Steven P. Gregory's Blog, page 4

Japan Offers to Lend U.S. Half the Cost of D.C. to Baltimore Mag-Lev Train

Japan’s Prime Minister proposed to President Obama during a conference last year that Japan would lend the United States half the cost of building a Japanese-technology mag-lev train between Baltimore and Washington.  The cost for thirty-seven miles?  Eight billion dollars.

The cost per mile works out (fans of repeating digits will swoon) to $216,216,216.21621621621622.  Prefer rounding?  $216,000,000 per mile.  Prefer words?  Two hundred sixteen million dollars.  That is per mile.  For each mile.  One mile, two hundred sixteen million dollars.

By contrast, in 2009, Maryland state Senator Ray Dyson wrote in Southern Maryland Online, complaining of the cost of Maryland’s Intercounty Connector (“ICC”) road, “[T]he ICC, at a construction cost of $133 million a mile, will probably prove to be Maryland’s monumental boondoggle.”

Who are they kidding?  Supposedly, the trip by maglev would take only fifteen minutes, as opposed to the forty minutes required by the  “slow train.”  That’s a lot of billions for twenty-five minutes.

The Decline and Fall of the U.S. Airline Industry

My apologies to Patrick Smith, author of the excellent blog Ask the Pilot.  See my blogroll.  I stole the title of this post from a post by Mr. Smith.  In his post, he discusses non-U.S. aviation hubs, including Dubai, and offers a fascinating fact:  “The book value of the planes Emirates [the Dubai airline] has on order — to say nothing of the 200 widebody jets it already operates — exceeds the value of the entire US airline industry!”

 

 

“Down With Safety”

The National Motorists Association blog argues that when politicians use the word “safety,” they lie, and you should substitute the word “puppies.”  Link here.

Readings and Book Signings

I will be reading from Cold Winter Rain (and possibly a tease from the next book in the Slate series, Spring Thaw)  and signing copies of Cold Winter Rain at the following places and times:

Saturday, January 25, 3:00 p.m. at the Public Library, The Town of Mt. Laurel

Saturday, February 1, Noon at The Little Professor Book Center, Homewood, Alabama

Please come out and join me!

A Summer Dream and Other Stories

Miserable in this cold weather?  Take a break with my new collection of short stories, A Summer Dream and Other Stories.  Lots of readers have downloaded the book since its December launch.  Check it out here on my website or here at Amazon.

Happy Holidays!

I don’t understand the antagonism by some people in some parts to this greeting, this blessing, these words of good cheer.  Those opposed say the phrase should not be substituted for “Merry Christmas.”  This meme now boasts its own Wikipedia entry.  Entitled “Christmas Controversy,” the page wades into discussions of the history of Christmas, pagan symbols, and multicultural sensitivity.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christm...

But the word “holiday,” according to every decent English dictionary, derives from before A.D. 950 and the Old English, or Anglo Saxon,  haligdæg, from halig “holy” + dæg “day.”  Thus, Holy Day.  This derivation should of course be obvious to anyone with eyes and the ability to read, but some may need further explanation.

In light of the numerosity of pagan symbols associated with Christmas — its association with celebrations of the winter solstice, the pagan origins of the Christmas tree, and “Yule,” a sacrifice feast for the winter season — and the misplacement of December 25 as a celebration of the birth of Christ, surely even fundamentalists should be just as pleased to hear someone wish them “Happy Holy Days” as “Merry Christmas.”

Happy Holidays, everyone.

Cold Winter Rain – post-launch update

The book launch party for Cold Winter Rain (held at the incomparable Barber Motorsports Museum in Birmingham) succeeded beyond expectations.  Over forty guests braved the cool, rainy late afternoon for a reading of the first chapter of Spring Thaw (the sequel to Cold Winter Rain), drinks and hors d’oeuvres, unlimited tours of the museum, and an unexpected track event for motorcycles.  Through the theater’s panoramic windows, the audience enjoyed a view of the sun setting over the track’s Museum Turn and the hills beyond.  Books were sold; food and wine were enjoyed; new friendships were forged.

Cold Winter Rain is now available in paperback at The Little Professor Book Center in Homewood, Alabama, PharmSouth in The Town of Mt. Laurel, and Carter Drugs in Selma, and in digital and paperback versions at Amazon.

A reading and signing event is scheduled for Saturday, January 25, 2014, at 3:00 p.m., at the Mt. Laurel branch of the North Shelby County Library.  Another reading and signing event will be scheduled in February at The Little Professor Book Center.

Book Launch Party Reminder

I’m celebrating the launch of my first novel, Cold Winter Rain, with a party on November 23 from 4-6 p.m. at the Barber Motorsports Museum , and I hope to see you and your spouse or significant other there (and your grownup or late teen children, as well as your neighbors) (see how to RSVP below).

Cold Winter Rain is the debut of Slate, a detective who shares my legal and aviation background, as well as my love of Alabama’s Gulf Coast.  Unlike me, he is driven by terrible losses, seeking resolution and order by solving dangerous puzzles in the cases he accepts.  Much of the action in the novel occurs in familiar Birmingham settings.  If you’ve read Robert Parker or John D. MacDonald, you will be on familiar ground as well.

Kirkus Reviews said of CWR:  ”Gregory’s prose is solid, and he vividly describes both the exterior Southern landscape and the insular, interior spaces Slate inhabits.”  An Amazon VineVoice reviewer, Diana Von Behren, wrote:  “Gregory positions his readers for an updated slant on the world in the form of the neo-noir.”  See Von Behren’s full review here.

Arrive at 4:00 for good food, good company, a short reading, a book signing, and even some door prizes.

The Barber Motorsports Museum, a visual feast, houses the world’s largest motorcycle collection and numerous race cars.  I look forward to seeing you there.

Steve

P.S.  If you’re on Facebook, please join the Launch Event and let me know if you are coming and if you’ll be bringing a date!  Or email me at Steven@StevenPGregory.com to let me know.

The Three Bs: From Blockbuster to Barnes & Noble to Books-a-Million*

Media reports last week briefly mentioned the permanent closing of the last four hundred Blockbuster video rental stores.  See “Internet Kills the Video Store,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 2013.  If you’re over fifty-five, you saw the video rental industry gestate, grow rapidly, thrive, diminish, languish, and die in the space of twenty or thirty years.  When the video cassette and VCR came along, entrepreneurs in small towns and cities opened video rental stores.  Someone I vaguely knew opened a store, then another, then two more, then a dozen, until he and his partners were running a statewide chain.  Later, the partners sold the business to Movie Gallery and retired young and wealthy.  Movie Gallery itself began in Dothan, Alabama, expanded across the state, then with the assistance of bank financing and an IPO, went nationwide.

Blockbuster, though, was the big kid bully in the space.  Blockbuster acquired smaller chains and opened new stores until, at its peak, according to Wikipedia, it operated over 9,000 stores with 60,000 employees.  Then along came Netflix with technology adapted for the Internet and cocooning, and in 2010, Blockbuster filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  The stores were acquired by Dish Network, which gradually shut down the entire retail operation.

Similarly, years ago, independent bookstores felt the pinch from the new big-box bookstores.  Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million grew and grew.  Lovers of books lamented the demise of the independents, but they bought their books at Barnes & Noble, and the independent book stores across the country died one by one.

And then a Wall Street banker named Bezos started a company he called Amazon.

Now you will see on discussion boards from time to time speculation about whether Barnes & Noble (ticker symbol BKS) will be forced into bankruptcy.  If you want to skip the financial analysis, here is my answer:  yes.  My reasoning follows, as well as my reasons why Books-a-Million (ticker symbol BAMM) will survive, and why we may see a resurgence of independent bookstores.

For the third year in a row, in 2013 BKS’s net tangible assets are a negative number — $329 million.*  That number worsened by over $100 million from 2012 to 2013.  “Net tangible assets” is calculated starting with total assets and subtracting intangible assets, liabilities and the par value of preferred stock.  The company last reported an annual profit in 2010.  BKS has now endured three consecutive years of losses, and those losses increased by $93 million from 2012 to 2013.  Overall sales and even sales in the Nook division have been declining year-to-year and quarter-to-quarter.  In layman’s terms, the company is shrinking while it loses money at an increasing rate.

Earlier this year, the BKS founder, Leonard Riggio, announced plans to buy a portion of the company; in August he announced that he would not pursue the purchase.

One problem with BKS may be not so much the decline of book sales and competition from Amazon — though those factors aren’t helping — as a flawed business model.  BKS operates brick and mortar stores in high-end, expensive locations.  It seems to me that only a high-margin, big-ticket product line will support that type of retail operation.  Books are neither.

By contrast, my guess is that, based on current financial data, Books-a-Million at least survives, even if it does not ultimately thrive.  BAMM has turned a profit in two of the last three years, and its net tangible assets have actually increased by a small margin.  BAMM and BKS stores operate, based solely on personal observation, in different retail spaces; while BKS stores are located in high-end, expensive shopping areas, BAMM locates its stores in less-expensive strip malls, spaces where you might find a Stein Mart or PetSmart or Wal-Mart next door instead of a Neiman-Marcus or Apple store.

Assuming current trends lead to the demise of BKS, where does that leave the book retailing business?  Amazon, AMZN, probably continues to grow, though at some point it will have to change from a growth-at-expense-of-profits model to a model that produces profits (AMZN’s revenues have increased substantially over the past three years, but its profits have declined, and it actually lost money last year).  BAMM continues to soldier on, aided by profits in its growing commercial real estate division.

And with their first big-box nemesis, Barnes & Noble, out of the way, could independent booksellers make a comeback?  I know plenty of writers and readers who’d like to see that happen.

*This article is intended as business and cultural commentary and does not constitute investment advice.

*Yahoo Finance supplied all financial data for this blog post.

Insightful Review of Cold Winter Rain

Diana F. von Behren, a Top 500, Vine Voice Amazon reviewer, has published a compelling review of my novel Cold Winter Rain worthy of reading as a stand-alone article.  Read it here.