I am hardly a horse racing buff, but the story of California Chrome, winner of this year’s Kentucky Derby and Preakness, is just so Mickey Rooney, it’s irresistible. The California horse is trained by Art Sherman, who at 77 is the oldest trainer to ever win a Derby. A former jockey of little success, the 5’2” fellow’s only other appearance at Churchill Downs was in 1955 as an exercise boy for Derby winner, Swaps. He actually slept on the straw with Swaps on the horse’s four-day road trip from California to Louisville for the race. California Chrome is owned by…
Author: Lloyd Graff
On Wednesday, a week after a train loaded with crude oil from North Dakotaexploded in downtown Lynchburg, Va., dumping 30,000 gallons of oil into the James River, the Department of Transportation announced two moves to try to keep this from happening so frequently. It’s doubtful that either will make much of a difference in preventing what’s become a major safety hazard in the U.S. Under a new “emergency order,” the DOT said it’s now going to require any railroad that ships a large amount of crude to tell state emergency responders what it’s up to. That includes telling them how much…
What a day I had yesterday. My wife Risa and I went down to the Sears (Willis) Tower in Chicago to meet a new lawyer who is going to rewrite our wills. Another chance to contemplate death and decrepitude and the loneliness of life without your beloved partner. Our lawyer, a thoughtful gentle woman, guided us through the choices that people with financial assets need to consider as they ponder the future. My wife’s primary concerns were about money for old age. How would she fare without me if she lives to be 90? I must admit that I deeply…
Yesterday, a physician friend of mine explained to me the economics of doctoring while his medical technician was removing wax from my ears. He says that with Obamacare, Medicare and increasingly tough insurance firms, the office visit is now the loss leader of medicine. From a money-making point of view, the office visit only pays for a doctor if they can get a scan or a procedure out of it. That is where you can still make money if you are an office based doctor. Recently, hospitals have been buying up practices to get access to referrals, which will bring…
LONDON — Gazprom, the natural gasgiant 50.01 percent owned by the Russian government, keeps ratcheting up the bill for Ukraine, increasing the economic pressure on Kiev in tandem with military pressure along Ukraine’s eastern border. What Gazprom executives now say Ukraine owes them comes to more than $22 billion. In early March, Gazprom put the bill at less than $2 billion. How Gazprom now calculates its charges explains a lot about the way the company is used by the Kremlin for political purposes. Behind the payment demands was a warning that Gazprom would cut off gas supplies to Ukraine, which it has done…
On Sunday I drove up highway 101 at 95 miles per hour in a bumblebee yellow Chevy Camaro convertible. “Born to Be Wild” blasted on the stereo. My face rapidly bronzed under the California sun. A good way to start my week. Last week I had a pleasure/business trip to California (90 percent pleasure), spending the first five days at our family’s timeshare in Carlsbad near San Diego. I had to visit a customer in L.A. on Monday so I jetted up the coast Sunday morning in a nice rental. I think most people would concur that renting cars is…
We fired a Manpower temp working in our machine cleaning area yesterday. Nothing unusual. They normally last from one day to a month. It’s hard, dirty work. Hector, who runs our cleaning and painting department, is demanding and intolerant of slackers or dummies. We pay $16.75 an hour for temps, but the workers get around $10 an hour. It’s no harm-no foul employment. Last Friday’s unemployment stats cheered some people, angered others. Non-farm payrolls added 288,000 jobs, a big number. But there was no increase in wages, and a meager 16,000 jobs added in manufacturing. Another stat – 43% of…
In the mid-1990s, Drew Greenblatt started dialing his way down a list of 800 brokers, lawyers and accountants, looking for a business to buy. He had sold a security alarm installation company, and he was looking for four qualities in his next venture: an honest seller, a viable market, a rational purchase price, and a business that sold to other businesses. He was through with coddling consumers. In 1998, after three years of searching, Mr. Greenblatt bought a sleepy Brooklyn manufacturing company with about 18 employees for $600,000. The company made one product, wire baskets for bagels, that it sold…
Donald Tokowitz, born in Chicago in 1934, is a great American success story. His immigrant parents moved to Los Angeles when he was two years old and changed their name to Sterling. Son, Don, has lived the American dream, of sorts, becoming a divorce lawyer investing in L.A. real estate and then buying a pro basketball team. Back in the early ’80s, late L.A. Lakers owner Jerry Buss, with whom Sterling had real estate dealings, encouraged him to buy an NBA franchise of his own. It was a great chance to have some fun, get good tax breaks, meet women,…
Energy extraction can coexist with native peoples and forests PASSENGERS arriving on the sole daily flight to the Las Malvinas gas-processing plant by the lower Urubamba river in Peru are ushered into a waiting room and shown a video. This contains a long list of “don’ts” for the Camisea gas project’s 600 permanent workers, including bans on bringing food and having contact with the Amerindian peoples of the surrounding forest. To get on the flight, which is chartered by Pluspetrol, the Argentine firm that operates the gas concession, passengers must have a medical pass, issued only after vaccination against flu…