A reader wonders about the disappearance of Advertiser street racks.

All around the city there are vending machines disappearing. Many of the machines are off of very visible locations.

I work in downtown, there have been alot of corners that I have bought papers from before that no longer have vending machines on them. Tamarind Park, across the street fronting 1st Hawn Bank, Davies Pacific Center, Kinko’s on Queen St and Bank of Hawaii at Ward Plaza.etc.

I can’t answer his question, but maybe someone out there can. Email me, ian(at)iLind.net.

Jim Cartwright, university archivist, responded with the answer to yesterday’s mystery building, which was mislabeled “Hawaii Hall”.

Your two views of “mystery,” nos. 22 and 24, are of Old Gilmore Hall, 1935-1973, which was demolished in order to make room for the construction of Art Building. The original two-story building was finished in 1935 on a diagonal so it faced mauka/Ewa to the space between Farrington and Hawaii Halls; by 1939 two one-story wings extending had been constructed at each end. So your photographs date between 1935 and 1938.

Guesses received prior to hearing from Jim were all over the map, so to speak.

This from former Star-Bulletin business writer Tim Ruel:

The 2008 holiday season is almost here!!!! As you may know, my family runs a Christmas tree farm in Central Oahu called Helemano Farms. We have been selling trees since 2005. The farm is in Whitmore Village and we will be open from Thanksgiving through Christmas this year. We sell live-cut Norfolk Pine trees as well as our popular wreaths. Some of our trees are now up to 20 feet!

If you would like to learn more, please visit http://www.helemanofarms.com. You can reach us at contact@helemanofarms.com.

Why buy from us?
Our tree prices start at $40. Our Hawaii-made wreaths are $25.
Our Christmas trees are not shipped to Hawaii, which eliminates the spread of invasive bugs from Oregon and the use of nasty shipping fuel from Alaska.
We are 100 percent locally owned and operated.
All the best!
Tim Ruel
Helemano Farms LLC

Roadrunner sent out notices earlier this month that existing home pages will be deleted as of December 17 unless they are moved to one of two new Roadrunner options.

We will retire the existing Personal Home Pages system on December 17. Any pages or files left in your old account will no longer be available after that date, so make sure that you backup or move your account as soon as possible.

It’s a pain for me because this blog started as a small web site hosted as part of our regular Roadrunner account and, after a decade, there are a lot of stray links out there to those early RR pages. So now I’ll have to work at saving those legacy pages and at least partially integrating them into this site.

Ms. Wally is my featured feline this Friday. We got back from St. Louis on Sunday evening, and she spotted the carry-on bags that I dropped on a chair in the living room. Hidden from view in the photos is a sweater that was on the top of the open gray bag. Wally somehow saw it and decided that it would be just the very best place to nest. I finally had to disrupt the scene to prevent cat hair from getting into everything. Maybe that’s a losing battle in this household?