I might as well start the day with a picture rather than push it off to the end. This was taken several days ago. And, yes, that rain did eventually come our way. We got pretty wet several mornings over the past week, unbrellas notwithstanding, but you quickly forget about that part of the experience.

After writing yesterday’s entry on gangs and the Army, I ran across this blog entry critical of the Defense Department’s tardy response to its own gang assessments. The Gangfighters blog looks like its one to check back with periodically.

A couple of unrelated items caught my eye yesterday.

Alumni of the old original Church College of Hawaii, now BYU-Hawaii, are gathering for a three-day reunion next month. The location? Where else! Las Vegas. I’m not sure how the family values thing mixes with the Vegas venue. But hey, judge not.

Then I spotted a story in the Anchorage Daily News reporting that in these trying financial times, we are going fly someone (or a couple of someones) up to Alaska to pick up 32-year old Tyler Ferguson who failed to appear in court on the Big Island to face a DUI charge.

Okay, Tyler’s not a good driver. He’s got a string of traffic offenses going back to December 1995, court records show.

But wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to just tell him not to come back or face arrest? It would keep him off our roads without spending a bunch of money to bring him back and incarcerate him. Maybe that’s just too straight forward to be realistic.

Noted: National Public Radio reported this week on Hawaii’s slumping tourism economy. And the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned both the Supreme Court’s Superferry decision as well as highlighting a recent Maui Times Weekly story by Rob Parsons which rated the Superferry’s performance.

From the procurement file: The Department of Transportation is seeking a procurement exemption for a $13,000 contract with VCA Animal Hospital in Pearl City for veterinary services and supplies for six explosive sniffing dogs that work at Honolulu Airport. The Department of Health is seeking an exemption for a 10-year contract that will pay the Hawaii Community Foundation as much as $4 million to provide investment, management, and grant services for a chunk of change from the state’s tobacco settlement special fund. And it’s going to cost $115,000 to repair an experimental hybrid electric/fuel cell van that is being tested at Hickam Air Force Base. The fuel cell system has to be shipped back to Hydrogenics Corporation in Canada for the repair.

According to the request for an exemption from normal procurement, DBEDT says that the van “must be in operating condition to fulfill a required demonstration period”. But it seems to me that needing a $115,000 repair during the test period pretty much scuttles its chances going forward. Why not save the money and checked off the “flunked the text” box?

There’s a lot of buzz about yesterday’s announcement that Star-Bulletin owner David Black has teamed up with a private equity firm to buy the San Diego Union-Tribune. Here’s the Union-Tribune’s version of the story.

According to the Globe & Mail:

Several months ago, Black Press bumped up against private equity player Platinum Equity bidding for unnamed properties. They discovered they had entwined interests and complementary skills: Mr. Black knew the business, and Platinum had a lot of money – its funds have attracted more than $3-billion in funds.

So Mr. Black, individually, teamed up with Platinum, and they won the Union-Tribune, whose roots date to the 1860s.

Mr. Black serves as a director and adviser for Platinum, a firm that says its expertise is in “businesses facing complex operational challenges in declining or transitioning markets.” Mr. Black, working with a firm with stakes in, among other things, fibreglass, North American Hispanic telecommunications, and construction crane rentals, will be the newspaper man.

Black goes on:

“This is what I’ve done for a long time now in my life, so I have a pretty good feel for it,” Mr. Black said. “I don’t have to go to a mountain top and reflect for months to figure out some of the basics in our business. It can’t be grey. It has to be colourful, local, entertaining, topical and witty.”

One report put the sales price at just $15 million, perhaps 5% of what the newspaper would have been valued at just a few years ago.