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October 18, 2003 - Saturday
It's 4:45 a.m. I had to get up to take more chemicals to control the symptoms of this cold. There's already been one cat fight (Harriet was trying to make the short run from a food dish on the kitchen counter to her sleeping spot on top of a buffet in our dining room when Mr. Leo went into action and launched himself onto her), with loud screeching and flying fur until I reached the scene and threw Leo out of the house. Then there were the warning sounds of another fight outside, but when I turned on the deck light and stepped out to check, all of our cats came running for safety. So whatever was going on out there, they wanted nothing of it.
Lucky for me that the McClain estate auction originally scheduled for today has been delayed for a week. With this miserable cold, I probably would have opted to just stick around the house today. Now that's not a problem.
| I couldn't find an angle that would capture the spread of newspaper sales racks at the entrance to the Pentagon City metro station. There was a similar lineup of boxes on the opposite side of this walkway out of this photo to the left. An amazing array, from Rupert Phillips' free Northern Virginia Journal, several Spanish language papers, and everything imaginable from around the region. |
no news shortage there
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If you wandered into the Star-Bulletin newsroom yesterday, you could have joined the goodbye party for longtime staff photographer Ken "Iggy" Ige who is leaving to join the Honolulu Fire Department!
Ronan Zilberman, ex-Star-Bulletin, then Associated Press photographer, is returning to the Bulletin. And Richard Walker is going full-time after years of hanging on as a part-timer.
October 17, 2003 - Friday
This from a friend and the regular reader who started this penultimate discussion:
I stand corrected and deflated.
Just when I was beginning to recover from my comment that the phrase "spineless jellyfish" was an oxymoron only later to be corrected by your astute readership.
Meanwhile, I'm just back from a short turnaround trip accompanying Meda to a workshop held in Arlington, Virginia. The Sheraton National Hotel was tucked away behind the Navy Annex and Arlington Cemetery, a short walk past lots of security alert signs to the Pentagon. It would have been pretty grim except for the view from our room, which looked directly out over Washington, and a hotel shuttle which provided a link to the nearest Metro station.
| Here are a couple of examples of the view. The top photo shows the moon rising on Monday night with the Washington Monument and the Capitol visible (just click on the photo for a larger version).
Below was sunrise on Tuesday, which lacked Kaaawa's beach but had a lot going for it nonetheless.
I did manage to catch a cold almost immediately and made the long flights back yesterday hacking and sniffling the whole way. The first class upgrade did provide a bit of a buffer, though.
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Moonrise over Washington
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Sunrise over Washington
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Finally, I don't have any idea what is going on at this blog by a 15 year old Brazilian, but if you click that link and scroll down a ways, you'll get to one of my photos of a cloudy morning in Kaaawa.
October 16, 2003 - Thursday
Isn't that Bob Rees something?
Rees, writing in the last issue of Honolulu Weekly, did verbal pirouettes past his own floating references to existentialism, Camus, theater of the absurd, and vigilante justice to somehow end up defending former Bishop Estate trustee Lokelani Lindsey against Judge David Ezra's order that she forfeit her freedom and immediately begin serving a six-month sentence for bankruptcy fraud.
Lindsey, who had earlier been granted a compassionate deferral of the effective date of imprisonment in order to care for her ailing husband, instead was spotted between casinos in Las Vegas on one of several trips there since her conviction. Judge Ezra took offense at the apparent abuse of the privilege he had granted Lindsey and ordered her into detention, an outcome Lindsey seemed to be expecting but which Rees portrays as surreal.
By now, no one should be surprised to see Rees emerge as a staunch defender of those who have seriously abused positions of power and public trust and subsequently been held to account. Although his public advocacy of civil liberties might reasonably lead to the expectation that he would be sympathetic to the regular folks who suffer abuse by the powerful, he seems instead inevitably drawn to the plight of the formerly powerful themselves. Rees still will seize the slightest excuse to praise the late "Fat Boy" Okuda, who turned favoritism, cronyism and politicizing of the civil service into an art form before a career-ending conviction for fixing traffic tickets, and I can't help but recall Rees' fawning one-hour interview with then-UPW director Gary Rodrigues broadcast on Hawaii Public Radio months before the federal indictments, where Rees skillfully maneuvered the interview to avoid any questions about the controversy that already surrounded the union leader.
It's puzzling why Rees is so outraged by Lindsey's latest courtroom adventure, given the circumstances, and perhaps even more puzzling why Honolulu Weekly would take this opportunity to promote his viewpoint.
October 15, 2003 - Wednesday
Just when you think there's no one paying attention I trip over something like the penultimate comment and bang, there you are. The responses speak for themselves.
Surely you are aware that "penultimate" means second best, and not the best.
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I am a regular reader in lovely St. Paul, MN, and am writing to comment on this little entry:
"Hilo’s Penn ultimate world champion"
Penultimate, or best . . . get it?
Actually, that isn't right. This goes back to Latin, specifically to where the stress goes in each word. For reasons that I don't know, Latin stress is on one of three syllables, starting at the end: the ultimate (last) syllable, the penultimate (from paena-almost plus ultimate, almost last or next to last) and antepenultimate (ante-before plus penultimate, before the next to last). There are all kinds of complex rules around this that matter a lot for Latin poetry. I seem to recall that Spanish still works this way, but they call the syllables first (ultimate), second (penultimate) and third (antepenultimate), as though they were counting backwards.
So, yes, the headline was a pun on the word penultimate, but it doesn't mean best, it means next to last. We often use ultimate as though it means best, although usually in settings where it refers to the outcome: He was the ultimate winner (the one left standing at the end, or the best one). Justice ultimately prevailed (at the end of the day, justice was done). Frankly, I'm not quite sure what the headline was trying to say. That Penn was the last world champion, as there would be no further competitions ever? That he was ultimately, at the end of the contest, world champion? Or that they were so taken with the pun that they ran it, without putting too much thought into it.
Just a little trivia from a Classics geek.
Okay, has everybody got that?
The latter response came with this quote following the signature:
| "Time spent reading is rarely wasted, time spent making life better for your dogs is never wasted, and if you can make life better for your dogs by reading books, you're making excellent use of your time." - Jessica Jahiel
Just the occasion for a few recent dog photos! Just click on Ms. Hina....
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October 14, 2003 - Tuesday
Sean McLaughlin ran into this story about a broadcast company which opposes the relaxation of media ownership restrictions. The company's CEO is quoted:
"I would call this the tipping point," Goodmon said. "If this goes through, there is no stopping media consolidation."
And that caution from an industry insider.
A reader nominated a story heading from Sunday's Honolulu Advertiser (page C-3) for best headline pun, although it perhaps wasn't intended:
"Hilo’s Penn ultimate world champion"
Penultimate, or best . . . get it?
Another reader offered up this tasty bit of trivia regarding John Paul Fritz, who I mentioned here on Sunday:
For awhile, when he was running for one of those offices and taking out classifieds, he listed the phone number of the K59 studios as the contact number.
I know this because of the complaints I'd hear from the other side of the glass (between the studio and the newsroom).
You never know when you might have need for that little anecdote.
By the way, does anyone know what ever happened to candidate Fritz?
October 13, 2003 - Monday
The New York Times has a story today on the use of free editions to attract young readers into the world of newspapers.
It's always nice to get further confirmation of a theory like the one I spun out yesterday. This message was in the morning email in-box:
-- Re Lokelani's challenge. You probably know this but Lokelani filed the Steve Crouch, Crabbe lawsuit against Bill Chee as an exhibit to her motion for Ezra's recusal ...
Actually, I didn't know this little factoid, since I haven't had a chance to check out that court file yet. But it fits with the Lighter scenario, since he was in the middle of that whole Crouch-Crabbe-Chee mess, which I wrote about back in 1996.
Lighter's beef with Judge Ezra dates back prior to Ezra's appointment as a judge. Back in the mid-1980's, Lighter was in real estate and was involved in a developer's conversion of a Waikiki complex into a condominium. I think the project was the Hawaiian Colony, on Ala Moana across from Fort DeRussy, but my recollection could be wrong.
In any case, the project missed the boom cycle and collapsed, and Lighter ended up getting crunched in the resulting foreclosure, and launched his first foray into messing with the courts trying to forestall the foreclosure process. David Ezra was on the other side of the foreclosure case, representing one of the big lenders. When Ezra was nominated to the federal bench, Lighter surfaced with all sorts of bizarre allegations against him and later, at some point, tried to place Ezra under a citizen's arrest. I'll have to dig out some notes to refesh my memory. So seeing Lighter surfacing again in Lindsey's proceeding in Ezra's courtroom shouldn't be a surprise.
Oh, by the way, this is the same Eric Lighter who filed suit against me (and the Star-Bulletin) early this year, but the nuisance suit has never been served.
| As promised, here's a batch of recent photos of the cats in our Kaaawa household. Just click on Ms. Annie's photo to reach them. |
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October 12, 2003 - Sunday
There's obviously something going on in the courts these days. The S-B reported yesterday on attempts by one defendant to undermine the system with bogus legal claims in state court. That followed by just a week Lokelani Lindsey's high-profile trip down a similar path with wild accusations against the federal court and Judge David Ezra.
What was described as Lindsey's rambling and apparently desperate document has many attributes of a strategy pioneered by Eric Lighter, a non-lawyer who for years has offered his unconventional legal defense "services" to people caught in court battles. Lighter's technique is to string together preposterous conspiracy allegations against the other parties in a case and the judges involved, and then attack the court for failing to take them seriously, alleging that this shows bias or worse. In one variant, these strange documents are mailed to a grand jury where they end up being ignored, which then gives rise to Lighter's allegations of "grand jury tampering" that he claims is proven by the grand jury's failure to act.
Lighter, who earlier claimed close ties to the "minutemen" and other far right separatist groups, later linked up with certain Hawaiian sovereignty groups and spread his techniques further.
Lighter would not only try to defraud the courts, but would take the opportunity to defraud people who fell for his offer of "services", according to a string of allegations from a succession of apparent victims. After all, if you're gullible enough to swallow the whole grand jury tampering approach, then you're probably fair game for all sorts of swindles.
It's been a number of years since I last looked at the spread of these desperate strategies pursued by pro-se litigants, those attempting to maneuver their way through the court system without benefit of counsel. At that point, there were several well-known practitioners clogging the system--whether this number has grown or is simply more visible these days isn't clear.
I'm reminded of a conversation I once had with another local character, John Paul Fritz, a perennial candidate for various offices. Fritz once ran on a platform that included a business development strategy built around a new flying saucer port he proposed for Pearl Harbor. In another instance, Fritz legally changed his middle name to "Aloha Mahalo" so that his name could appear on the ballot as Fritz, John Paul Aloha Mahalo.
Anyway, Fritz once came to see me when I was working for Common Cause. He explained that he had proof that the CIA had been tampering with his mail. The proof was that he had been running newspaper ads promoting his John Paul Fritz for President campaign, and he had not received a single response--no letters, no contributions, no volunteers. He said the lack of responses "proved" that the CIA had been intercepting the flood of cards and letters which obviously must have been generated. Government conspiracy!
And so it goes on Sunday morning.
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