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October 22, 2005 - Saturday

News coverage of the discovery in the California mountains of a frozen body believed to be the victim of a WWII military plane crash has sidestepped one question--is the melting of the glacial ice in which the body had been frozen yet another indication of overall warming, at least in the region? I tried scanning stories yesterday for any further mention of the receding glacier in Kings Canyon National Park, but found no additional comments.

Shouldn't reports of the brief escape of three boys from the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility this week have included at least some mention of the horrendous conditions uncovered by the ACLU and the Department of Justice? Instead of focusing only on how the boys escaped, it might be more appropriate to be asking why they escaped. The ACLU and DOJ provided lots of possible reasons. The question at least needs to be asked.

Here's quite a useful resource I just ran across, Plogress.com, a web site that tracks the current votes of members of Congress. Click here to jump right to the votes of Hawaii's four member delegation.

Okay, I have to admit, two mastiffs and a great dane fill a room much more effectively than a bunch of cats. If you need to convincing, and you've got a high speed internet connection (DSL or cable), then check out this little video by friends of ours who live in just such a menagerie. The internet speed impaired can still appreciate the photo galleries featuring these rather large dogs.

Or start at the beginning of Takatimes.com and read gems like this story of how Scooby got his name. Scooby, by the way, is a large, black, and very sweet great dane.

How Scooby became Scooby

Taka's name is not the only name that has a history behind it. I was born Thor. Now when I visualize a Thor I see someone big, beautiful, powerful, and masculine. What a great name for a macho Great Dane like myself. I was more than happy to go through my many dog years "Thor, master of the dane world!"

But noooooo, the day after my family picked me up they felt an overwhelming need to change my name. My mom says she had to change my name because her tongue is unable to produce the "thhhh" sound. All of her "TH"s sound like "D"s and everyone though she was calling me "door" instead of "Thor, master or the dane world!" So she and my Dad put their heads together, chuckled, and started calling me Scooby.

Come on! I go from "Thor, master of the dane world" to "Scooby dooby doo where are you?" What were they thinking? I could just howl with misery and discontent!

So that's how I became Scooby - because of my Mom has a lazy tongue that refuses to make a tip and press firmly against her front teeth.

Life can be so unfair sometimes.

October 21, 2005 - Friday

Friday. How about some fun? Here's a great collection of funny videos at Whoomp.com. Some of these are commercials I would not mind watching on television instead of the endless offerings from our favorite drug conglomerates. I've only made it through a few, all so far qualify as great. I actually started with the milk rappers and worked back to the main index.

And here's some brain food, interesting comments and revealing links on our foreign policy woes from the Whiskey Bar.

A long story in today's New York Times reports that charges in the CIA leak case may involve attempts to cover up by several top White House aides, including Rove and Libby but perhaps others. The Times story proceeds from a legal perspective, citing sources among the lawyers, while today's Washington Post takes the political perspective inside the administration and Republican circles. Very different approaches to the same developing news.

The year was probably 1973, the cause was the nationwide lettuce and grape boycott called by the United Farm Workers Union. A group of UFW supporters set up an informational picket at what was then Holiday Mart, now known as Daiei. I think this was an uneventful day, watched over by an HPD officer assigned to keep the various activist movements under surveillance. By this time, he was accepted as just part of the event. In any case, these aren't the best scans but they do convey at bit of the time.

Click for more

Arriving home in the evening is always an adventure. The cats are usually waiting for us. Well, they're waiting for us to deliver the food. Evening is when they get the day's ration of canned cat food, which they usually consider a treat. So we usually walk in the door, put our things down, do a preliminary cat census to see who is accounted for, then get a couple of cans of cat food and stack of dishes. I have to spread out dishes on the counter, spoon a bit of food into several of them and deliver to the floor at one time. That reduces the bickering over which cat gets to eat first. When I looked down last night, it was quite a crowd, with seven of the nine crowded into a small area, so I quickly grabbed a camera.

October 20, 2005 - Thursday

Today's dueling news:

Star-Bulletin: "Agricultural theft cost Hawaii farmers $11.4 million last year, about 9 percent of the industry's revenues, according to a new federal survey."

Advertiser: "Agricultural theft and vandalism cost Hawai'i farmers almost $4 million in 2004, according to a first-ever survey of farm losses due to property crime."

The difference, it turns out, was how each writer treated the $7+ million that was spent on securing against theft. The S-B included it in their total while the Advertiser did not.

This photo, borrowed from a travel web site, is the Quality Inn Oceanfront in Ocean City, Maryland, where Duke Bainum has been employed as an assistant manager, according to an update on the former city councilman's whereabouts and plans that appears in last Friday's edition of Pacific Business News. Quite an interesting scoop for little PBN.

Bainum probably landed the job because of his experience in the hospitality business, no? Oh, it didn't hurt that the hotel is owned by his family.

The former city council member and mayoral candidate told PBN he's been speculating in real estate in Thailand and on the mainland, while also starting a small import business in Hawaii.

""I spent all that money and now I am making it back," Bainum told PBN.

Although Bainum indicates an interest in returning to Hawaii politics, I'm not sure that it helped to simply leave the state after last year's close election. And despite PBN's prompting, he still had little substantive to say about the last minute allegations about his wife.

And Mr.Toby got another bit of fan mail last night:

Thanks for the great cat photos -- of all the gang, but especially Toby. It sounds like he behaves a lot like our orange and white cat, who climbs into bed to snuggle above a head at night. He invariably gets up in the middle of the night to go nose to nose with a human, breathing and rubbing his whiskers on your face, all the while purring. His other trick is to get up against the side of your face or neck and suddenly flop down in a maneuver known as the freaky flop. A sweet cat overall.

Let's see. Toby adds drooling and nose nipping to the routine, which can be a bit exciting when he catches you off guard.

October 19, 2005 - Wednesday

I know it's a wet morning when there's a bufo, or two, or more, sitting in the driveway as I wander out in the dark to put the garbage out for pickup.

Actually, it was raining steadily when I got up, but now it's tapered off to an occasional drip. Still to dark to assess the clouds, though. I think all the cats but Silverman are inside and relatively dry, including Kili and Toby, the two with most propensity for wandering, so I don't have to worry about an early roundup.

I shake my head in pain every time there's another case in which a child dies locally at the hands of a parent or guardian. What pains me is that our community only sees individual cases and not the real issue, which in my mind is our lack of support and services for young parents. I would guess that we have fewer supports for child raising of any economically advanced nation, whether that's simple parenting education, child care, counseling, or whatever. I recall a long conversation with a friend who had studied child deaths in Australia. He viewed each case as a symptom of the community's failure more than an individual's crime.

We tend to look at it quite differently and in a way that absolves the broader community of any culpability. We can continue to demand individual accountability but, it seems clear to me, the problem of child abuse isn't going to go away until we face up to the our responsibility for changing the disorganized and depressed conditions in which so many young families live.

Meanwhile, two articles caught my eye this morning. Global warming is reportedly impacting the Pacific Northwest's Puget Sound more than most other bodies of water. That's pretty close to home. And the Los Angeles Times paints a grim portrait of the future of work in America. Maybe those McDonalds jobs Howard Dicus was talking about are really the future after all.

We met a new old dog getting her morning walk over the weekend, and I told her people that I would have her photo ready in a few days. No, not Ms. Hoku, she's a very familiar face. The new dog, 15 years old, is Amelia Doghart. Just click on Hoku's photo to see this latest batch of Kaaawa morning dogs, including Amelia.

Ms. Hoku

October 18, 2005 - Tuesday

Sunrise today is at 6:29 a.m. What this means for us is that we're able to walk down to the beach in time to watch the sun emerge, something which we don't quite manage during the summer months, when the sun almost invariably gets there before we do.

Kaaawa sunrise

Sean McLaughlin, former president and CEO of Akaku: Maui Community Television, will be providing a briefing at noon today on the current congressional rewrite of the nation's telecommunications law.

The briefing, "Free Speech at Risk", is scheduled for State Capitol Room 225, and is billed as a brown bag affair (bring your own lunch).

A report from the San Francisco Bay area indicates traditional daily newspapers are shrinking in pages, budgets, and staff while free community newspapers proliferate, a dangerous trend for those looking for quality journalism.

And I see that Rupert Phillips (remember him?) has unloaded several more newspapers, this time Suburban Washington Newspapers Inc.

October 17, 2005 - Monday

Mr. Toby leads the cast of characters in today's photo gallery of Kaaawa cats. We're close to the 3rd anniversary of his rescue, which as I recall was on the day before Halloween in 2002. He was a tiny kitten and had to be bottle fed for about two weeks before making the transition to regular food. And look how handsome he is now!

Mr. Toby Please click for more

This note came in response to yesterday's musings:

I remember thinking the same thing when the book about Bush's former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill "The Price of Loyalty" came out in 2004. The book described a Bush who walked up and down his halls, angrilly muttering various right-wing platitudes like some rabid talk radio listener. You never saw that in the daily press. Bush was simply too popular then.

Sometimes common sense points in exactly the wrong direction, and disaster planning is one prime example, according to a recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education with important implications.

"The structure of the Department of Homeland Security is not conducive to good emergency management," said William L. Waugh Jr., a professor of public policy at Georgia State University. "It isn't even conducive to homeland security." Within the department, Mr. Waugh said, FEMA and other small agencies have not successfully competed for money and attention because they do not mix well with what he calls the "gun-toting" culture of the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies that dominate the department. "They have a propensity to have small groups of loyalists in a room making decisions, closed off from everyone else. No experts on what they're actually making decisions about."

Beyond that insular culture, some critics say, the department is also hamstrung by a "command and control" mentality that is ill suited to the realities of disasters.

"One of the things that's very consistently found," said Delaware's Mr. Dynes, "is that in a disaster, decisions are made at lower levels than they are made normally because you're confronted with a situation, and you can't get 10 of your colleagues to have a staff meeting to decide what to do. You've got to make a decision. So any decision in any organization is going to be made at lower levels than in normal times. And so the idea that anyone at the top could command and control all this activity is idiotic."

This perspective needs to trickle down and start informing reporting on policy making. Important stuff.

The full story is available here, at least for most of this week. The Chronicle, by the way, provides lots of excellent reading, although subscriptions are a bit on the pricey side.

Update: That photo of a Hawaiian "news boy", featured here two weeks ago, got a single bidder on eBay and sold for the minimum price of $19.99. The buyer has made over 1,000 eBay transactions, so is likely a dealer of some kind. Also on eBay now: An original (they say) copy of the December 7, 1941 Star-Bulletin. With one day of bidding to go, there are so far no bidders. And from Pahoa on the Big Island, a 1978 Honolulu Advertiser shirt. Price: $35. There's always something.

October 16, 2005 - Sunday

Worked stopped in the Star-Bulletin newsroom on Friday for an informal lunch to mark Helen Altonn's 50 years as a reporter for the newspaper. She started before Hawaii became a state and has been reporting regularly for longer than the average regular reporter has been alive. What a treasure! Congratulations, Helen!

Friday's Paul Krugman column in the New York Times hit a nerve and left me fuming. Krugman was ruminating about the change in tone of reporting of President Bush's personal characteristics.

Now that Mr. Bush's approval ratings are in the 30's, we're hearing about his coldness and bad temper, about how aides are afraid to tell him bad news. Does anyone think that journalists have only just discovered these personal characteristics?

Wait a minute. You mean those White House reporters have been just had a silent agreement to keep their mouths shut and keyboards silent on such things? I remember vividly when I first read a story in Capitol Hill Blue about Bush's temper tantrums, cursing at staffers, hostility to bad news. It was so different from the reporting of the daily press that I couldn't help wondering if it was a parody or a hoax, and I went digging trying to find more about the folks who write for that site. Now it appears they were just un-bought, not unglued.

That realization makes me mad. It should make more people mad. And it grates on me that there's likely similar knowledge about key local decision makers that is also self-censored by daily reporters with access to such inside information.

And then we wonder why the public credibility of the news media is so low.

Separated at birth? A friend in New Zealand noted yesterday's photo and commented: "Is that Willie Nelson I see?" Maybe if I get rid of the glasses and the aloha shirt....and maybe not.

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