2008

The Chinese consider 8 a lucky number. I hope they're right.

My Christmas present (s)

So yeah, I’m supposed to ooze that sappy sympathetic “There but for the grace of God…” routine, but to Hell with that! These clueless amateurs should NEVER have initially opened.

Simply put, this side of the River--that would be the Connecticut-- dividing us, The People’s Republic of Amherst, from our Sister City Northampton (with Hadley stuck in the middle) can support two decent sized Health Clubs; and the other side of the Coolidge Bridge can also support two. That’s all folks. We’re not exactly Boston, The Big Apple or LA.

Thus when you have six or seven facilities on this side of the river all scavenging for half the pie, something has to give--as in DIE! A duo did this week; a duo more to go. And then, gloriously, homeostasis returns to the Happy Valley Fitness Universe.

Gold’s Gym and Planet Fitness (that has not even opened yet) are next on the Devil's shortlist.

Ultimate Fitness opened almost ten years ago targeting the same student demographic Flex Gym on University Drive lived and died by a year or two earlier.

James “Bruiser” Flint had inherited the Umass Basketball Head Coach position after Coach Cal left the building (Mullins Center), and he Pollyannaishly decided to open a Health Club while simultaneously trying to coach a nationally ranked (at times #1) basketball team. He failed, miserably, at both.

Umass basketball slid into the toilet, where they remain today, and Umass quietly benched Coach Flint (they, like the town of Amherst, hate it when a minority hire fails.) He would return once annually for the past few years to tour his albatross business (no reason really, since they have not changed a single thing) and that was the extent of his long-distance involvement.

Curious that they would surrender now. Unlike most Valley businesses January is, mainly due to New Year’s Resolutions, the peak month for the Health Club industry.

Probably a confluence of concerns: the recent ownership change at Hampshire Fitness in Amherst, the pernicious predatory pricing from Planet Fitness in Hadley and the daunting prospect of a shiny new $50 million Recreation Center at Umass (guaranteed to absorb the vast majority of students.)
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Curves was never a concern, as they only target women, thus ignoring half the market. A few years ago Curves was the #1 franchise in America with thousands of units springing up like summer weeds. Many have now wilted and died.

Aerobic circuit training is fine (we have just added a one-hour Friday class), but to limit your entire business model to a 30-minute circuit routine performed two or three times per week guarantees boredom, the #1 cause of dropout.

An exercise science study showed if women actually followed Curves recommendations (three workouts per week) they burned under 300 calories total, or one-twelfth of a pound.

American College of Sports Medicine recommendations, however, suggest moderately intense cardio 30 minutes a day, five days a week. So even if the entire Curves chain vanishes nationwide it would have zero impact on the average health of American women.

And in the Happy Valley, consumers (men and women) who patronized a dead club mostly migrate to another--thus ensuring the financial health of those hardy Health Clubs that remain.

Like the Marine Corps motto: The few. The proud!


Not sure why Dead Men Walking still do this (put up a sign suggesting they will return). Used to be local owners wanted a few days to get out of town so members who just paid for a long-term membership can't catch them, but since Flint left Amherst a long, long time ago...

Hey, at least Curves had a sense of humor with their obituary:

Un-American assassination

Kennedy observed, not two weeks before his head was ripped apart, that if an assassin really were willing to sacrifice their life to accomplish murder then the Secret Service would likely someday fail him.

But Oswald (and that guy on the grassy knoll) had no intention of giving up their life to accomplish murder most foul. Neither did John Wilkes Booth who fled Forbes Theater and made a beeline for the South. Sirhan Sirhan could easily have saved a bullet for himself and Dr. King’s assassin died from cancer after years of rotting in jail.

Only outside America do we have idiots willing to slink into a crowd and detonate themselves and everyone in the vicinity! At least the Japanese Kamikaze’s restricted their suicide strikes to military targets.

Note to terrorists: When you start murdering women or children, you lose the hearts and minds of people EVERYWHERE.

And so this was Christmas

Descending toward Bradley International airport after almost 19 hours in the air I was anxious to land…but not that anxious! Listening in on the planes communication channel plus the dramatic increase in turbulence confirmed the Nor'easter had beaten us. The air traffic controller calmly reported wind gusts of 60 mph and snow falling at rate of 10” per hour.

A brief pause…and I thought about knocking on the cockpit door and telling the pilot I had only been a dad for 72 hours, and I could use a lot more time. The pilot confirmed he was redirecting to Dulles Airport.

My sis worked for Independence Air a small, low cost airline based at Dulles (since gone bankrupt) and her spacious home was only five minutes from the airport. We spent our first Christmas as a family there in 2002 and have gone back every Christmas since.

This year we drove, as three plane tickets would have set us back $900, leaving Amherst on Christmas Eve and stopping first in New Jersey to stay overnight with Donna’s brother. His house is almost exactly the halfway point to Washington, so it broke up the travel into two manageable legs.
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The Air and Space Museum located at Dulles Airport, like many attractions in DC is government owned and operated, meaning We The People are shareholders and as a result there’s no admission charge.

The modern building is really just a giant hanger with one monstrous door that opens to the outside so airplanes could enter fully assembled. My sis said that the entire airport practically came to a standstill a few years back when the last remaining Concord flew in and took up permanent residence.


Gazing on the Enola Gay, a B-29 that delivered the first atomic bomb, it’s easy to imagine why we won the war. And the Space Shuttle Enterprise demonstrates our industrial, technological edge continues fifty years later.


We left DC for home on Thursday stopping in Manhattan to break up the drive. Dinner at an Italian Restaurant in the heart of Little Italy.
then a dessert from a bakery in nearby Chinatown. Donna has been taking Chinese lessons for a while now and managed to understand when the two women who waited on her called Kira “beautiful”.


We zig zagged around Times Square taking in the light show but police were everywhere keeping traffic moving and blocking off Rockefeller Center to autos.
Now the tallest manmade object in the Big Apple, the Empire State Building stands like a proud beacon...


Left the City at 7:00 pm and pulled into Amherst at 9:30 pm.

Coal in their stocking too.

So the crusty Gazette, not know for showing bravado, waited till today to take on the Town Manager’s terrible Christmas tree tax debacle, knowing perhaps passions would subside after Christmas.

While acknowledging his timing was terrible the Gazette still lauded the idea of a public policy for the use of Kendrick Park. Considering the Gazette published a front page banner headline story about an Umass professor calling 9/11 an inside job on the morning of that awful anniversary they should know about lousy timing.

Of course there should be a public policy—with equal access for all—to our parks and town common. That could have been easily crafted without the idiotic $1 dollar per tree tax on the Christmas spirit.

Let’s hope the Town Manager discovers some common sense in the New Year (and the Gazette develops some chutzpah).

Yes Kira, there is indeed.

And then there were none...

While the Boy Scouts Christmas trees may have sold out a day or two early from all the publicity, in the end nobody wins. All the extra money kindly donated will maybe make up for the loss of 100 trees not harvested and sold due to last week's storm.

And the Town Manager has squandered credibility and political capital the way President Bush sacrificed 9/11 world sympathy by declaring war on Saddam Hussein.