My first attempt to post earlier this morning was somehow gobbled up by WordPress, never to be seen again. More than a little disconcerting, for sure. But I’m trying again.

Two stunners from today’s Star-Bulletin.

First there was the correction:

Belinda Aquino, University of Hawaii-Manoa Philippines Studies Center director, was given a lifetime achievement award by the alumni association of the University of the Philippines. A “Newswatch” item on Page A3 in yesterday’s morning edition incorrectly displayed a photo of former Philippine President Corazon Aquino

They all look alike anyway, right? Whew.

And reporter Alex Da Silva added another good story describing more internal problems in the university’s handling of the Sugar Bowl scene. Craig Gima has already pointed to “miscommunication” between the UH president’s office and the Manoa chancellor that led to UH paying for the personal travel of girl friends, children, etc.

But today’s story was accompanied by a happy face editorial that pronounced, “UH did its best”. What? At minimum, the stories reported so far certainly may have led some readers to a very different conclusion. I felt like the editorial undermined the reporting by clipping off its critical edge.

Now former co-workers will probably criticize me for being unfair to the S-B. I don’t think that’s true, but you’ll have to decide for yourselves.

Gannett’s Honolulu Advertiser has set back contract negotiations with what the Hawaii Newspaper Guild has called “a new and breathtakingly regressive” offer just put on the table. According to the Guild’s web site, Gannett’s proposal includes a longer work day, loss of job guarantees, right to outsource, and a two-tier pay scale with new employees entering a lower-paid track. Meanwhile, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald is running a reverse auction, with its offered wage increases dropping with each month negotiations continue.

This drew a comment from the reader who pointed me to the Guild’s updates:

This seems to indicate there is a significant round of union-busting going on. I don’t know whether that still resonates with the public but unless the companies get their collective heads out of their asses, the shit is going to hit the fan sooner rather than later. Morale is plummeting like a rock and product quality continues to suffer commensurately. Permanent damage to employee-employer relationship is being done, and it sure looks like this will all end very badly. The vaunted Internet news machine, which leeches the vast majority of its content from the traditional news industry, is not the answer, for self-evident reasons.

Another reader noted that KITV ran another “no worries about Hawaii banks” story yesterday, the same day Central Pacific’s stock fell to its lowest point in nearly a decade and Bank of Hawaii ended up down 9% in a single day, capping nearly a 33% fall from its 52-week high.

No investigative work on this story. People forgot the failures of Manoa Finance, Great Hawaiian Finance, and HONFED in the early 1980s. Remember the run on HONFED, the lines were just like the ones for INDYMac Bank.

Yesterday’s query drew a response from the author of the web site that used my white cat photo. He writes:

I can tell you what is happened because I am the owner of that blog .
my name is ramtin golbang and I am Iranian .

I saw ( about ten days before now ) a dead cat in the street and surprisingly saw that a little white cat has been watching the dead body of that cat, without any movement .

I felt that , the white cat has felt something about death and I wrote about this subject in my blog : Do animals have any feeling about death? and I used your photo as the title .

So now that I’ve been in direct communication with an Iranian blogger, I suppose it will justify sweeping all of my emails up in the U.S. government’s secret surveillance system. And maybe I’ll be on the airport list for closer inspections. If so, it will take me hours to explain all of the various cables, drives, chargers, etc. that I carry when traveling to feed the computer and camera.