Trying to get in shape the hard way

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WeightScale.jpgSandy Szwarc makes sense while expressing skepticism about the FDA’s decision to approve an over-the-counter version of Xenical (orlistat) for sale, the first prescription weight loss drug to be available without a prescription:

Even the FTCís scientific expert panel reviewing the evidence for weight loss advertisements, . . . determined that any claims that a weight loss product will cause weight loss by blocking the absorption of fat or calories were false and fraudulent advertising. . . . [E]ven with the prescription strength Xenical, people canít malabsorb enough fat a day to lose a pound a week and there are limits beyond which significant gastrointestinal problems occur. The panelís scientific analysis stated: ìThe biological facts do not support the possibility that sufficient malabsorption of fat or calories can occur to cause substantial weight loss.î

Meanwhile, this NY Times article reports that one of the formerly most popular ways to attempt to lose weight has fallen out of favor:

[I]f current trends continue, aerobics will be as rare as, . . . those vibrating belts that were supposed to jiggle away fatty hips and gravity boots that were supposed to ó what was it they were supposed to do? For now, the popularity of aerobics is sharply down from when it was ìthe mainstay of fitness in America,î said Mike May, a spokesman for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.
Itís why you may have noticed ó if you have shown up at your gym attired in your best leg warmers with a sweatshirt off one shoulder ó the lack of aerobics classes on the menu. Fewer than half of the 300 gyms and health clubs recently surveyed by IDEA offered aerobics classes, a number that is ìcontinuing to decline,î according to the summation of the report.
At its peak in the mid-í80s, an estimated 17 million to 20 million did aerobics, Mr. May said. But only five million did in 2005, according to a report by the sporting goods association. ìWe expect the 2006 numbers to be significantly lower,î Mr. May said. ìAerobics are increasingly out of favor.î
The legacy of injuries is one reason. Many of the original instructors like Mr. Blahnik wonít teach aerobics ó because they canít. ìThose hardest hit by all those aerobics were often the teachers, because they were pushing harder than anyone else and doing the classes a dozen times a week,î Dr. Metzl said. ìOur bodies just werenít meant to withstand all that pounding.î

By the way, Art DeVany has compiled this category of blog posts that explores the damaging physical effects of distance running and endurance training. More exercise does not always equate with better health.

Lamar Muse, RIP

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Muse%20Air.jpgFormer Houstonian M. Lamar Muse, one of the founders of Southwest Airlines and a pioneer of airline deregulation, died earlier this week in Dallas. He was 86 at the time of death.
Muse was legendary in the airline industry for taking over Southwest when the airline had no planes, piles of startup debt, and nominal liquidity. He parleyed that into three 737s from Boeing so that Southwest could begin flying the planes between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, taking advantage of close-in and underused Hobby Airport in Houston and Love Field in Dallas. Inasmuch as Southwest was flying entirely intrastate, the airline was lightly regulated in comparison to the legacy airlines of the time and, thus, slashed fares to capture the Texas market. When I moved to Texas in the early 1970’s, I could buy a ticket to Dallas or San Antonio for about $30, $50 round trip. And, yes, those orange hot pants on the flight attendants were not bad, either.
Muse left Southwest in the late 1970’s over a dispute about the rate of expansion and he was never able to regain the mojo that he displayed at Southwest. In 1982, he started Muse Air, which was sort of a luxury version of Southwest, but the timing was bad as the oil and gas business in Texas was just beginning to enter a long and deep tailspin at the time. After never generating a profit, Muse sold out to Southwest in 1985, which renamed the airline TranStar. By 1987, Southwest had had enough of the airline’s losses and shut it down.
Muse was a true character to the end, reportedly participating in internet chat rooms regarding airlines up until recently. Probably his most endearing business legacy is his championing of a company stock-based, profit-sharing plan for Southwest employees, who didn’t have pensions at the time. That plan eventually turned many longtime Southwest employees into millionaires as Southwest’s value grew over the years. A fine legacy for any businessperson, indeed.

The International is kaput

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Castle%20Pines.gifThe International — the idiosyncratic PGA Tour event at Castle Pines GC in Colorado that used a modified Stableford scoring system rather than the traditional stoke play format — will shut down for good after this year’s tournament, another casualty of the increasing stratification of tournaments on the PGA Tour. John Hawkins has the story.
But for the support of Shell Oil, the same thing could happen to the Houston Open, for the reasons noted here and here. The prospects for the other Texas tournaments are not all that rosy, either. PGA Tour, are you listening?
Meanwhile, Doug Ferguson reports that several cities are vying to replace the International:

The cancellation [of the International] leaves a hole in the PGA Tour schedule on July 5-8, but tour officials have been working on a contingency plan over the last month and are expected to announce a replacement by April.
The leading candidate is Washington, the largest U.S. market without a PGA Tour event. The nation’s capital had a tour event since 1968, but that presumably ended when title sponsor Booz Allen bailed out last year because it was not part of the FedExCup portion of the PGA Tour schedule.
Other markets under consideration are Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Kansas City.

EGL deal hits turbulence

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EGL.pngLooks as if Jim Crane’s proposed private equity-backed buyout of EGL is on the rocks already. That news probably makes Ben Stein happy, but what about EGL shareholders?
Crane commented that he will resubmit another bid, but the market certainly didn’t receive his first with gusto. After an initial run-up in price upon the announcement of the proposed buyout, the stock is now trading at close to its 52-week low. Interestingly, Crane’s failed offer — something that folks such as Stein would make illegal — may end up inducing more bidders to get into play for EGL than otherwise would be the case, thus increasing EGL’s value for shareholders. Stay tuned.

Judge Robinson hands Westar’s Wittig another excessive sentence

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westar020607.jpgOn the heels of the 10th Circuit’s scathing decision last month setting aside the convictions of former Westar Energy executives David Wittig and Douglas Lake, this Greg Burns/Chicago Tribune article reports that the legal tug-of-war between U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson and the appellate court over her handling of the criminal cases against Wittig continues.
As Burns reports, Judge Robinson re-sentenced Wittig earlier in the week to 24 months in prison on a bank fraud conviction that was not related to the larger prosecution of Wittig and Lake in regard to Westar. Judge Robinson handed down that sentence despite the fact that the 10th Circuit had already struck down two of her previous sentences on that charge, the most recent of which suggested that the sentence on the charge should be a maximum of six months. Wittig has already served over a year in prison.
Beyond his reporting on Wittig and the Westar-related criminal cases, Burns’ article is well worth reading simply for the depth of his analysis of how the prosecutions reflect the questionable nature of the regulation-of-business-through-criminalization policy that the federal government and state actors such as Eliot Spitzer adopted after the bursting of the stock market bubble at the beginning of this decade. As Burns notes, the Westar prosecutions have played more on widespread resentment of wealthy businesspersons than on clear lines of criminal liability. Such analysis is a refreshing change of perspective from what much of the mainstream media serves up about prosecutions of business interests.

Regulating private equity buyouts

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moneyrolls.jpgMatthew Bishop over at The Economist.com makes the salient point that the concern over private equity buyouts is getting a bit hysterical:

THE backlash against the private-equity boom is becoming a tad hysterical. Take yesterday’s Financial Times (of February 5th), in which John Gapper issues a ìwake up callî about what he says may be the next big financial scandal, ìmanagement buy-outs of public companies by executives backed by private-equity firms.î
What is the problem, exactly? According to Mr Gapper: ìTo state the obvious, any chief executive who plans to buy the company that he or she leads faces a huge conflict of interest with its shareholders. The job of an executive is to make a company as valuable as possible so that its shares fetch the highest possible price. But any director who bids for a company is eager to pay as little as possible so that he or she can reap the maximum reward in the future.î
Still, Mr Gapper concedes that not every management buyout is ìinherently flawedî. That makes him a moderate compared with another financial writer, Ben Stein, who wants them to be made illegal.
As Mr Stein claimed not long ago in the New York Times, ìmanagement buyouts are great for management. But by every standard I can see, they are yet another sad sign of how our corporate trustees have lost their moral compass. The time for them to stop is long overdue. If the stockholders have hired you and pay your wage to manage their assets, your job is to do that for themónot to buy them out at fire-sale prices and turn around and make billions that rightfully belong to them. The management buyout is a sad and infuriating avatar of a decadent age.î

Whoa, Nellie, says Bishop:

Mr Gapper and Mr Stein talk as though the mere existence of a potential conflict of interest will lead directly to wrongdoing. But one of the great strengths of capitalism is its ability to develop efficient mechanisms to manage conflicts of interest. When a boss considers selling his firm to private equity, the check on him is particularly simple: the shareholders of his firm must approve any sale. In a few recent cases, such as a bid for CableVision, shareholders have considered the offer inadequate and blocked the sale. That is evidence, not of a brewing scandal, but of market forces at work.

Indeed. My anecdotal experience is that a good sign to hold on to one’s pocketbook firmly is when someone tells you that it is better to have fewer bidders competing to purchase something. Indeed, my sense is that a management-led, private equity-financed play for a public company is usually just as likely to spur competing offers for the company as it is an attempt to lowball the public company’s shareholders. When the folks who know the most about a company’s business show that kind of confidence in the value of the company, that sends a strong signal to the market that more value can be made. Such confidence tends to be contagious.

Institutionalized fanaticism

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signing%20day.jpgIf your friends or co-workers who follow college football closely are acting a bit stressed out today, then it’s quite likely that the source of their anxiety is a 17 or 18 year old who they have never met.
Yes, today is that day of the absurd dubbed “National Signing Day” when we are deluged with the rather odd spectacle of grown men fawning over high school football players to induce them to come take advantage of their university’s resort facilities rather than their competition’s resort facilities. And, oh yeah, if they can earn a few “tips” from well-heeled alums while enjoying those resort facilities, then that’s alright, too.
Indeed, this NY Times article already suggests that the University of Illinois’ inexplicably strong recruiting class this year may be the result of cheating. With the proliferation of the blogosphere over the past couple of years, a host of blogs follow the recruiting wars closely and often with keen wit. The following are a few of the interesting posts on this year’s recruiting season that I’ve stumbled across:

The Wizard of Odds explains why all of this competition over the quality of recruiting classes is largely meaningless;
The Sunday Morning QB examines the strange system in which all of this has evolved;
The House that Rock Built explores the ripple effect of recruiting decisions;
Every Day Should Be a Saturday reveals how recruiting foretold Rex Grossman’s mediocre Super Bowl performance (just kidding);
A widget that displays a map reflecting where a school’s recruits are coming from; and
The College Football Resource page has more information than you should ever want to know about this year’s top recruits and where they are going.

Meanwhile, as university presidents continue to dither over this fundamentally flawed system of regulating rents, this post from a couple of years ago suggests that a better system is readily available so long as the colleges forsake being the NFL’s free minor league system, a position with which Malcolm Gladwell agrees. As noted earlier here, big-time college football as presently structured is hopelessly corrupt, but it’s a pretty darn entertaining form of corruption. Adopting a structure much closer to college baseball would likely minimize the corruptive elements of college football while not affecting the entertainment value of the sport much. But it’s going to take leadership and courage from the top of the universities to promote and implement such a reform.
What are the chances of such leadership emerging? Probably about the same as Rice knocking off Texas next season in Austin.

Reflecting on the aftermath of Barbaro

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Barbaro.jpgNow that the hyperbole from the unfortunate death of Barbaro is dying down, some much-needed perspective is beginning to appear in the articles about horse racing.
In this NY Times piece, Gina Rarick compares the European style of horse training and racing, and posits that the injuries that Barbaro suffered are the inevitable result of the more extreme training regimen that thoroughbreds endure in an American racing system focused primarily on speed.
Meanwhile, this Bill Finley/NY Times article introduces us to Barbaro’s kid brother, a yet-unnamed yearling still frolicking in the fields of Kentucky. Will the young colt develop as well as his big brother? As they say in the horse-racing business, “you never know, but that’s part of the charm.”

But do they have WiFi?

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coffee_ov1_small.jpgIt was a tough day for yuppies yesterday as this Consumer Reports analysis concluded that good ol’ fashioned McDonald’s coffee was superior to Starbuck’s in taste testing. But both McDonald’s and Starbucks are going to have a hard time competing with the new coffee franchise described in this LA Times article:

On a quick break from his job as a trash hauler, Rob Chapman was in the mood for some coffee. So he pulled his truck into the Sweet Spot Cafe, a drive-through espresso stand on busy Aurora Avenue here in the Seattle suburbs.
“Do you want a Wet Dream or the Sexual Mix today, honey?” asked barista Edie Smith, dressed in a tight-fitting yellow blouse that did a less than fully effective job of covering her cleavage. She leaned down in the window, perhaps all the closer to hear his order. He chose the first option: a coffee with white chocolate, milk and caramel sauce.
It is possible, of course, that Chapman and the dozens of other drive-by customers at the parking lot stand one recent morning stopped by only for the coffee.
But, as Chapman dryly observed, “I do enjoy coming here more than Starbucks.”
In a way, it is perhaps stunning that it took so long for entrepreneurs here to figure out that coffee, the fabled Seattle obsession, mixes very well with sex, the fabled human obsession.
But apparently it does, to judge from the growing number of steamy espresso stands that have popped up around the region in the last year or so.
At the Sweet Spot here in Shoreline, the Natte Latte in Port Orchard and the Bikini Espresso in Renton, not to mention the multi-stand Cowgirls Espresso, the term “hot coffee” has clearly taken on a whole new meaning.

It’s safe to say that it’s only a matter of time before this type of coffee shop catches on in Houston.

One of the Chron’s good guys retires

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doggett.gifI don’t fish much and hunt even less, but I have enjoyed enjoyed the writing of Houston Chronicle Outdoors columnist Joe Doggett for the past 35 years. Over that time, Doggett has cogently addressed a wide variety of subjects and issues that impact hunting and fishing in a manner that made them equally interesting to the avid and casual outdoorsman alike. This past Sunday, Doggett wrote his final column for the Chronicle before heading toward a retirement for which his occupation prepared him particularly well. He will be missed.
By the way, Doggett’s last column gave me an excuse to pass along the specially-made YouTube commercial below with a hilarious hunting theme. Enjoy.