The Empire Builder -- An Update -- Novmeber 12, 2017

From Zacks, two days ago:

EQT receives shareholders' approval for Rice Energy buyout. 

See this post for background information.

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Watching The Royal Tea Leaves

From The [London] Telegraph News: Remembrance Sunday: Queen watches Whitehall service from balcony for first time as Prince Charles (her son, not her grandson) lays her wreath.

We'll Meet Again, Vera Lynn

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Watching The Tesla Tea Leaves

From MarketWatch, Tesla's junk bonds are trading under water and it could spell trouble for Elon Musk. 

Tesla Inc. first-ever pure corporate bonds are trading under water, boding ill for the Silicon Valley car maker’s next attempt to tap capital markets.

The 5.300% notes, which mature in 2025, were trading at 93.81 cents on the dollar on Friday to yield 6.320%. The bonds fell under par within a week of issuance, but were holding above 97 cents for much of October. [The size of this bond issue: $1.8 billion.]

The weak performance of the bonds may be a sign that bond investors, at least, are starting to disbelieve Tesla’s growth story and will be looking for higher premiums to take on higher risk.

If Tesla is delivering 5,000 cars/month (all models; S,3, and X) that works out to about $1,500/car in annual interest payments on these 5.3% notes.

Disclaimer: my usual disclaimer about my arithmetic skills applies.

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The Ugly Americans

UCLA and Georgia Tech played an exhibition basketball game in Hangzhou, China, last week.

Three UCLA players must not have received the memo. They were arrested for shoplifting in the hotel's gift shop and were detained by authorities while the rest of the team flew home. 

I guess you can take the boys out of the 'hood, but you can't take the 'hood out of the boys. Wow. I guess this is how you show your coach and your team some respect.

In their defense, one would assume this is the Marxist way of thinking. Fifty percent of millennials probably see nothing wrong in this. My hunch: they will be "kneelers" when they "grow up."

According to at least one report: they could be held in China for "several weeks." This would have happened at the time/around the time President Trump was visiting China.

From KTLA-TV:

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Light Rail Killing LA's Mass Transit 

As long as we're in la-la land, one more story. From The Los Angeles Times:

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s ridership has been falling steadily since 2014, losing on average 69,000 daily riders each month. The most recent 12 months of data show a decrease of more than 10% compared with the same period three years ago, and Metro’s current “annual boardings” — just under 400 million — represent a drop of almost 20% from the system’s 1985 peak, even though the county’s population has increased by nearly a fifth since then.

In 1986, Metro ended the fare subsidy and shifted the funds to building rail lines, beginning with the Long Beach Blue Line, which opened in 1990.

Total transit ridership proceeded to fall until the NAACP, the Bus Riders’ Union and others took Metro to federal court to protect bus service in 1994. Their argument was that the expansion of rail was coming at the expense of bus routes, bus frequency and bus riders, and it was disproportionately harming minorities, the elderly and the young. Metro settled, and the deal was enshrined in a 10-year consent decree starting in 1996.

The settlement allowed Metro to build all the rail it could afford, so long as specific bus service improvements were made too. Those improvements included reducing fares, increasing service on existing lines, establishing new lines, replacing old buses and keeping the fleet clean. Lo and behold, while the decree was in force L.A.’s transit ridership rose by 36%.

When Metro was no longer bound by the settlement, it refocused its efforts almost exclusively on new rail projects. The quality of bus service began declining in almost every way measurable, and overall ridership again fell.

By the way, the writer at the Coyote blog said the same thing happened in Phoenix; he's been writing about the Phoenix debacle for years.

I guess one could say, "no mas transito, menos transito."

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The Literary Page

From: A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Solors, c. 2009, p. 456, an essay by Gerald Early, on L. Frank Baum and the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Baum was by no means an inexperienced author when he began his career as a children's writer in the 1890s. At the age of twenty-three, he started The Poultry Record, a monthly trade journal abut the breeding of fancy chickens. (He had a lifelong interest in the subject of prize poultry.) Most of it was cribbed from other journals, but he wrote editorials and jokes.

In South Dakota, Baum started a newspaper in 1890 called the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, for which he wrote editorials and a column entitled "Our Landlady." He lost the paper to bankruptcy in 1891 and moved to Chicago.

A few years later, in 1897, Baum started a monthly journal called The Shop Window: A Journal of Practical Window Trimming for the Merchant and the Professional.

While running a store, Baum's Bazaar, in South Dakota, Baum had become adept at creating attractive window displays, so he chose to exploit this skill in his new publication. The idea of seducing the eye, which is so emphasized in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with the emerald-colored glasses and the theatrical tricks of the Wizard, probably has its roots in Baum's work of window dressing.

He gave up publishing the magzine in 1900, when his career as a children's writer began to take off.

In May, 1900, advance copies of the Hill Company's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz -- text by L. Frank Baum and illustrations by W. W. Denslow -- began to circulate among reviewers.

And the rest if history. 

As a fictional location, Oz is better known than Mark Twain's St Petersburg and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. (The only fantasy place comparable in familiarity may be Disneyland.)