If you visited here early yesterday, please check back on that entry for my major correction. It seems the email I received from Kona blogger Aaron Stene was simply calling my attention to negative comments published at Hawaii Threads. He didn’t write them, just flagged them for me. They were forwarded without comment, and I mistook them for Aaron’s own words. I’m so sorry for taking the wrong turn somewhere out there in the blogosphere. Apologies, Aaron.

I noticed this column, “Stiffling protest: bad choice between law and order“, published by the First Amendment Center that should perhaps be required reading for those planning the defense of Nawiliwili Habor.

On a different subject, here’s a wrap of the Bush administration’s war against openness and sunshine.

From one-time Star-Bulletin photographer Dick Schmidt:

Though you are all-powerful in sweeping the WWW re: Hawaii-related themes, commentary, blogs and tidbits, you may not have come across these rather obscure items. They’re from a local Sacramento media celebrity, R.E. Graswich, former reporter & columnist, for a couple decades, of The Sacramento Bee; now an afternoon drive-time radio show host, a local TV news comment guy, and monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine. For SacMag, he also writes an online blog several times a month. The most incisive of his Hawaii-related entries –that resulted from a recent vacation to Oahu– is “Honolulu, a slow and steady decline.”

In that “slow and steady decline” column, Graswich describes arriving in Honolulu and quickly feeling sorry for island residents.

But to wander Honolulu is to witness the slow and steady decline of a Third World place. Even at glittering Waikiki, home to Prada and Gucci, children in dirty T-shirts and sandals frolic outside derelict homes where the roofs are patched with tar paper. These properties must be worth $1 million, if you bulldoze the houses. But squalor is squalor regardless of property values.

Wide swaths of Honolulu feature long rows of concrete apartment buildings with peeling paint and windows covered with foil and curtains held open by large knots tied in the middle.

It’s a pretty devastating description of the physical infrastructure of Honolulu, quite different from the gaze of travel writers who are escorted through the mansions of Kahala or Lanikai.

Two other columns are “Shirtless in Hawaii” (“You can get better Hawaiian shirts in Sacramento than Waikiki”) and another describing a visit to the Pearl Harbor Memorial.

It’s tough to read about your city in the glare of someone else’s viewpoint. But Mayor Mufi might take note.

Later today I’ll try to post some photos of our incredible slow food experience with new neighbors down the street. I had to wave the white napkin of cooking surrender in the face of overwhelming skills that Doug displayed last night. But the feast was certainly worth it and more!