iLind.net

September 16, 2005 - Friday

[Note added at 8:22 a.m.--Look what happens when you're not paying attention! Burl Burlingame reminds me to check the calendar. It's the 6th anniversary of the 1999 announcement that the Star-Bulletin was to be closed and the genesis of this web site. Once again, to remind yourself of the times, you can go back to the photos I took in the newsroom at the time, or the initial entries in what was then "A newsroom diary". Does forgetting the significance of the day when I wrote today's original entry mean that I'm officially "over" the experience?]

The flash flood alert was apparently allowed to expire at midnight after a lot of rain fell yesterday afternoon and early evening. The plants love the rain, the cats don't.

Speaking of cats, not an unusual occurrence in this household, I walked into the bedroom several days ago and found Romeo asleep on the bed. It was a most inelegant pose but par for the course for him. Feline grace must have been in one of the kitten classes he missed.
Romeo at rest-
click for larger photo

A faithful reader, whose name I'll shield, pointed me to this funny and informative blog entry recording one of those moments for people who live with cats. And today's Star-Bulletin reports on a good looking "jackets" available at the Humane Society for walking your indoor cat, complete with instructions.

One of our first cats, Windfola, was addicted to short walks outside our Kahala townhouse with her brightly colored collar and leash, complete with bells. All you had to do was open the closet, grab the leash so that the bells jingled, and she would be good to go. I don't remember how we taught her the routine, although I do recall some hilarious attempts to get her into a complicated harness, which she interpreted as her own special Houdini moment. But the simple collar, for some reason, was okay with her. When she died in 1988 at age 19, I don't think we were able to throw away the collar. As far as I know, it's still in a box somewhere here in the house, holding those memories and waiting for us to give the bells a jingle.

For those who are interested, there's a new issue of Kaaawa News online, which I updated yesterday to include more of those photos from the open house at the school. They give a bit more of the flavor of the neighborhood and its people.

September 15, 2005 - Thursday

The Royal Hawaiian Band played yesterday at Kaaawa School, warming up an appreciative crowd at the school's open house. A pickup football game was in progress as I was walking back to my car, so I stopped for a few photos. This is my favorite.

click for larger photo

Yesterday's rant on the modern wedding brought a couple of replies.

"Couldn't agree with you more," one reader wrote.

Our wedding was 8 people at Lyon Arboretum, a nice late lunch at the Pineapple Room and 3 days at the Halekulani on Kamaaina rates. It wasn't cheap -- out of pocket perhaps $1k -- but it was a whole lot less than what people seem to expect at a wedding. Frankly, we loved it that way.

Another friend checked out that web site and came up with this:

I checked it out and found a Sullivan and partner in Captain Cook who request a "Lua" dinner. Be careful what you ask for.

For mainland readers, "lua" refers to a hole in the ground and is the common name for a toilet, as opposed to a "luau" or Hawaiian feast, the word they were probably really after.

As we prepare for a couple of trips over the next two months, I was interested in this assessment of the whole experience of airline deregulation, which seems to have delivered lower fares but threatens to take down the entire industry.

Thanks to the Center for Investigative Reporting for this review of the potential conflicts faced by nominee John Roberts.

And now a Google ads update...I'm about to forget the whole affair and wipe them off these pages. During the first week, Google appeared on track to produce enough revenue to pay the expenses of this site, but the daily figures quickly fell, and fell dramatically. At the pace of the last week, it's certainly not worth the visual impact. So they'll survive perhaps through the weekend, but I'll probably start eliminating them at that point.

So that means it's back to the drawing boards for some viable means of support.

September 14, 2005 - Wednesday

The sound of the surf is loud this morning. We're apparently at that tipping point in the seasons with simultaneous large surf on the south shore, a remnant of summer, and the north shore, a sign of the coming winter.

For future reference, here's the lawsuit filed by CNN last week challenging the government's ban on reporting certain aspects of the New Orleans recovery efforts. The suit and court ruling were favorable to public access, but enforcing it appears to be a problem as results on the ground are reportedly mixed at best.

We got an introduction this week to another example of the wedding-industrial complex when the post office delivered a wedding announcement from Meda's niece complete with links to www.TheBigDay.com. Check it out. Just plug any name into the search field and see what random folks are ordering up for their wedding experience. It's a combo online travel agency and wedding registry that will shock the system of anyone even mildly uncomfortable at the excesses of corporate consumer culture. So now weddings not only have to involve burning vast sums of cash on a major spectacle or risk not being recognized as valid, but they apparently must be followed by a tacky game show mall of requested and regimented gifts where, as Meda says, comsumerism becomes a proxy for joy. Our "honeymoon" consisted of a 12-hour drive to see friends in another state and sleep on their floor, and I don't think it was that unusual at the time, so this modern world of depersonalized nuptial consumption is proving a hard pill to swallow. And how do you explain that to a young couple you don't know well who are just trying to do what everyone else seems to be doing? Tough assignment.

But for 30-seconds of cheer, of multiples thereof, you might want to wander through the 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library, a product of angry alien productions.

September 13, 2005 - Tuesday

That's Mr. Leo at the window last night, mesmerized by the sight of a large gecko waiting for prey on the other side of the glass. Leo was wired and ready to pounce, but he's learned over time that these particular geckos are tantalizingly close but out of reach. So he still gets all excited, but just has to sit and watch. You can click on the photo for a larger version.

I was struck by one short section of Sean Hao's gas cap story in this morning's Advertiser:

The caps don't require wholesalers to price at the maximum allowed, but oil industry analysts said it is likely they are doing so to offset times when they are forced to lower prices.

"If the price is driven down by the cap and our costs haven't gone down as much, we're going to get crunched," said Albert Chee, of Chevron, one of two refiners that operate in Hawai'i.

Officials for Hawai'i's second refiner, Tesoro Petroleum Corp., were unavailable for comment yesterday. However, Chee said this week's spike in prices shows that Hawai'i prices should not be set based on Mainland prices.

Hao doesn't comment on the implicit contradiction, but go back over it carefully. In paragraph two, Chevron's representative speaks in convoluted negatives. If the cap forces lower prices "and our costs haven't gone down as much", it will supposedly result in Chevron getting hammered. So he's implicitly saying that the current gasoline price reflects Chevron's actual costs and not, as alleged by outsiders in the first paragraph, charging as much as they can to "offset" leaner times.

But then in the last sentence Chevron's rep appears to say that without the current cap they would be charging less, implying that the current prices are indeed well above actual costs here in Hawaii, which he seems to say are actually less than the mainland.

Unfortunately, the contradiction was probably not as obvious during the interview as it was when the story was written, so Chevron's Chee wasn't asked to explain the discrepancy.

A final note--the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, reported on Sunday that some doctors in New Orleans gave lethal doses of morphine to critically ill patients judged unlikely to survive a forced evacuation. "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die." Checking whether this story had been reported in the U.S. led me to other frightening tales, such as this account of conditions in one New Orleans hospital.

September 12, 2005 - Monday

KHON continued its news coverage of gasoline prices last night, this time producing a page of statistics and asking drivers to react. According to the KHON figures, Hawaii led the nation with the highest week-to-week price changes (this week compared to a week earlier). Of course, drivers are not happy. That's a no brainer.

But KHON, in its rush to paint the gas cap law as a failed effort, falls short of the standards of objective reporting.

For example, I made a slight addition to the KHON data by simply calculating the year-to-year price increase. In this case, the picture is quite different. In fact, Hawaii has had the smallest percentage increase in gasoline prices of all 50 states. Hawaii's 31.5 percent increase over a year ago was dwarfed by increases of more than 70 percent in many states, including Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The average year-to-year increase across the country was 61.5 percent, nearly twice that in Hawaii. Here's my crappy little table, to use Howard Dicus' favorite description.

KHON reported: "With average prices down everywhere but four states including Hawaii this week, drivers here say they feel robbed -- and many blame the wholesale price cap."

Many blame the wholesale price cap, but shouldn't reporters be testing that consumer belief against available data? For example, the lag in Hawaii's rising prices is nothing new. That's been the standard relation between Hawaii and the mainland. Mainland prices rise and we follow. The same KHON statistics remind us that a year ago, our gas prices were already 25-50 percent above what drivers on the mainland were paying. And, in the past, when mainland prices went down, Hawaii prices stayed high. So the disconnect between Hawaii's continued price increases and the mainland dip in prices is nothing new. That's how we ended up with the highest prices in the country, and why the legislature adopted the price cap legislation in the first place.

In reporting this story, context and perspective is vital. Former Gov. Ben Cayetano's op-ed in yesterday's Honolulu Advertiser provided some of that needed perspective.

Frankly, I don't know what the real underlying dynamic is or what the ultimate evaluation of this gas cap formula will be. One test will be whether the gas cap will factor in those mainland price drops and bring Hawaii prices down over the next couple of weeks, as it was designed to do. In any case, loose reporting that simply fans consumer discontent and fear doesn't help find these answers.

Now that you're all steamed up, calm down by browsing through my latest gallery of Kaaawa photographs. These are highlights of those taken last month, and include more Kaaawa people as well as the usual scenics. Just click on this photo for more.

September 11, 2005 - Sunday

Oh, my. September 11. I remember that other 9-11 well, watching the television in the pre-dawn darkness with disbelief and shock, then watching the sunrise from the beach in Kaaawa. Let's hope this anniversary passes safely.

Noted: Former Honolulu Magazine editor John Heckathorn's column in the Star-Bulletin, "What the Heck?"

If you're looking for more information about gas prices than most people can possibly digest, check out this compilation by the Energy Information Administration.

Sunday morning viewing. Time for another minute in Kaaawa, this time captured on tiny video from the corner of Pohuehue Road and Kekio Road. This bit of Google's satellite map marks Pohuehue and Kam Hwy...Pohuehue runs off to the lower left, and the corner where I was standing with the camera is visible by a large tree in the lower left.
click here for another
60 secondsin Kaaawa

And for Sunday morning reading, take a gander at this well-done blog I stumbled across, King of Zander. or this long London Times story on the rise of the web both for citizen journalism and virtual warfare.

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