Salt Lake City

Tens of thousands of travelers flying home from the Winter Olympics yesterday were greeted with lines longer than two football fields and waits of up to four hours at Salt Lake City's airport. The airport braced for about 74,000 passengers, said Barbara Gann, spokeswoman for the city's Department of Airports. By midmorning, the line to check in for Delta Air Lines stretched out of the terminal and onto the sidewalk. At the end of it, an airport employee, Gary DeVaraux, said the wait was four hours.

When the Chicago Bulls decamp, along with the Utah Jazz and 1,300 members of the media, for Salt Lake City after tomorrow's Game 2 of the NBA Finals, some of them think they might as well be leaving for Mars. "Dennis says he is going to take the party with him," said Bulls reserve Jud Buechler. "He's going to take six or seven guys along. " Salt Lake City, whose downtown sits at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains and is dominated by the Mormon Tabernacle, is one of the least favorite stops among NBA players.

Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell promised that an investigation of alleged bribes by Salt Lake City officials to help win the 2002 Winter Olympic Games would be "thorough and prompt. " "One of the most difficult parts is the judging of past actions by current standards," Mitchell said yesterday. "How do you treat people fairly? We will do the best we can within the limits of time and scope. " After his first meeting with members of a special commission investigating the allegations, Mitchell told reporters the five-member panel must file its report to the U.S. Olympic Committee by Feb. 28. He said there would be no public reports before then.

After pleading innocent yesterday in Salt Lake City to charges he used cash to land the 2002 Winter Games, Dave Johnson said there was nothing wrong with using money to influence members of the International Olympic Committee. His fellow defendant, Tom Welch, was more circumspect, saying he did nothing wrong. But lawyers for both of Salt Lake's indicted Olympic bid leaders expect to call IOC members to the stand to explain how cash and gifts aren't the same thing as bribery.

IN A MONTH OF gossip heightened by a Tweeted congressman's penis, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Salt Lake City's KSL-TV has decided not to air "The Playboy Club," a fall NBC drama trying to capitalize on "Mad Men's" 1960s aura with mobsters and busty bunnies. "The Playboy brand is known internationally," KSL's president and CEO, Mark Willes , said in a statement. "Everyone is clear what it stands for. We want to be sure everyone is clear what the KSL brand stands for, which is completely inconsistent with the Playboy brand.

One year into his job as head of the "scandal-weary and dispirited" Salt Lake Organizing Committee and two years away from the start of the 2002 Winter Games, W. Mitt Romney finally has had some good news to report. New corporate sponsors at last are beginning to sign on, costs have been trimmed, and Romney, the wealthy venture capitalist and Michigan-born Mormon brought in to turn things around, says he is confident now that the threat of a large deficit has been deflected. The outrage that followed 1998 revelations that Salt Lake had lavished gifts and free trips on members of the International Olympic Committee to sway their site-selection votes has receded, though the U.S. Justice Department's investigation is not over.

If the John Hughes of The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off had had a little more rage going for him (not to mention a taste for the Ramones and the Suicide Machines), he might have come up with something akin to SLC Punk. This motor-mouthed tour across an '80s Middle America "wasteland" - specifically, the doggedly conservative Middle America of Salt Lake City (hence the film's acronymic title) - is guided by one Stevo (Matthew Lillard), a rich kid with spiky blue hair, razor-blade jewelry, and a perpetual sneer.

The Salt Lake City Organizing Committee had all sorts of dandy information ready to impress the world's media at the Nagano Winter Olympics. The committee could tell you how much it expected the 2002 Winter Games to generate in economic activity for Utah ($2 billion). How much they would generate in state and local tax revenue ($108 million). The average February temperature along the Wasatch Front (37.2 degrees). And how much snow falls in the area in a typical year (300 to 500 inches)

If you're down and out, this is the place to be. Just as it was a safe haven for persecuted Mormons 150 years ago, Salt Lake is now a mecca to homeless people from all over the West, drawn here by reports of plentiful jobs as well as exemplary charity to tide them over during the hard times without work. "There's a homeless grapevine, passing on from hobo village to hobo village, about the largesse of Salt Lake City," said Dan O'Neill, 56, who found the prospect of winter in the snowy Wasatch Range infinitely preferable to sunny Las Vegas, where he had been scrounging - unsuccessfully - for work.

Question: We recently traveled on Amtrak's California Zephyr from Chicago to Sacramento. It was not a good experience. When we entered the sleeper bedroom, it was readily apparent that the visual depiction on the Amtrak website was a gross exaggeration. The condition of the car was very poor. We soon realized that the latch on the bathroom door had a problem. When my wife tried to operate the latch from inside the bathroom, she found that she was trapped. The door could be opened only from the outside.