There are many reasons why new year’s resolutions don’t stick. The one that seems to be the most compelling though, is their utility to us.
Is what we are setting ourselves to accomplish worth the time and effort we’ll put into it? Is the end result something we will like having or that we might really need?
Resolutions can’t be pulled out of a hat, willy-nilly at the last second. Good luck with yours, if you decide to set one up!
Traditionally, debriefing is an information-sharing and event-processing session conducted as a conversation between peers, in which group members become informants to each other about a situation or event that occurred to them as a group.
Recently, I was thinking, why not conduct the same session at the end of each day, as a personal exercise of introspection, critique, pat on the back and learning. 
That would revolve around an actual response and a summary of feelings about our daily plans and what was forced upon us by events that occurred during the course of that same day and the manners we handled them.
This, in my view, should be a great way of learning, remembering and improving one’s life, while counteracting a daily routine that keeps us into a static rut and precludes a continued and desirable personal growth.
Something I intend to explore in the near future and might even make my upcoming new year’s resolution...
I don’t know about your family, but mine as a special way with its members’ birth years. Look at the table and you’ll understand. Is that pure coincidence, serendipity or conspiracy theory?
I’d say the former, but it is simply amusing. What’s even more amazing is that the spacing always is multiple of 10.
What about yours?
This holiday season, I ski everyday with my daughter and my grandson.
To put it simply, in spite of skiing mostly on man-made snow and very limited terrain, we’re three crazy speed demons dodging other skiers and having lots of fun, even though our ages almost span a human lifetime: 12, 38 and 72 respectively!
That’s my quandary, as I’m supposed to be the pacesetter and the law-and-order element of that gang, but it’s so fun to be having so much fun in a three-generation ski outing!
It took me about almost seven decades to find out which way I should put my T-shirt in the appropriate direction.
In the past, I always relied on the tag stitched by the collar, but since shirts companies have been trying to save all the money they could, many of these are now imprinted and depending on the shirt color, barely legible if at all.
That’s about the time when I providentially discovered the presence of an inside tag on my T-shirts located on the left seam, that was meant to let me know for sure that my shirt was on the proper side of my body and, in the process, changed my humble daily life forever!
Ever since I can remember, I have received plenty of Christmas presents, except perhaps when I was a child when what I got was limited to an orange and some candies. My godparents, who owned a grocery store, once gave me a toy airplane that I really cherished…
The rest of the time, Christmas presents were objects that my wife and I purchased together, killing any element of surprise as we opened the package on Christmas Day. It was until this very Christmas Eve, when my daughter-in-law found for me a brand-new looking, used book about planning and architecture of French ski resorts.
The authors show how planners and architects addressed their real estate developments with solutions specific to each location. For each place, the book covers a time span ranging from the conception to the birth and the completion of these destination resorts, detailing multi-family to single family dwellings and common areas, plus including original drafts and an impressive array of interior photographs.
I’ve already began to read it and can’t wait to dig further into it!
In the late fifties, a French college professor who had bought a rustic chalet in my mountain hamlet used to come from the big city to spend three month into the fresh, Alpine air.
He and his wife had five daughters, and the seven of them would pile up inside a Renault Frégate, the largest French-made sedan at the time.
There was a little boy who might have been 6 or 7, that was attracted by the large automobile. In particular, it was its bulging chrome hubcaps that exerted a magnetic attraction for him.
Once he kicked one of them with his rugged mountain shoes and observed that it made a pretty big dent into the hemispheric shape of the wheel cover. His victory over seemingly hard-metal encouraged him to continue and to add dents to the first wheel and soon to the three other remaining ones.
He never got caught by the professor and I don’t know how the man reacted when he realized the extent of the vandalism. To this very day, I never could understand what happened in that little boy’s head to make him act in that manner.
Did he discover his unknown power in stamping metal or was it merely a matter of making his mark on things? Did he see breasts in the anatomically shaped hubcap?
I don’t think we’ll never ever know...
Before we get into the list that’s inside the bucket, it’s only fair to remember the origin of that expression. It was coined by the 2007 movie “The Bucket List” featuring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, playing two terminally ill men on their road trip with a wish list of things to do before they’d "kick the bucket".
This said, I don’t often consider what’s left, or should remain in my bucket list and I need to think hard to fill it with a bunch of wishes that could occupy my available time-space between now and my earthly departure.
As you can see, my bucket is pretty full and I better get going...
During our morning walk, we literally ran into an ermine (aka stoat, or Mustela erminea ) that was stealthy crossing our pass with its all-white call except for the black tip of its tail.
According to Wikipedia, the white winter fur is very dense and silky, but quite closely lying and short, while the summer fur is rougher, shorter and sparse. In summer, the fur is sandy-brown on the back and head and a white below.
The stoat moults or sheds twice a year. In spring, the shedding is slow, starting from the forehead, across the back, toward the belly. In autumn, the process is quicker, progressing in reverse order. The change in coat color, initiated by seasonal change in daylight, starts earlier in autumn and later in spring, at higher latitudes.
In northern or snowy habitat, like Park City, it adopts a completely white coat (except for its characteristic black tail-tip) during winter which provides them with the perfect camouflage!
Many people who have gone to support Trump are finding democracy too complicated or too high-maintenance, and would prefer an authoritarian system unencumbered by choices. A one-size fits all society, if you prefer.
It’s true that democracy is a large tent that must make room for a wide variety of differences in people and for their great variety of aspirations and needs. All these complex issues are being fed into political and governmental systems that seem no longer able to process and digest all the multiple, diverse and complex requirements brought by today’s overpopulated and diverse society.
Social grievances might also bear some of the blame with traditions like religion, sexuality, family life and more, that are being challenged. At the same time, massive immigration, especially in the US and Europe, and the mobilization of oppressed minority groups have disrupted the existing social order, leaving some citizens angry and resentful.
All these elements often grind the process of governing to an exasperating halt. This is what has created a fertile terrain for nationalist and fascist ideas brought forth by the Trumps of the world, advocating for easy, simple and naive solutions against highly complex problems. Their leadership also means far less choices and options available compared to what’s offered under a more diverse, difficult and complex democratic society.
The choice is therefore simple: Democracy is a complicated luxury while tyranny is a simple tool and a seemingly happy prison.
I haven’t heard much from yesterday’s blog in terms of comments made about it. What is clear to me though, is that some countries are absolutely terrible compared to others.
Still in that category, I would somehow “excuse” countries like Mexico, Chile and Columbia, while “scolding” countries like the United Kingdom, the United States and France, as the latest is often given as an example for its exemplary healthcare system.
As for Belgium, it might be an aberration that someone will be able to explain some day. With two insane individuals at the head of the UK and the USA, such terrible results shouldn’t totally come as a surprise, but it’s fair to say that Mr Trump is clearly responsible for at least 100,000 death, because of his attitude, absence of action and lack of interest for fighting the pandemic.
The next mediocre category could be the 40 to 80 deaths per 100,000 people. In it, they could have done better, but were probably ill-prepared to fight Covid-19.
A more acceptable category, would fall between the 10 and 40 deaths category and would include Canada as well as Germany among others.
Places that the US and the entire EC could have emulated to perfection.
This, clearly is where our next Pandemic Best Practices ought to be coming from...
They’re not poor nations by any mean, on the contrary, its members and key partners represent 80% of the overall world trade and investment.
The goal of the OECD is to promote the economic welfare of its members. It also coordinates their efforts to aid developing countries outside of its membership.
Now, with this in mind, let’s see how each one of these 37 countries “performed” in terms of containing death from Covid-19, per capita.
With very few exceptions, these are country we should trust in terms of reporting their numbers and the open question addressed to my readers, is why we can observe such a (criminal) disparity.
Your comments are welcome!
Recently, I heard on the radio that Napoleon was “another dictator” and chuckled a bit, because, deep inside, I knew that there was some truth to this, but through my schooling in France, the one-time Emperor was mostly portrayed as a great general, statesman and even a hero.
Rather than to help ensure the development of France as a free republic, Napoleon decided that France and all of Europe needed a strong leader to run the continent. Napoleon also got interested in the French legal system of France, because he felt that a centralized judiciary would allow him to strengthen his regime and prevent political threats.
The same could be said of his instituting 18,000 gendarmes reporting daily to Fouché and his control of the media that repressed free speech and expression, becoming the government’s mouthpiece for all official propaganda.
Sure, Napoleon might have not been as bad as Hitler or Stalin but he sure had power and was determined to keep it. In the waning days of the Trump would-be dictatorship, it’s worth remembering that dictators come in all kinds of flavors and strengths.
Perhaps, Napoleon might have been a "light" version, but in my view, was nonetheless part of that nefarious club!
It took a very, very long time for Mitch McConnell to reluctantly admit that Trump had lost and Biden won the election. The same goes for the vast majority of the GOP members.
As we all know the mascot chosen by the American GOP or Republican Party, is an elephant. I propose that it be replaced by a scorpion. My thinking is triggered by that famous fable attributed to Aesop, known as the scorpion and the frog; it goes like this:
"A scorpion asks a frog to carry him over a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion argues that if it did so, both would sink and the scorpion would drown. The frog then agrees, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When asked why, the scorpion points out that this is its nature."
Something Biden should always remember during the next four years!
If anything else, this pandemic is a unique common element that humans can share from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. If most countries had more good judgment, they should have leveraged that commonality of circumstances as well as knowledge, and extracted the best possible practices.
They haven’t and this has led to the disparity we’re still witnessing in terms of death per capita for each country.
On the other hand, that global crisis has launched a planetary race in order to find vaccines that could address that modern plague, and the speed at which the first ones have been developed is a positive benefit and a testimony to what works with globalism.
Quite possibly; at least the process has been initiated and as the Novel Coronavirus is clearly behind the fall of Trump, our nationalist, apprentice-dictator, it’s also not helping Boris Johnson’s cause, nor is it advancing that of both Andrzej Duda in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary!
For a long time, I’ve been wondering when and how Robert Redford, who is now 84 will organize his succession and was told last year that his children would probably take over the management of his iconic ski resort.
Well, since December 14, this has changed, as we’ve learned that Robert Redford is selling Sundance, his ski and mountain resort close to Park City, to a real estate investment group specializing in the hospitality industry.
Global warming and the required large investment to keep going probably played a big role with that decision. The transaction includes all the resort buildings, ski lifts, on-site dining venues, and event spaces.
Today, the resort offers 450 acres of skiable terrain spread across 44 trails, 2,150 feet of vertical served by five lifts, a year-round ZipTour, summer mountain biking, and hiking. Redford bought the small Timp Haven ski area in 1969.
The buyer, Broadreach and Cedar, said it would improve the ski experience, try to increase the resort bed base, and continue the development of creative and cultural activities. The sale does not affect the Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Catalog, Sundance TV, or the Redford Center.
Back in 2002, I began creating our own Holiday Cards (see picture) and continued until 2011 when I replace that medium with a video message.
Not counting the time I spend emailing the two-minute clip, it takes me from 24 to 36 hours to produce it. Sure, I get better with time, but I still don’t know if I’ll have the stamina to keep on churning out that annual project forever…
Should I use my time on more productive endeavors?
Recently, Rob Katz, the CEO of Vail Resorts, acknowledged some of the problems I had mentioned to him and to the Park City Mountain, General Manager, Mike Goar. His response, while recognizing a less than stellar performance from Vail’s customer service department, seemed to ignore the larger problem plaguing your reservation system.
More about this one later, but suffice to say that I tested the “improvements” made today to the company phone and chat services and was force to see that the Chat room didn’t operate at all and that it took me 62 minutes to get a response.
Without getting into the details, it requires a lot of time to manage and keep straight, and this is why I’m imploring Vail that, to avoid creating an impossible situation when the high season comes around, it get rid of that system of reservation.
It doesn’t exist in nearby Deer Valley and things work perfectly fine. Long lines? People can work around these by picking both the time they come out to ski and the order of lifts and the area they’ll go to. This is a foolish pursuit and it must be abandoned!
As I was searching for information about some older Salomon products, I stumbled upon a book written by a former Salomon’s manager, namely Walter Zibung, former Swiss subsidiary director for the French ski company.
A page-turner written with wit and some reasonable exaggerations, that autobiography uncannily mirrors my own career path, indirectly pays homage to Georges Salomon, the genius entrepreneur that, with his dad François, built Salomon to the number ski company in the world.
It shows that the late leader was chuck-full of common sense, knew how to pick the right associates as well as observe intensely and listen extremely well to the market.
It also shows that the company successive take-overs, beginning with Adidas, was the poison pill that killed the culture and the creative juice that ran through that company.
It’s also a reminder to all of us who were privileged to work in the ski industry as much as we did, that we're indeed a very lucky bunch…
Whenever I speak to my French friends, and ask them about vaccination in general, I sense a general lack of appetite for this type of protection.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone, in 2018, a survey by Wellcome, a British medical charity, and conducted by Gallup, showed that France has the lowest levels of trust in vaccines globally.
The vast majority of my friends don’t get the annual flu vaccine, many don’t ever renew their Tetanus shots and are convinced the all is well. So, don’t even try to tell them about getting the Covid-19 vaccine;
I guess they’d rather die.
Pretty amazing!
A friend of mine sent me a video of what appeared to be an old newsreel, allegedly from February29, 1956, titled “Avoiding the future plague”. The piece looked pretty authentic and was predicting the future between then and now, to a tee, including the advent of Covid-19.
My sender is a serious, well rounded and educated individual who didn’t see the pure fabrication, and skilled editing behind that clip. Always a bit skeptical, I did some research and found that footage on YouTube (see below) which gave away the scheme and confessed it had been made up as a prank with archival and public domain footage acquired from Archive.org.
Too bad that the author didn’t label his piece as a humor piece, because, I’m pretty certain that many folks my age might have taken that piece of vintage news to the bank. Ten years ago, I remember being “had” on Facebook with a video showing a single engine plane landing with one wing torn off and this taught me a good lesson in critical thinking in a world of social media and fake news.
This is one more heads-up for all of us that the internet is fraught with poisonous information and that nothing should ever taken for granted. Always be wary!
As the ski season moves on, Vail Resorts’ approach to maximizing lift capacity is evolving.
At first, on a six passengers chair, the options seemed very limited with half the normal load on average.
Today, however, while three perfect strangers can only ride three on such a large chairlift, we can also have multiple combinations, like two households of two, sitting on either extremities.
Also, one stranger and one household of four as well as a household of two and one of three, leaving only one free space, or one household of two and two perfect stranger leaving on free space in each interval.
That’s not too bad and make more sense than the early combinations I had heard of, but still a bit complicated for most skiers to grasp and use effectively in a fluid and fast lift-line environment...
I wish I were the fly that landed and stayed for two minutes and three seconds on Mike Pence’s perfectly manicured hair, during the Vice-President debate, last October.
Unless Trump dies from a heart-attack, of natural causes, resigns to get Pence grant him a preemptive pardon, or got forbid, get assassinated by the Iranian who are pissed off at him, his chances of presidency are dwindling fast.
He should console himself that, while he was seen as a robotic, uncharismatic and dull VP, he was picked as a prized landing spot by a rare Nevada fly and got quite lasting fame and recognition out of it!
Park City doesn’t have an airport, because it doesn’t need one. With Salt Lake City airport 35 miles away and Heber City’s just within 20 miles, that’s plenty to land a plane. Except of course when you’re flying a small passenger plane, that oil pressure drop to zero and that the only engine one has stops.
This past Saturday, night had just fallen when Jackson Walker who was flying from Idaho Falls to Provo had no choice but land and made a safe landing with no damage to the aircraft or injuries to him and his passenger.
Before that, Walker said he tried to re-start the engine on several occasions, but to no avail, so, he stayed over I-80 hoping to make it to the Heber City airport, but that didn’t work and he had to land on the freeway, near the Park City exit.
The pilot, who had got his license in June flashed his landing lights to alert oncoming cars he was be landing on the freeway. A nearby driver, who happened to also be a pilot, noticed the plane coming down and alerted cars so they could slow down.
Inside the plane, the pilot saw the maneuver and started swerving to slow down traffic to create more room, trying to maintain the same speed as traffic until he could bring the plane to a stop.
What I conveniently forget to add is that it takes energy to compress the air that blow the mixture up into the air, and in Park City, our electrical power is still mostly made of fossil fuels that spew CO2 in the air...
Recently, I was watching a video interview between Jean-Marie Peyrin, a former buddy of mine at the Cluses School of Watchmaking by Kristin Marion for a local radio station, near Annecy, France.
Kristin started singing jazz at the age of 26, and has trained in jazz vocal and has participated in many workshops in schools and with jazz musicians. She completed her voice training in the US with online sessions at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Since August 2014 she has been the official Jazz Education Network representative in France.
In this informative and captivating exchange, Jean-Marie explains to us how he managed to merge Jazz and Watchmaking and retains an intense passion for both fields which don’t seem to have much in common.
I was also very impressed by the depth of knowledge of my former classmate and air force buddy (yes, we both served together in Salon de Provence, the equivalent of Colorado Springs Air Force Academy!) He knows his stuff and it shows.
Although the exchange lasts 38 minutes, if you understand French, I recommend that you invest some of your free-time to watch it!
Near my hometown in the French Alps is the ski town of Châtel, that sits next door to another one in Switzerland, called Morgins. Both are part of one of the largest Alpine ski interconnect known as “Portes du Soleil”.
Nicolas Rubin is Châtel’s mayor and a maverick of sorts. He is now challenging French President Macron’s edict to keep ski resorts shut down till sometime in January, if signs of a tapering off Covid-19 are materializing. He can’t understand that his Swiss neighbor Morgins, can stay open while he has to keep his community out of business.
To borrow a page from Trump’s bold playbook, Rubin might try to annex Switzerland like the US wanted to do the same with Greenland, and the embattled mayor should also build a wall west of Châtel and have Macron pay for it!
Of course, to add insult to injury, Macron now wants to punish French skiers who’d dare ski abroad, like in Switzerland, by imposing a quarantine upon their return from their ski holiday. This has prompted the French ski area association to sue the government.
To be continued...
While Donald Trump probably believes that he should pardon himself, including his own family, cronies and friend as a preemptive measure to shelter him from the deluge of legal actions waiting as soon as he exits the White House, I have myself wondering if I shouldn’t ask him for a preemptive pardon too.
I don’t intend to rob a bank, nor to commit any major crime, but I would love to do one simple thing while I’m alive. If and when I get that Tesla that has been in on my wish-list for a while, I intend to test it on Interstate 80, and particularly climbing the 6% grade preceding Parley Summit to see if I can get any close to the 155 mph announced for the model I covet.
That pardon would embolden me to try it as it would guarantee me some modicum of protection in case a Utah Highway Patrol car happens to be around and considering that we're in a 65 mph zone…
I’ve already been skiing a few times this season and have not really felt the threat of Covid-19 contamination, but again, how can we say that we “feel” that?
While the distancing in ski lines is a bit “elastic”, it is what it is, as long as I’m protected by an all-encompassing balaclava plus my goggles. When I’m riding the lifts (two or three strangers respectively together in the same quad, gondola, or six-pack) and when I ski down the hill, I experience the total freedom inherent with our sport.
In summary, skiing is apparently less risky than going shopping or flying three passengers sitting in a triple row. So why is the French government (prodded by Germany’s) keeping their ski lifts shut down till January 2021? This hardly seems justifiable, or am I missing something?
Of course I’m not talking about piling up people inside tiny accommodations and controlling wild après-ski parties. This is the objective danger that nations should be concerned about and ready to control and clamp down on any abuse.
I don’t about you, but I no longer sleep as tight as I used to, and this is simply because, as I age, my sleep has become much more lighter and my many dreams can be so vivid that they keep on waking me up.
This is when I return to my old, proven method for falling asleep that I developed over years of extensive international travels when planes used to be pretty empty.
What I do is quite simple: I mentally picture the vacant center row seats in the economy section of a wide body airplane, and I see and feel myself laying there comfortably, stretching as much as can and falling deeply asleep in spite of the roaring engine noise.
November is a transitional month that begins just after Halloween and ends after Thanksgiving. For us it’s usually marked with some natural snowfalls in various quantities and that’s when ski resorts open and start making artificial snow in earnest.
We also have elections and this year was a big one. Up until now, and for the past four years, time has slowed down to a crawl as we were under the thumb of Dictator Trump.
But now, with Trump leaving us soon and vaccines arriving to the rescue, fast times are back, so hang on to your seats and don’t wonder why November went in a flash!
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