Tucked away in a Star-Bulletin crime brief yesterday was the first mention I’ve seen of the “G” word in the context of last week’s shooting death on the North Shore. The item describes the man indicted in the case:
Jimenez has 11 prior arrests, five for contempt of court. He had received a deferral of a guilty plea for an auto theft and is reportedly a member of a Wahiawa gang, prosecutors said.
Aha. Not simply an amorphous “group of men” on the beach. Perhaps we’re dealing with gang conflicts here. I would think this is relevant to public understanding of the case and the broader situation we’re in, but it’s an issue that still hasn’t been pursued.
The spelling bee gave me a couple of things to comment on. First there was yesterday’s Advertiser story quoting Hawaii’s Andrew Zhou soon after he was bounced from the competition.
“It’s a good word to get out on,” the eighth-grader at Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School in Honolulu said, eating a brownie as he left a special room where spellers can recover after they’ve been eliminated. “Actually, I’m kind of relieved to see that it’s all over now, so it’s like an end to all the, you know, torture.”
“…you know, torture.” A great quote but also perhaps a tip of sorts that could lead to further reporting. Did that tweak the reporter’s instinct? Torture? Really. What do you mean by that? It’s a clue that there’s more going on than the brief annual spelling hype typically captures.
Then there was Joe Moore’s commentary on KHON’s 6 p.m. news a couple of nights ago, triggered by “quatenus”, the word that tripped up Zhou.
Moore went on and on about the word’s Latin origin, and repeatedly questioned why they don’t stick to English words. It was supposed to be humorous but, in the context of the whole debate over immigration and the push to exclude non-English speakers, it came across as closed-minded and tinged with xenophobia. Too bad.
I happened to stumble over online video of several panels at the recent National Freedom of Information Coalition Summit in Seattle. There’s a link to the video coverage at the bottom of that page.
It’s that time again, Feline Friday, and this week the focus is on Mr. Romeo.
I caught up with him earlier in the week as he waited, concealed in the ferns in the front yard. He was waiting, it seems, for an opportunity to leap out on one of his unsuspecting adopted siblings. Toby is one of his usual targets, but not the only one. You may recall that Romeo started as a walk-on who took up residence under our house after a noise new year’s eve a couple of years ago. We eventually invited him to stay and the rest is history.
And yet another murder reported today. We’re at double the rate last year. Statistical anomaly or sign of societal distress? Gang activity, of course, is yet another sign of societal distress. Perhaps we’ve been so busy tending to unions and the visitor industry that we’ve failed to tend to the needs of the actual people who live here.
I didn’t see any of this year’s Bee, but I do know that last year, there was a liberal use of Hawaiian language words.
Nice pic of Mr. Romeo.