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As you might expect, the house and the ball field are pretty much exactly as they appeared in the movie with the notable exception of there being no corn in the cornfield at this time of the year. What we thought was more interesting than the movie set was the surrounding area where 40+ acre farms (with similar white houses and red barns) go on and on and on, this being one of thousands of similar properties in the state.

It was a fascinating trip in many ways and the “end of an era’” as well since one of the main reasons we made the journey was to visit relatives who are now racing the clock to get everything squared away before the moving vans show up in a couple weeks to take them to Arkansas after having lived in Las Vegas for more than 20 years.

They managed to sell their house in North Las Vegas at about the same price they paid back in the late-1980s, a 2012 housing success story if ever there was one for one of the nation’s worst housing markets.

Since they’ll no longer be there, we have even less of a reason to go back there which is why it seems unlikely that we’ll ever visit the place again. If we ever return to Southern California, we’ll likely pass through, but I’m guessing that we’ll never spend the night there again or walk the streets and take in the sights.

Despite the opulence of places like the Venetian, Wynn, and Palazzo, the area had an even greater underlying sense of despair and an obviously growing divide between the rich and the poor that make it all a little depressing to take in – kind of like the troubled relative who shows up at a family gathering with a nice car and a nice, tidy appearance when you know from hearing the family talk about him that the guy’s life is a mess.

From the outside, things appear just fine, but beneath the shiny veneer, it’s a different story.

We stayed at Treasure Island since they had a great deal on rooms at mid-week and it’s right in the middle of the strip with great views.

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Like the airlines and just about every other hotel in Las Vegas, after you get the super-low rate, you get nickeled and dimed for everything and I’d have to imagine that there are many, many people in the hotel and gaming industry whose sole job it is to figure out new and ever more ingenious ways to separate people from their money.

Since, aside from maybe a total of an hour over three days in front of a video black jack machine, we don’t gamble, making money on the two of us is especially difficult, however, they certainly did try and that’s one of the things that makes the place increasingly less fun to visit as we get older – this sense of desperation about getting your money.

Now, a lot of this view of things is shaped by the fact that we’re on the other side of 50 right now, no longer approaching a visit to Sin City with the wild-eyed enthusiasm (and looser wallets) of 20-somethings that continue to be drawn to the place simply because it would appear that anything is possible.

Clearly, we’re getting too old for this stuff and, now living in the wide-open spaces of Montana, we have much less tolerance for being in close proximity to the masses, so, the whole place had a different feel to it after not having been there in four years.

As always, people-watching was half the fun of the trip and, My God!, we’re a fat nation.

From kids to teenagers to young adults to the middle-aged to senior citizens, everyone seems to be carrying around an extra 10, 20, 30 pounds or more. Based on the obesity data I’ve seen, it’s even worse in other parts of the country, but, it was again striking that so many people have become so fat.

I didn’t set out to capture any of these folks on film (and really didn’t take many pictures on the trip at all), but even the photo below of the Fashion Mall happened to include a few people early in the morning who could clearly drop a few pounds.

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We were reminded that a lot of people in this world still like to smoke and that the practice will likely never be outlawed in Las Vegas casinos since people with addictive behaviors make great casino patrons. As I said, we didn’t gamble much, but wherever we did stop for a few minutes, there always seemed to be an elderly chain-smoker within an unacceptable proximity.

As we’re early risers, we saw the usual all-night poker games going on at 7AM and it brought to mind the brief conversation I had with the guy who sold us our house here in Montana (a short sale where they were underwater well into six figures) where a career as a professional gambler was seen as an appealing choice since nothing else seemed to be working.

The population of the Greater Las Vegas area has clearly changed since we visited there frequently in the 1990s. The thump-thump-thump sound of a car pulling up next to you at a stoplight was something that brought back memories of Southern California and provides another reminder of how powerful a force demographics is. Just watching the school kids cross the street about a mile or two from the strip tells you a lot about how the population is changing.

With unemployment as high as it is in Las Vegas, I imagine the place is no longer seen as a salvation for those in Los Angeles seeking greener pastures and maybe a better option for raising a family.

Pete Rose was in a Caesar’s Palace sports-memorabilia shop signing autographs and, after spotting the sign announcing his appearance, I just poked my head around the corner to have a look. He was sitting at a table waiting for someone to approach, no doubt willing to sign an autograph, pose for a picture, or do just about anything else for the right price. Our eyes briefly met, as if we were both trying to determine if we knew each other, and then I ducked back out of view.

It was kind of weird, especially since my parents have been big baseball fans all their life and were affected more than most from Rose’s fall from grace over the years.

There were lots of other interesting things to do and people to watch – one thing about Vegas that is really nice is that you can just walk and walk and walk and just take it all in, making a whole day of it on the strip – but, the biggest thing that kept popping back into my head was that signs of growing inequality were everywhere.

This was most evident after we left Pete Rose at Caesars and crossed the street where, prior to getting back to the Venetian, the Palazzo, and the Wynn hotels, you go through the seedier Margaritaville area where you can almost smell the despair.

Of all the observations that were made during our trip, this was probably the most profound one – the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer – and it’s all on display on the Las Vegas strip.

Now, we had never been inside the Wynn or the Palazzo before and, along with the bridge near Hoover dam, those were some of the things we looked forward to seeing, but, the spotless floors and windows, the fake grass out front, the gaudiness of it all inside, and the sheer ridiculousness of the things they were selling in all those stores just kind of hit me.

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Everything is nice to look at, but it’s just striking how you can go from opulence to despair just by walking a couple hundred yards.

There must be enough wealthy people visiting Las Vegas who think nothing of buying $500 handbags to keep all these shops afloat and, as you watch the middle-aged Hispanic lady spraying a little Windex on some shop window at 7:30 A.M., hours before they open, you then think of fashionable 20-something hourly workers who will show up at 10 A.M. to open up shop, and then to the wealthy patrons that might stop in… and you realize this is a microcosm of our economy  and our society today.

Fewer people have the option of following in their parents footsteps with a middle-class factory job. Instead, they take what they can get in support of the spending habits of those who have money. This goes on to different degrees in other parts of the country, but, it just jumps right out at you when you visit Las Vegas.

I can’t imagine what the place will be like in another 5, 10, or 20 years and I don’t think I want to find out.

From the Nate Beeler archive at the Washington Times.

It’s been a few weeks since the last look at the Bozeman police blotter and, with the weather being unusually warm for this time of the year (although we got about four inches of snow last night that should last about a day – go figure!), there are indeed some interesting items to report, highlighted by the very first entry below.

This should serve as a warning to all alcohol impaired drivers that, if you’re going to pass out behind the wheel, try not to have your vehicle moving in the direction of a police car. Also, in the event that others don’t know what “huffing Dust Off” is in the two items about half-way down, Veronica Rohrmoser explains in this video.

• A man was passed out in the driver’s seat of his vehicle on North 19th Avenue at 1:55 a.m. The vehicle rolled into a city patrol car. The man was arrested for aggravated driving under the influence.
• A woman asked deputies to check on her husband. He was supposed to pick her up from the airport two hours earlier, but he didn’t show. She couldn’t reach him on his cellphone. When deputies arrived at his house, he had just woken up and realized he was late to pick her up.
• A woman was driving around a subdivision very slowly, stopping and looking at every home. The driver was also stopping and looking at young kids on their bikes.
• A man was found passed out in Catherine Lane Interiors under some sheets the store had on the floor.
• A caller reported seeing a driver on a cellphone. The caller was also on a cellphone.

• A person reported that four horses on Dawn Drive are fed only once every few days and are “knee deep in manure.”
• Ten miniature horses were left on a Bolinger Road property by the previous owners. The new owners wanted to know what to do with them.
• A caller reported an injured whitetail doe. The caller said the deer had a leg injury. The caller was advised to leave the deer alone and that “many deer live successfully on three legs.”
• A 38-year-old Bozeman man was arrested after he was seen huffing Dust Off in a North Seventh Avenue grocery store around 1:45 p.m.
• Another Bozeman man, 37, was arrested for criminal trespass and other charges after he was reportedly huffing Dust Off outside Walmart around 3:45 p.m.
• A landowner accidently burned down a barn during a permitted burn on Blackwood Road around 6 a.m.
• A pet carrier was in the road on Interstate 90 near mile marker 316 around 9:45 a.m. No word whether an animal was inside.
• A woman believes her landlord is videotaping her.
• A woman’s prescription medication was stolen from her house. She believes her son’s friends took it.
• A man has been riding his motorcycle down South 10th Avenue, speeding and doing wheelies. This is an ongoing issue.
• Officers who responded to a reported assault in progress found that the person who reported the assault had left and turned out to be the person who started the fight.
• Two horses were reported as looking like “skin and bones.”
• A man had concerns “regarding his thermostat not holding the correct temperature.”
• A resident of Mockingbird Road reported that bullets were ricocheting toward the person’s home around 10:15 a.m. Someone was shooting gophers nearby.
• Someone threw a bicycle through a Stubble Lane Road home’s front door.
• A caller, who reported a drunken driver on Huffine Lane around 6:45 p.m., said he knew the occupants were drunk because he’d seen “them at the golf course and they were obnoxious and drunk.”
• A person had questions about shooting gophers with pellet guns.
• A mom called with questions about her juvenile son getting alcohol while at a neighbor’s house. It was revealed that several juveniles got alcohol at the neighbor’s house with the adult’s knowledge. The neighbor apologized.
• A man told police someone has been hitting golf balls toward his Churchill Road property and leaving them scattered around his livestock and barn.
• A caller reported that a former friend had posted a listing on Craigslist about someone looking for sex that included the caller’s number.

GLASGOW, Mont. – Drug crimes in eastern Montana have more than doubled. Assaults in Dickinson, N.D., have increased fivefold in just two years. And the once-sleepy town of Plentywood, Mont., has seen three assaults with weapons in the past few months – a prospect previously unheard of in the tiny community tucked against the Canada border.

Booming oil production has brought tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenues to communities across a wide expanse of the northern Plains. But it also has brought more crime, forcing law enforcement from the U.S. and Canada to deal with spiking offenses ranging from drug trafficking and gun crimes to prostitution.

The region is emerging as one of the top oil-producing areas of North America. Officials say up to 30,000 more workers could descend on the Bakken oil fields of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan in the next few years.

The recent kidnapping and brutal murder of Montana teacher Sherry Arnold tragically underscored the changes brought on by the rapid pace of drilling. Two men are in custody, but the case has left residents shaken and led to a huge rise in applications to carry concealed weapons in Montana and North Dakota.

In the wake of Arnold’s killing in the town of Sidney, which is quickly being overtaken by the boom, federal prosecutors began a two-day retreat Monday in Glasgow for about 150 police officers, sheriffs, federal agents and other law enforcement to craft a common strategy to deal with rising crime.

Towns like Plentywood, population 1,600, were until recently places “you could send your kids to the pool in the summertime on their bikes and not have to worry about it,” said Sheridan County Attorney Steven Howard. “All those things are changing,” he said, adding that the Arnold case “has had a chilling effect on our people.”

We’ve heard a lot about the Sherry Arnold murder in recent months. In some ways, it’s probably like the 1860’s gold rush in this part of the country or when they built the railroad not long after with what they call “sprawling man camps” for all the workers who are being paid handsomely. Some small percentage of young men working hard and making lots of money always seem to get into trouble and, understandably, the locals don’t like it much.

Over and over I come across items that are not related to economics, finance, and investing that would surely be of interest to others, but I just never get around to getting them up as posts, a good example being this Associated Press story from before our trip to Las Vegas about the ongoing rise in prescription drug use across the country.

Sales of the nation’s two most popular prescription painkillers have exploded in new parts of the country, an Associated Press analysis shows, worrying experts who say the push to relieve patients’ suffering is spawning an addiction epidemic.

From New York’s Staten Island to Santa Fe, N.M., Drug Enforcement Administration figures show dramatic rises between 2000 and 2010 in the distribution of oxycodone, the key ingredient in OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan. Some places saw sales rise sixteenfold.

Meanwhile, the distribution of hydrocodone, the key ingredient in Vicodin, Norco and Lortab, is rising in Appalachia, the original epicenter of the painkiller epidemic, as well as in the Midwest.

The increases have coincided with a wave of overdose deaths, pharmacy robberies and other problems in New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Florida and other states.

Wow – New York, Florida, and Tennessee, an odd combination. A report the other day on one of the national news shows detailed how teenagers grab handfuls of their parents’ prescription drugs and throw them all into a big bowl at parties for their friends to grab handfuls out of in order to liven things up a bit. A sign of the times, to be sure.

On the news the other day, they were talking about how Nevada keeps doing a hat-trick month after month – the nation’s highest unemployment, highest foreclosure rate, and most underwater homeowners. My guess is that it won’t look much different to us than it did four years ago when we were last there.

I suppose that these police reports are something I should really try to keep up on here at this blog as they offer a nice, short distraction from what I’m usually working on over at the new blog on Saturdays. It’s been about  month since the last batch and, while the items below contain the usual alcohol related incidents, there are also an interesting set of reports about people who, presumably, were sober.

• A woman complained that there were at least eight kids unsupervised in her neighbor’s backyard on Brentwood Avenue. She said her neighbor ran an unlicensed daycare. An investigation revealed the neighbor was having a play date with four mothers present.
• A man called Jo-Ann Fabrics and told an employee he was groping himself.
• A caller had questions about a towing company. The woman thought the company was “shady” because the driver wouldn’t come to the door until she had $150 in hand.
• A fifth-grader called wanting to ask an officer five questions for a school report.

• A caller who lives on Secora Lane said neighbors aren’t feeding their five horses enough. Three horses are very thin.
• A caller said he had a customer he was trying to get money from. The customer pulled a gun on the caller and told him to leave.
• A man has been camping at a rest area on North 19th Avenue. A caller reported that he usually leaves during the day and goes back at night and stays until early morning. The caller wanted an officer to tell the man that he can’t do that.
• A caller reported that her babysitter won’t leave her alone because the caller owes the babysitter money.
• A man had questions about what to do about his ex-girlfriend who was continuing to call him after she said she didn’t want him to call her.
• A person lost a cellphone, and the person who found it was sending offensive text messages.
• A caller reported a strange boy was in his house at 5:51 a.m. The caller said the boy was very intoxicated. The boy was cited for trespassing and minor in possession of alcohol.
• A woman reported her ex has been texting her, violating the restraining order she has against him.
• A cable salesman trying to sell a cable package stayed at the person’s house for three hours and refused to leave after being asked.
• A man lost his wallet but he can’t remember where.
• A shirtless man was almost hit by a car after walking into traffic on Huffine Lane at 2 a.m.
• An unknown person ran a roofing truck through some fences at the old Kenyon Noble just before 3 a.m.
• Homeowners on Olive Street found a man trying to get into their crawl space just before 3 a.m. When confronted, the man ran and was chased down by one of the homeowners who held the 22-year-old Bozeman man until officers arrived. The intruder was arrested for criminal trespassing.
• Two young males, aged 16 and 17, stuffed things in their beds to make it look like they were sleeping before they ran away from home on Westridge Drive.
• Someone trying to start a large piece of construction equipment on Alder Creek Drive around 3 a.m. fled after triggering a loud alarm.
• A man, who was thrown out of a Nash Road party for making “creepy comments to some of the females,” came back in through a balcony door around 9:15 p.m.

I know a little bit about manufacturing and what’s truly amazing about all of this is that there are detailed instructions for each and every step of this process. Of course, engineers diddling in their cubicles oftentimes resulted in these detailed instructions getting modified for one reason or another – what we used to call ECOs (Engineering Change Orders) – and these oftentimes drove the people on the production line crazy.

As it happened, about a month after last April’s visit I decided to not take the doctor’s advice by radically change the way I ate and, since I have data from last year’s exam and today’s, comparing the two side-by-side makes for an interesting exercise.

I thought I was in decent shape a year ago, but little did I realize how big an impact a zero sugar, zero processed food, reduced carbohydrate diet would have, one that also includes plenty of fat and protein (via meat, fish, foul, eggs, butter, cheese, etc.) along with large portions of green leafy vegetables.

I’m no expert on the subject (though I do know a lot more than a year ago), but I was expecting the cholesterol numbers to go higher (but stay within an acceptable range) and that the triglycerides would come down substantially, as they did.

I can’t say enough about the benefits of dramatically changing your diet by, basically, replacing most of the carbohydrates you eat with meat and green vegetables and now there are some pretty interesting numbers to back that up.