Apologies to friends at the Star-Bulletin, who are obviously upset by my comment yesterday about the online availability of the Advertiser’s Saturday edition that never made it into print.

Apparently the Star-Bulletin actually got a paper on the streets and to some subscribers despite the blackout. That print edition never made it to Kaaawa and I didn’t know it existed until the first comment was posted here later in the day.

Check the comments left yesterday for more opinions about the two newspaper’s responses to the blackout. The Advertiser just scrubbed their newspaper and went 100% online, while the S-B crew got an edition on the street.

Here in Kaaawa, we had rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning, for most of Saturday morning. But no electricity until about 2:20 p.m.

I managed to finish one Harlan Coben novel and make a substantial dent in another by Alafair Burke before power was restored. But the high point of the morning was the arrival of a former neighbor with hot coffee in hand, courtesy of her gas stove. Losing electricity for less than 24 hours is an inconvenience. No coffee is a disaster. Thank you, Tanya!

We were watching the weather yesterday with increasing anxiety because we were due at a mid-afternoon wedding of one of Meda’s former students just around the bend at Moli’i Gardens, part of Kualoa Ranch. The site is near the border between the ahupua’a of Kualoa and Hakipu’u, one of the wetter parts of the island. But the weather cleared and the wedding proceeded without any visible glitches.

Meda’s quoted in a story appearing in the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette, “Doubts arise over surge in girl fights“.

“We’ve had a media-led moral panic from this,” said Meda Chesney-Lind, professor of women’s studies at the University of Hawaii at Monoa and contributor to U.S. Department of Justice research on juvenile delinquency. “This has been a man-bites-dog story.”

Numbers put together by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, an arm of the Department of Justice, show between 1997 and 2007 there was an 18 percent increase in girls younger than 18 accused of simple assault.

Arrests of juvenile girls accused of more violent crimes dropped by 12 percent during the same time, making researchers such as Chesney-Lind, who helped collect the data for the Department of Justice, question whether it’s just policy changes that have led to the increase in arrests involving girls fighting.

Finally, have you noticed that our Kaaawa morning dogs have been missing from these pages recently? I was worried until I figured out what’s going on. As the season has changed, it’s suddenly dark when we leave the house. Too dark for photos of our favorite dogs. So the dog-camera connection is harder to make. It’s taken well over a month to collect this batch of our morning dogs, like the Dogue des Bordeaux puppy across the street. As always, just click for more.