Human Interest Story For Williston Residents; US Olympic Swimmer WIth Williston Ties To Swim For Stanford; ATT To Announce Deal For DirecTV

Sent to me by a reader, this is a very, very nice story. ESPN is reporting:

Olympic champion swimmer Katie Ledecky plans to swim for Stanford after she graduates from high school next year.

The 17-year-old from Bethesda, Maryland, announced her commitment Thursday. She is a junior honors student at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in her hometown.

Ledecky will join Olympic champion Missy Franklin in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ledecky won the 800-meter freestyle as a 15-year-old at the 2012 London Olympics, where she was the youngest member of the entire U.S. team. A year later, she won four gold medals and broke two world records at the world championships in Barcelona. She was chosen the 2013 FINA world swimmer of the year.

Ledecky swims for her high school team and trains at Nation's Capital Swim Club in Washington under coach Bruce Gemmell.

Ms Ledecky is the granddaughter of Dr Ed Hagan, one of the original family practice physicians in Williston. In another time and place, he would have lived among the gods on Mt Olympus, at least in my young mind. One needs to have grown up in rural North Dakota in the 1950's to know, I suppose. Perhaps hyperbole. Perhaps not.

According to the reader who sent me the link, there is another Williston connection: Ms Franklin's coach is a grandson (and son) of Williston residents, also. I could have some of this wrong; it's hard to keep the genealogy straight. But one gets the point. A lot of reasons for Willistonites to be proud.

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For Investors Only: ATT

A year ago, back in March, 2013, I got into a discussion with my son-in-law. That discussion evolved into a stand-alone post on "the next big thing," specifically Netflix, completely unrelated to the Bakken. I didn't want to lose track of that story, and similar stories; thus, a page linked to "the big stories" was born.

This evening, I was curious how Netflix was doing. My son-in-law thought Hulu would win out over the long run over Netflix; he may be correct. But in the process I became aware of something I was previously unaware of regarding ATT: a onetime Hulu suiter, Peter Chernin, has just agreed to invest $500 million with ATT to form/start-up a new streaming network.

ATT is also in the news for another reason. Reuters is reporting:

AT&T is close to announcing that it will buy the No. 1 U.S. satellite TV operator DirecTV, according to people familiar with the matter, in the second potentially transformative deal to jolt the U.S. television industry this year. The No. 2 U.S. cellular operator, which also has some TV and broadband services, has been in active discussions to buy DirecTV for nearly $50 billion, or low to mid-$90s per share, and has been working to finalize a deal in coming weeks.

I assume the other "transformative deal" Reuters is talking about is the pending Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal. 

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read here or anything you think you may have read here.

Note: just as I completed that note on ATT above, I googled the "deal" to see where it stood. According to USA Today, it's a done deal. ATT will announce the deal Sunday. Of course, it needs government approval. This will be in the news for quite some time.