I believe I have now completely cleaned out all the long strands of raven-colored hair from the drain, and I can shower without quickly standing in dirty water up to my ankles.

Still, sort of miss having her here, though a recent shorter-haired visitor of Czech origin has made up for the company. Too bad she's returned home too.

Israel Passport Update

Well, I got the document as discussed the other day. But apparently only good for one year. It seems that the US government has been concerned about foreign nationals arriving here, "losing" their passports, and then getting new ones in an effort to avoid anybody noticing that they stayed far longer than their tourist visas permitted. This avoids their being blacklisted for future travel. In most cases passports are not even renewed: the person is usually given a one-way transit document good for only a few months and allowing the holder to go home.

I was allowed to get an actual passport because my old one which was issued in 1973 was "lost" so long ago and because there's no question of my legal status in the US. Still, at the US government's insistence, I can only get a 1 year document after reporting a loss. In six months I can go back and request that it be extended out for an additional nine years, upon proof of being here legally, which I already provided.

Yet another example of our Department of Homeland Security generating lots of rules and "action" with no real results.

Weekend Cat Update

The RHIGF is the source of only one type of problem hair this week. With the recent increase in temps, shedding activity has increased significantly. Time for some serious grooming.

Panorama Photo Update

Got myself this neat little device from Really Right Stuff, who make some of the coolest camera-support equipment available. I've calibrated it and did some experiments, and it's pretty fantastic. Don't have any really worthy images, but look for some soon. My 20mm lens seems to be just about perfect for panoramas on the digital Nikon.

iPhone Mania

My own take on this is that it'll open up the smartphone market for consumers in a way that it has never been open before. That said, as Kevin Wassong notes, it's not a device for my mom, and in truth is overkill for my needs too.

But it's not going to displace the BlackBerries in the business market until things like integration with enterprise email servers are worked out, and possibly not even then. I have not had good results with touch-screen keyboards of any size in the past and am somewhat skeptical of the reviews claiming that it's not an issue. Maybe not for casual consumer web surfing, but has a real crackberry addict tried it and liked it?

The Death of Biotech and Pharma

David Miller of Biotech Stock Research points out in this month's newsletter that it is quite possible that biotech and pharma, along with much of health care, is likely to become uninvestible in the coming years. Copyrighted stuff, so can only give tidbits here. Justifications for this are mostly political: in addition to the liklihood of more regulation and price controls, the FDA has come under so much political pressure to avoid approving drugs with risks, that the liklihood of approval has been signficiantly reduced, the liklihood of approval subject to ongoing re-evaluation much increased, and thus the costs of bringing something to market increased signficantly. At this point a drug that experiences significant side-effects in only 1% of the people who take it is being questioned. That type of scrutiny would have kept lots of current drugs off the market. It is a big deal.

He forecasts that in coming years, we'll see a move away from drugs that work for everybody and towards solutions that integrate genetic testing of the potential patient, with a selection of drugs that are uniquely suited to that patient. From my perspective, the problems with this will continue to be political. What if you come up with a drug that works well only with people whose "genetic identifier" includes the gene for blue eyes or low-skin pigmentation? Think the polticians won't intervene against a "racist" cure, even if grounded in good science?

Summer Travel

It looks like this summer's travel will be mostly related to my mom's upcoming move. While my brother and I are happy to finally see this happen, an August move in Manhattan is not sounding like fun.

Perhaps I'll manage to squeeze in a quick birthday trip to the mountains.

-btc

I just got a call telling me that my Israeli passport is ready.

I didn't know that I needed one until recently, when I made one of my rare family visits to Israel. Usually the family is over this way -- or at least in some mutually convienient location -- often enough that I don't need to bother going all the way there. On this visit I was advised on my exit that I was, in fact an Israeli citizen and had a passport in the past, 1973 to be precise.

I knew that my dad was originally an Israeli citizen, and apparently I had a passport myself for a while due to difficulties of traveling with him otherwise. Since I've been an adult and traveling myself, this has never been an issue and I've used my American passport with no problems.
But Israel has apparently upgraded their systems and identified me on a combination of name, birth date and place of birth. (Our TSA, apparently, still dreams of such capabilities.)

A couple of weeks ago when I was in Utah I experimented a bit with panorama photographs. I didn't have much to work with since, as I mentioned at the time, I had decided to leave the good camera home in order to make room for some (ultimately useless) hiking boots and other equipment.

So I played around a bit, trying to keep everything lined up and level as much as possible just by eyeballing it on my pocket digital's tiny screen. In the end I got four of them, all taken on my second day there, in the general environment of the Snowbird resort.

Snowbird from the balcony of a lodge where I had dinner. One thing I notice about panoramas which is true of all wide-angle perspectives is that the perspective tends to make the mountains look a lot less steep than they are. Virtually everything left of the middle is advanced or expert terrain, though it doesn't quite look that way.

The western panorama from Hidden Peak, at the top of the Snowbird Tram. The Salt Lake valley is off to the right under the haze. Note the skier walking back up on the far left. He's just skied the Little Cloud bowl's north-east facing slopes, then walked back up the opposite side where there wasn't much snow. At this time of year, walking back up to take the tram down is a lot easier than walking down 2/3 of the mountain through varying terrain and conditions.

The eastern panorama from Hidden Peak, at the top of the Snowbird Tram. Alta is just past Mt. Baldy, which is the closest big peak. The terrain to the left is part of Snowbird's Peruvian Gulch and the terrain to the right is called Mineral Basin. You can just barely make out the cables for the Mineral Basin chairlift at the very far right.

A northwestern panorama from Hidden Peak, including a the Snowbird tram and a bit of the loading dock

A few learnings here.

I was in Utah over the weekend, primarily for a meeting of my vacation spot's HOA finance committee, but also to get out into the mountains, hike, maybe mountain bike a bit, and generally enjoy the outdoors. There was a lot of good, interesting information exchanged at the meeting that has wider implications and about which I will comment tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I chose to leave the nice camera home and took the little pocket one. Figured I would rather hike unimpeded than hike with a bunch of camera stuff on my back. I also generally prefer not to have lots of carry-on baggage with me when I forget to check-in early and end up in the Southwest "C" boarding group.

Leaving the good camera was a bad choice. It was a great weekend for photography and a much worse one for hiking. These conditions don't lend themselves to navigating across the terrain unless you also have snowshoes, a rope, preferably a partner, and a variety of other safety gear:

American Fork Twins

In fact, there were still a few guys skiing out there, coming off the top of the Snowbird tram which runs year-round. I thought about it chucking everything and taking a run or two, but decided that the beginning of June was not the best time to start skiing after four months, especially with the bottom 1/2 of the mountain mostly mud and rocks.

Probably could have driven to a lower elevation and found something nice, but driving would have defeated the whole purpose of being there.

So I contented myself with time in the pool with a few glasses of wine and as much photography I could do with my little "toy" digital. My friend Leo has recently been experimenting with freeware stitching software to make panoramas from multiple images, and I found the top of the Snowbird Tram to be a good place to play with the possibilities. I will post my attempts as soon as I have them put together.

And of course I dined at my usually spot, hoping for a Larry appearance. As is his habit in the summers, he was off in the trees somewhere, presumably eating pine nuts and not needing any helpings of bread. So, here's a photo of him or one of his friends, taken in January:

Larry loves bread

-btc

On Sunday I met my visiting cousins and their families at Six Flags Magic Mountain, one of the three major theme park complexes in Southern California.

Now, I knew that Six Flags (NYSE: PKS) had put itself up for sale and that things might not be in the best of shape, but I was astounded at how bad the current management has let things get.

Huge swaths of the park are closed due to capital projects currently underway. Several major rides are closed, for no apparent reason. Many of the others are running at only partial capacity. On a somewhat chilly October weekend, lines were still so long that we decided to forgo several of the major attractions we had gone up there for in the first place.

As if that weren't enough, bathrooms were dirty with paper towels and toilet paper often nonexistent. The park itself is confusing and its map and signage don't help much. [Hint: A picture of a roller coaster on the map does not tell me where the entrance is!] The tilt-a-whirl was probably not unsafe, but the old paint and rust didn't inspire confidence. The staff milling about at many of the rides made me wonder if anybody was actually working. And the metal detectors and security sweeps at the entrance are a reminder from the very start that this place has been the scene of gang violence.

[They might solve this problem if they took a page from Disney's rulebook and simply excluded anybody who even looks like they're in gang colors, along with the variety of other miscreants in obscene t-shirts, etc., of which we saw plenty.]

I'm guessing much of the neglect comes from management's desire to make the numbers look better. Charge the same prices and cut back on service. Always good for a temporary earnings pop.

But if the grumbling in the lines is any indication, they're doing so at the cost of alienating many local customers, precisely the people who keep it going year-round. Maybe in other locations, where there aren't two alternatives in the same metro area, this could be acceptable. But here in SoCal the damage is being done, and whoever buys this thing is going to end up with a damaged brand name that will need an awful lot more than just operational restructuring to bring back.

No Inflation
But my local beer and burgers place (OK, it's more than that) has raised prices on the menu for the second time this year and are cutting back on some things. My local coffee place has not changed prices much, but is now charging for wireless internet, which used to be free. One of the owner/managers explained that the cost of everything is going up and they're trying to hold the line on price increases by charging for some of the "extras."

Auto Parts Stores Still a Joke
I still can't get a windshield wiper blade to fit a current model Honda Accord from any of these jokers. But yesterday I had to drive around to three different stores just to get the various items I needed to clean and wax my car. And nobody stocks that basic great stuff -- cheesecloth -- anymore. I got it at a supermarket. In fact, I got most of the stuff (other than the Meguilar's wax) at a supermarket. I really don't know what the future is for these guys.

So Now Delta is Going Bankrupt Too?
Big surprise. I never finished penning the promised commentary on my recent experience with (among others) them. All I can say is good riddance. Time to let them fail and let the chips fall where they may. Eventually a world will emerge with much less capacity, where not everybody can afford a trip to New York for the weekend, and where airlines can be profitable. For those who thought ultra-cheap airfares were a birthright, I'm sorry.

Boing!
The above is clearly a negative for Boeing, no matter what justification the analysts pull out of their asses to justify continued expansion of the civilian fleet.

Cat Conundrum
Whatever allergic reaction I had presumed to be related to the arrival of BTCat II was either a temporary thing or a pure coincidence. Now, it's time for the long road towards reconcilliation and maybe even friendship between felines. Things seem to be calming down, but still at least one cat fight per day.

Off To Ojai
I'll be joining the Minyans in the Mountains, starting tomorrow and may have some comments coming out of that sure-to-be fantastic conference.

Overstuck
I've had some words over at Jeff Matthews' blog about Overstock.com (NasdaqNM:OSTK). I find these long/short battles to be fascinating and as I told one "fan" of mine by email yesterday, it seems that both sides are so adamant in the correctness of their position that they're willing to ignore huge amounts of public information. I continue to watch this fantastic theater from the sidelines, partly out of sheer boredom, partly because it kills me to sit by while people make allegations and assertions about issues for which there are solid facts available in the public domain. And for the record, I think the CEO is a looney, but wouldn't touch the stock either way.