August 7, 2005 - Sunday

Coming very soon. Check back later this morning.

August 6, 2005 - Saturday

My trusty laptop went down yesterday, taking a lot of things down with it. I think its hard drive has died. It had slowed to a crawl several times in recent days, which I had misinterpreted as a software glitch or memory problem. It didn't occur to me that it was the result of the hard drive failing to respond, or resonding only sluggishly. But yesterday it made a clear statement. It's still covered by Apple's extended warranty, although I don't know if a drive failure will be a warranty repair. I'm hoping that I can get by with incremental updates to this site for the next week while the Powerbook gets shipped off to Texas and back.

Maybe it's just my browser, but the new Advertiser site seems V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W to load. There's a substantial pause as their server seems to hunt for the file, which loads quickly enough when it is finally found. The rival S-B site seems to be much more responsive. Again, perhaps it's my particular hardware-software-internet provider combination. But in town, when I'm using a Hawaiian Telcom DSL connection, it is so slow that I consistenly get a "server can't be found" error, and as a result I haven't been able to access the Advertiser from there for at least a week, perhaps longer.

I notice that the Advertiser did get at least a small mention of Gov. Lingle's campaign fundraising into the paper today after it was discussed here yesterday.

Noted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, August 4, 2005:

RULING ON RACE-BASED ADMISSIONS: A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit voted, 2 to 1, on Tuesday to strike down, as discriminatory, the Native Hawaiian-only admissions policies of three private elementary and secondary schools in Hawaii. The University of Hawaii System responded by saying that, until the schools exhaust their appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court weighs in on the matter, it has no plans to abandon its practice of setting aside a share of its need-based tuition waivers and tuition discounts for Native Hawaiian students. The tuition waivers and discounts have already come under federal scrutiny as a result of a discrimination complaint filed with the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (The Chronicle, March 19, 2004).

Today's Hawaiian rally at Iolani Palace should be an interesting affair. I'll be heading over the mountain this morning to check out the mood and at least lend a bit of personal support to the cause, however nebulous it might be at this point.

I've been digging around for old photos in preparation for an upcoming high school reunion (number 40, if you're counting, something I'm having trouble with now that we're talking big numbers). In any case, some of the snapshots I've unearthed have made the transition into iconic photos, like this buddy picture from that year long ago.

Volcano, 1965

August 5, 2005 - Friday

The election is still 18 months away, but Gov. Linda Lingle's money machine is already up to speed. Her campaign took in $1.3 million during the first six months of 2005, and ended the period with more than $2.2 in the bank, according to a new report filed last week with the Campaign Spending Commission. Nearly one-third of the total (31 percent) was raised from out-of-state companies or individuals. Fully 70 percent of the total came from donors who have already given $2,000 or more. Just under half of the total amount (44.5 percent) came in amounts of $4,000 or more. On the other end of the scale, just $26,113 (or 2 percent) of Lingle's total during the period came from grassroots donors in amounts of $100 or less.

Click here for a list of the 36 donors who contributed $6,000 each, the maximum allowed by state law, during this six month period.

Meanwhile, no potential rivals appear to be ramping up their own fundraising. Senator Donna Kim raised only $3,843 during the period, although she had $254,981.42 in the bank at the end of last month. Big Island Mayor Harry Kim's campaign received a non-cash contribution valued at $209.29, and spent a grand total of nothing, zero. Senator Colleen Hanabusa, who has also been reported to have gubernatorial ambitions, doesn't file publicly accessible electronic reports and I haven't had a chance to check her paper file at the commission's office.

Lt. Gov. Aiona, sometimes mentioned as a potential challenger to his running mate, raised $22,438.67 during the six-month period and finished with $67,995.49 in the bank. Better than nothing, but certainly not the basis for a challenge from the right.

I also noticed Sen. Clayton Hee, who represents our windward district, appears to have cleaned out the last $20,238.93 from his campaign bank account in order to pay off a portion of an outstanding loan--from himself. Hee wrote off the remaining $29,761.07 of the original $50,000 loan, but after the payment to the candidate himself the campaign was left with a cash balance of zero.

And so it goes on this Friday morning.

August 4, 2005 - Thursday

The action in Detroit yesterday was a repeat of Gannett's sudden simultaneous 1993 purchase of the Advertiser and sale of the Star-Bulletin to a cooperative buyer. Yesterday Gannett similarly rocked the newspaper world by taking over its former rival and JOA partner, the Detroit Free Press, while announcing the sale of its Detroit News to the much smaller MediaNews Group.

Staffers at Honolulu's dailies will recall that day when Gannett executives announced the sale in the S-B newsroom, then walked into the lobby separating the two newsrooms, took off their Star-Bulletin shirts, donned Advertiser shirts, and then told Advertiser staffers they now belonged to Gannett.

Details of the Detroit deal were not publicly disclosed, so it isn't known whether the sale includes a rewrite of the terms of the joint operating agreement. When Gannett took over the Advertiser, it also dictated a revised JOA that eliminated the former split of the profits and replaced it with set payments to the smaller partner, claiming all the real money to be made by Gannett. I would guess that a similar deal has been made in Detroit.

The New York Times quotes newspaper analyst John Morton, whose comments were widely quoted here during the effort to block the closing of the Star-Bulletin:

"This is further evidence," he said, "of how financially driven these companies are. The era of when newspaper companies had an emotional attachment to their properties has really withered away."

In a side deal, former Free Press owner Knight Ridder took over three Gannett newspapers in the northwest, while swapping Gannett its paper in Tallahassee, Florida.

This is a deal that will be reverberating through the industry for some time.

It's hard to follow that kind of blockbuster. The minor good news on my end is that those vividly-named porn sites that caused such a problem for me last month were apparently stymied by my addition of a password to the iLind.net stats page and have gone elsewhere. There were 17,127 hits blocked by the password protection over the past several weeks, and thousands more before the password was added, but current stats show no further access attempts from those sites. I'm not sure why it's a relief--perhaps because, despite the tentative diagnosis, no one was exactly sure all of what might have been going on. But it's over, at least for now.

Digging around online I ran across a fledgling English language web site in Japan that lists this page as the sole entry in a listing of "other journals". Its author provides this self-description:

I'm an American business consultant who's lived in Japan nearly five years. A lawyer by profession, most of my career has been spent in newspaper publishing. It was a newspaper management job that first brought me to Tokyo in 1997.

I suppose I'll have to find out more.

I missed the president giving reporters "the finger", but the episode is recounted by Nick Coleman in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Also noted at the Star Tribune, a column about blogging on or about the job.

August 3, 2005 - Wednesday

News of the 9th Circuit Court decision overturning the Hawaiians-only admissions policy of Kamehameha Schools spread quickly yesterday morning. The Advertiser posted an AP story at 9:29 a.m. and the Star-Bulletin followed just minutes later at 9:33 a.m.

I haven't read and digested the entire decision yet, but I can't help recalling the unfortunate explosion of protest when Kamehameha trustees attempted to quietly admit a non-Hawaiian student on Maui. Students, parents and parts of the Hawaiian community reacted angrily, forcing the trustees to reverse themselves and setting in motion a series of legal challenges.

I think Beadie Dawson had it right in a 2002 Star-Bulletin op-ed (click here and then scroll down to Dawson's column):

NOWHERE does her will require the schools to educate all Hawaiian children, all the children of Hawaii or only Hawaiian children exclusively. Calls for Kamehameha to exclusively admit only Hawaiians are misplaced. They may jeopardize the trustees' efforts to educate Hawaiian children and place the schools' tax-exempt status at risk.

Any move to open the schools to all children in Hawaii would not only violate terms of the will but also trigger a revolution in opposition, one that I would gladly join.

Defending a Hawaiians-only, racially exclusive admissions policy in court is a bigger problem, however, than finding room for thousands of Hawaiian applicants or calming angry Native Hawaiians.

Under the circumstances, with a limited and exhausted pool of Native Hawaiian applicants for the eighth grade at the Maui campus, the trustees made a prudent legal decision, choosing the only option available to them at the time.

The outcome yesterday might have been quite different if the trustees had done a better job of communicating with their various constituencies and then held their ground on their initial admission decision in that case.

Yesterday's ruling will only further aggravate the difficult political terrain here in the islands. Some will welcome it because it appears to leave Hawaiians only a choice between the "revolutionary" option of sovereignty and wholesale surrender of hope.

I'm not sanguine about this. Thirty years ago, as a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Hawaii, I heard students seriously discussing acts of violence against tourists as one strategy for combating development and slowing urban growth. Now, with a sense among Hawaiians of being pushed to the margins and an abundance of images of destructive responses elsewhere in the world, I would not be surprised by an emergence of violence. Hopefully other options will appear but, if not, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Meanwhile, Erika Engle's column yesterday in the Star-Bulletin confirmed what you read here back on July 22 about the $6.5 million price tag on former Gov. Cayetano's humble home.

Meanwhile, we're off to see the sunrise. More here tomorrow. And, as usual, just click on the photo for a larger view.

August 2, 2005 - Tuesday

A reader added another factor to the assessment of the newspaper's web sites--usability.

Yesterday, after seeing "The Pirates of Penzance," I wanted to reread the respective reviews. The Star-Bulletin review was a cinch. I got there right away.

However, the Advertiser review was located counterintuitively. I entered the same information as to the Star-Bulletin and got nothing. After poking around awhile, I was about to give up. Eventually, I tried the Google route and came up with the review. But it was a frustrating slog.

A Los Angeles Times story on Hawaiian sovereignty got quite a bit of play recently, appearing in the Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, and other papers. But I noticed one substantial mistake in the middle of the story:

Today, the state's estimated 240,000 Native Hawaiians — those with 50 percent or more Hawaiian blood — make up about 20 percent of the population and fare poorest in almost all socioeconomic indicators. They have the state's worst health statistics, highest number of school dropouts, highest unemployment rate and highest levels of incarceration.

Actually, the 240,000 figure is all Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians, and is not a count of those with 50 percent or more Hawaiian blood. The State Data Book, drawing on the 2000 Census, puts the number of Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians at 239,655.

That made me wonder about the count of those with 50 percent or more Hawaiian. I thought it would be a short search, since both the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands serve this base population. But the population figures don't seem to appear in OHA's Native Hawaiian Data Book, and I couldn't find them in the DHHL Annual Report or its General Plan. This was a surprise. How can either agency know if they are effectively reaching this population if they don't know what it is? Hopefully it's my error and I just missed the appropriate table in one of these data sources. If so, I apologize in advance.

Oh, no! Did my comment trigger the demise of the "crappy drawing" description? That's the word from PBN's Howard Dicus, who also offered up the real history of his informal and informational graphics:

Aaron Copland once explained the shift from the complex style of his "Dance Symphony" to the later style of "Appalachian Spring" by saying it seemed worth the effort to see if he could say what he wanted to say in the simplest terms. Someone told me that you had commented on the new PBS Hawaii show so I visited your site and read it... and decided it was worth the effort to see if I could find a more attractive way to describe my crappy drawings. You deserve to know that your comment did inspire that.

Your reader who attributes the original idea to PBN's copy editor is in error. Meredith Prock is blameless. It started when one of the dailies reported, as if it were scandalous, that HMSA, after securing a rate hike, had made a profit. All HMSA can do with leftover money is spend it on health care later on -- it's a nonprofit -- but apart from that the profit was weeny compared to what it spent. This was best expressed visually, so I held up a "crappy drawing" and the rest is pathology. Response was so positive, a one-time bit became a regular thing. So did the title. A woman in a pick-up saw me walking and yelled, "I love your crappy drawings!"

Months later my managing editor, Jim George, invited me to write a weekly column for the newspaper and illustrate it with a crappy drawing. We quickly learned that what is drawn large for TV doesn't always look good downsized for print so I make separate drawings for the newspaper now.

I have actually been cartooning and drawing maps for pleasure since I was four or five years old, but in three decades of working mostly in radio there hadn't much call for it for some reason.

For the record: I like hearing Howard's "crappy drawings" discussed on PBS. It took me by surprise the first time around, but the phrase has a nice straight forward ring to it.

Here's an odd little run of old photos from my archive from a poster making session in July 1972. The posters were to publicize the upcoming trial of the so-called "Hickam Three", charged with destruction of government property after pouring blood on top secret files at Hickam Air Force Base to protest the war in Vietnam. I say it's an odd batch of photos because the combination of film, chemistry, available light, and age give then a nice "patina". I'm not sure how else to describe it. Unfortunately, I can't come up with names of most of those who were there...surely someone will fill in my memory gaps.

Hickam 3 posters

August 1, 2005 - Monday

A new week and a new month. Here we go.

One reader posed a serious question: "Does the Advertiser get anything out of its VERY expensive nut of 2 people and fantastically-high-priced satellite phone connections for its 29th Brigade coverage in Iraq?"

And he offers an opinion:

I don't see very much gritty stuff. Their stories are no different than the S-B's freebies by army guys all along. Soldiers handing out candy, soldiers having lunch with Iraqi chieftains, soldiers in pool. I suspect it's the "embedded reporter" syndrome. The Cole stories read like PR handouts --- maybe you'd like to see what kickback you get from your blog readers.

Any reactions from others? Email your comments to me, ian(at)ilind.net.

Yesterday's reader's comment comparing the Star-Bulletin and Advertiser's online strategies and products brought quick replies. I apologize in advance for the length, and thought about moving these comments to a separate page, but decided to keep them here in the main view. So read on, or just skip down to the puppy news if the online wars aren't of interest..

Reader #1:

I found (yesterday's) entry from a reader interesting, considering the S-B has been online since 1996 and the Advertiser balked for a number of years, convinced it would hurt their subscriptions. HNA (Gannett) was not happy with the S-B's decision and refused to market it's web site in any form, despite there being the JOA in place. would not allow the S-B to go after online ads, etc. But Gannett's current resources do allow for them to do more now that they've decided to join the real (internet) world.

At least the S-B has their archives which go all the way back from the first online day (although they were very poor about putting up the Saturday edition for years). The Advertiser's archives are very short and difficult to navigate.

And then this long comment regarding the online wars came in from former Star-Bulletin webmaster Blaine Fergerstrom:

Your reader is entitled to his opinion, but speaking as someone who was there, I need to say that it appears he doesn't know what he is talking about.

For instance, according to your reader, "The Bulletin comes much later in the morning around 6am or later if I'm not mistaken."

Yes, he is mistaken. The Bulletin was online, in its entirety at 4:20 a.m. today, Sunday, July 31. I know this because I received the Bulletin headline email at 4:20. It is likely that the paper was online, live and ready to go at 4:00 a.m. The webmaster was likely tending to administrative, cleanup and checking of the live edition before sending the email. This was for the greatly expanded Sunday edition with many extra features, columns and an extra travel section.

Sections may have been finished and ready at 2 a.m. to publish, but the Bulletin doesn't publish partial materials. They publish an entire edition, complete, when all sections are ready to go.

The Bulletin used to be an "afternoon" online paper to reflect its analog parent's publishing schedule. They decided some time ago to publish early a.m. online. To accommodate that, the webmasters start work at 9 p.m. What time the paper goes online is a function of how thick today's paper edition was...how much work there is for the webmasters.

The Advertiser uses a "content management system" to publish their online edition. They take the news copy and paste it into a form on the web site. Push a button, it's published. The Bulletin operation is more hands-on, more personalized, with the (much smaller) web crew crafting each page, individually.

Your reader thinks that "The Advertiser has so much more to offer online than the Bulletin (jobs, classifieds, interesting sections)."

Uh, the Bulletin has those, too. Has had them for a long time. From day one, we took special pride in publishing all the local special editorial sections. Often we'd add extra material that wasn't available in the print edition. The Star-Bulletin's classified ads have been online since 1998.

As far as the design, I can't comment on that. The value of graphic design is in the eye of the beholder. While he may prefer the Advertiser's layout to the Bulletin's, it would be trivial to find others who prefer it the other way around.

It is obvious from his assertions that he regularly reads the Advertiser online but rarely visits the Bulletin site. This would not sufficiently qualify him to comment on the merits of both in a balanced fashion.

I would add that if your reader thinks he can do better, he should try it some time. As with most worthwhile endeavors, it's a lot harder than it looks.

Blaine

P.S., You knew you'd hear from me on this one, right? :)

We stopped yesterday afternoon to see Girlie's puppies. They're now about 5 weeks old and oh so cute. Her people are now having to worry about finding them good homes, and we were suprised to be told that ours is one of the first households considered acceptable. If we want a puppy, we can have one, they said.

Two males, two females

We got to know Girlie's people when we rescued her (twice) after she escaped from their yard, and both times we found her and brought her back home. Then, of course, she loves us to show up in the morning because it means a dog biscuit. Now it means we have to struggle with whether or not to remain an all feline household. But what would the cats say if we brought a puppy home?

July 31, 2005 - Sunday

.What a difference a week makes. On this past week's PBN Friday, Howard Dicus dropped his "crappy drawing" line in favor of a more restrained description, "low tech graph".

A reader notes that Dicus got started with those crappy little drawings when he was writing a column on page 2 of the weekly PBN, and they followed him to the morning appearances on KHON and now to PBS Hawaii..

Everyone seems to have forgotten that it was PBN Copy Editor Meredith Prock’s idea that he make diagrams for his columns. He started doing it on the legal pad, and it became a Dicus prop. It certainly translated well for TV, and I’m not surprised to hear he brought it along for his PBS show, too.

Will Howard rehabilitate the "crappy" descriptor for his drawings? Time will tell.

A reader contributed this extended thought on the online competition between Star-Bulletin and Advertiser:

Like you, I enjoy reading the Advertiser and Bulletin on-line. Lately, the Advertiser has been downloading it's front and local sections at 2am. For some reason, letters are available around 3am. The Bulletin comes much later in the morning around 6am or later if I'm not mistaken.

If I understand you correctly, you suspect that both paper's are suffering from inept on-line management. In other words, if both paper's had their act together, online content would be available much earlier.

I have a different angle.

I suspect that the reason online content is both limited and late is because the publishers want "us" to buy a print copy rather than get it for free online. Recent headlines suggest that the NY Times and Wash. Post are contemplating fee-based subscriptions. It really makes (business) sense when you consider more and more people are going online all the time. If both dailies were to remove their Editorial sections from the online section I would buy subscriptions. (Has the Bulletin removed Borreca's immensely popular Sunday column from the online version?)

However, the plot thickens. Don't count on the Star-Bulletin to make their online content available earlier anytime soon. Just like the print wars that exist between both papers, their is a more subtle online war going on. Most likely, the Bulletin can't afford to offer their online content any earlier. I'm sure if they had their way, they wouldn't have it all. On the other hand, the Advertiser is obviously taking the lead in online management and can afford to upstage the Bulletin. The Advertiser has so much more to offer online than the Bulletin (jobs, classifieds, interesting sections).

One more angle to keep in mind. I'm sure many folks on the mainland would like both papers to publish their online content earlier.

Finally, I liked the Advertiser's old web-design better than the new one. But I'm probably alone in that. Most would agree the Bulletin's webpage design and layout is awful!

So far, so good. Then he added:

PS: I'm allergic to cats. When I'm around them, I get deathly ill. Itchy eyes and sneezing. You really have the makings of a popular political blog on your hands. How about making a separate section for you personal stuff and news for us political junkies? Just a thought. But who am I to say? You can run your blog the way you see fit and I will still keep coming back for more.

The idea of splitting the content of this page comes up from time to time, usually from folks who get itchy eyes when viewing photos of cats. I just don't think segregation will work. After all, what tricks would I turn to on slow mornings if the cats weren't available? In addition, of course, I'm trying not to be a blogging machine, but rather letting this blog reflect what's happening in my particular sphere, cats (and dogs) included.

Perhaps you didn't notice that last week went by without a single new cat photo. So those with the itchy eyes shouldn't be complaining. But to provide balance, here are a few more of our Kaaawa cats from the latest photo safari. Just click on this picture for more.

When Silverman meets Romeo

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