Did you notice yesterday’s dueling UH stories?

A Star-Bulletin story warned that the planned West Oahu campus faces a rapidly approaching funding hurdle. Ms. Meda is quoted regarding UH faculty concerns that this diversion funds for creation of a major new campus on Oahu comes as the Manoa campus, and the rest of the system, face hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance and other huge problems. At the same time, supporters of West Oahu seem most interested in its non-educational impact as a stimulus for surrounding development.

Meanwhile, over at the Honolulu Advertiser, there’s an op-ed by professor and former UH Manoa ombudsman, Neil Milner, describing his personal impression of the maintenance backlog on the system’s flagship campus, starting with the urinals in the bathroom of the floor where the political science department is located. He keenly expresses the UH experience.

Milner concludes his essay with a biting statement:

Instead of repairs or replacements, we get signs. People post unofficial sets of instructions. Some are detailed: “Press button. Count to five and release.” Others are terse: “Please flush!” short for “Hey, you got to flush another time. Why? Take a look.”

At UH, the old order is the most sustainable thing of all. Broken things stay broken for so long that no one considers them broken anymore. Inferior products? Don’t fix them or replace them. Put it on the user. No matter how the bathroom signs are worded, they all come down to mean one thing: “Hey, buddy boy, it’s your problem. Fix it. Good luck. Don’t bother to let us know how it turns out.”

Sadly, so very true. Things are just declared dead and left in place. Generations of students might experience one of these monuments to budget cuts before it is removed or replaced.

Did you happen to catch the Business Week story about a new service being offered to Christians who believe in the Rapture?

If they’re crazy enough to really believe in the Rapture, there’s an entrepreneur ready to offer Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, sort of Rapture-insurance for pet owners.

For a $110 fee, your pet will be cared for in the event that the Second Coming occurs within ten years and you’re wisked away to a better place.

Care will be provided by certified athiests who will certainly remain in the here and now.

The guy who came up with the idea was working on a book.

In it, he says many unkind things about the devout and confesses that “I’m trying to figure out how to cash in on this hysteria to supplement my income.”

What a great idea!

Back in this world, my sister spotted one of my mother’s cousins, Arthur Harris, in this Bishop Museum video about young Hawaiians who were dispatched to Pacific islands between 1935 and 1942.

This short video tells the unusual story of 130 young men from Hawai’i, most of them Native Hawaiian, sent to occupy small uninhabited atolls located in the middle of the Pacific between Hawaii and Australia, from 1935 to 1942. Travel back in time to the remote Pacific through photographs, archival footage, and interviews with the men and their families.