We arrived at my father’s hospital room late yesterday morning with a Leonard’s Bakery cake for his 95th birthday. He was surprised.

When asked how old he was, he gave it a bit of thought and then announced, “seventy three”.

Interesting. When he examined at the emergency room before being admitted to the hospital two weeks ago, the ER doctor asked him what year it is. He answered, “1986”.

In 1986 he would have been 73.

Is this a clue to something or just my mind refusing to accept coincidences? I’m thinking it could be the backbone of a great mystery novel plot.

My sister asked the nurse if it would be okay to light a candle for the cake. After checking, the nurse came back and said it would be okay.

I was surprised when my mother then pulled out six candles and proceeded to light them. In the photo above, he had just succeeded in blowing out the candles. Notice the smoke rising from the candles? Warning sign. It took just a second or two for the room’s smoke alarm to go off. I had visions of the sprinkler system being activated and all of us getting drenched and then billed for the water damage, but luckily a nurse dashed in and quickly disabled the alarm.

A last birthday point. Check the “Celebrating 95 years” card. Is there really enough demand for 95th birthday cards to sustain a commercial market? Maybe some enterprising business reporter will check it out.

The Seattle Times debuts a new look today, described in a column yesterday by executive editor David Boardman. After describing the consolidation into four daily sections from the previous five, Boardman wrote:

What you will no longer find in the daily paper are some features I know many of you will miss: the Bridge column, the Scrabble game, The New York Times crossword puzzle and the daily television listings. We’ll give you TV listings in our Sunday “TV Times” magazine, and those listings and The New York Times crossword will be available on our Web site. We’ll keep our long-running Daily Crossword in the daily and Sunday newspapers, and the NYT crossword on Sunday.

If this were the popular HBO series “The Wire,” this is where the newspaper editor would say, “Less is more,” and that we’re making the paper smaller to save you time in your busy lives.

But I’m in the truth-telling business. We are making these changes because we are reducing our two largest newsroom expenses: staff and newsprint.

Less is less, and we won’t be offering you quite as much content. That said, we’re committed to sustaining the high quality of what we publish. And we’re confident we will give you a newspaper well worth every hard-earned penny you spend on it, each and every day.

Let’s see. Two adult sons of the late Honolulu attorney David Schutter’s are in the news again in Colorado, facing charges of smuggling drugs into a prison where one of the men is currently doing time. Schutter, of course, was one of Hawaii’s legal greats over two decades. He died in 2005.

I was glad to see Advertiser reporter Rick Daysog recognized in editor Mark Platte’s Sunday column, but it points out the difficulty of transitioning from the world of print to the online world. The column would have been more useful had it provided links to each of the stories Platte describes, allowing readers to easily follow Daysog’s prodigious production over the week. In print, it’s not really possible. Online, it’s expected.

Finally, I’ve got to give a plug to Twin Bridge Farms. We bought a bunch of their Waialua Asparagus at the Sierra Club dinner on Friday night, and it became a centerpiece of our dinner last night. Wonderful stuff. Now the question is which stores carry it?