First, a Friday update in response to several questions.
First, we did buy a new range after our previous appliance went out with a bang, or at least a cloud of acrid smoke. We got through the interim cooking on our small gas grill, with one night of takeout from our regulat Thai restaurant in Kaneohe (Chao Phya, next to Starbucks in the Windward City Shopping Center).
Thanks for all the suggestions, but after exploring many of them, and checking availability, we ended up back at Sears, which was able to deliver and install an electric, smooth top drop-in range to us in Kaaawa within two days. They could have come the next business day, but that didn’t fit with our schedules. We managed to get a decent price, thanks to (a) a pricing error that cut off $200, and (b) another 10% discount for using a Sears charge card, which we signed up for on the spot in order to claim this discount. Sears was about the only place to find a mid-priced drop-in that was in stock, ready for delivery. Lots of other places had great selections of items for special order, delivery in about 4-5 weeks, which just wouldn’t have worked for us. Oh, there were also the high priced ranges in the $2,000+ category, which we never considered. Are people crazy?
Second, a Feline Friday report on Ms. Wally. If you recall, I took her to the vet two weeks ago when her appetite had dropped to near zero. The first round of tests diagnosed a urinary infection and crystals in her urine. The good news was that all other major systems checked out okay, heart, kidney, liver, thyroid, etc. I begged for to get the prescribed antibiotic as a shot rather than a twice-a-day battle to assert human authority over cat, the kind of battle that mortal humans rarely win and that end up with that sticky pink goo spit out over everything. They also sent Wally home with a fancy pain killer, which had her wandering the house, eyes dilated, looking for love, and a little food. She went back last weekend for another shot of antibiotic. I was able to report that her appetite had picked up, not to normal levels, but at least to the point where I’m not worrying that she’s going to starve. Next stop–a round of dentistry. She has some dental “issues” that could account for her picky eating. So now we’ve got to schedule the dental work and figure out how to pay for it. But that’s another tale.
And here are some suggestions for today’s almost-weekend reading.
From The Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports,” which begins with four incredible paragraphs.
“I’M NOT HIDING,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”
Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.
“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”
Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”
From Pro Publica, “The Hidden Hands in Redistricting: Corporations and Other Powerful Interests.” Can someone involved in tracking Hawaii’s redistricting comment on whether any such groups have been spotted here?
Also from the ProPublica Blog: “Do Regulations Really Kill Jobs Overall? Not So Much.” Throw this into the debate.
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If you haven’t seen it, here’s another interesting investment in college sports from broadcast media:
ESPN Obscures Its Own Role in the Conference Realignment Mess: The network’s $300 million deal with Texas, at the heart of the news, goes almost unmentioned
by Ryan Chittum//Columbia Journalism Review
http://goo.gl/4amzv
Glad to hear the Ms. Wally is coming around. We had two cats with constant battles with feline gingivitis. We eventually had their teeth pulled. As horrifying as it may seem, they got through the surgery great and they ate dry cat kibble for many years after without a problem. And they never had any future problems with the gingivitis. It sure beat the constant battle with their gums. Good luck
Duke’s mother had no teeth when we rescued her. She also ate dry food. And taught Duke to hunt cockroaches, which she really didn’t need teeth to kill.
Congratulations to your kitties and you. We too have been through an incredible two weeks of dealing with Boots – formal name is Bootes, The Huntsman. He’s well back on the road to good health, but after spending several days at the vet’s and getting negative results back on all kinds of tests, no one is able to tell us how he went from great to really sick in less than eight hours. I suspect that poison of some sort was ingested.
Back to your question re reapportionment. I, along with several of your other regulars, have covered every single Commision meeting since April.
My read of the process is that no one entity is going to “win big.” There is a lot of unhappiness from certain people living on the Big Island about not removing ALL the military from the count and from others who are concerned about divvying up communities, but the staff as well as the members of the commission have been open & up front about what they’re doing.
The big issue that has divided not only political activists but also community members is whether or not to count the military, their dependents, college students, and prisoners housed in Hawai`i. Hawai`i prisoners serving their terms in Arizona are counted as residents there, not here. Pirsoners here are not counted anywhere.
Hawai`i is almost unique in eliminating the four groups. Forty-eight other states do count them while Kansas only removes active duty military from the count.
There will be some state legislators who will have to deal with boundary changes that winds up putting two of them in the same district.
With respect to how the changes will impact me, unless there are some significant changes coming out over the next couple of weeks, I will no longer be in House District 49/Senate District 24 but House District 51 and Senate District 25.
A decade ago, I wound up being disappeared altogether when a House district in Kane`ohe wound up being absorbed into surrounding districts. At that point, I decided to “move” into District 49. A few years earlier, we’d moved from Kane`ohe to Kailua but all that happened was to move into a new precinct.
Now we’re “moving” again to accommodate the O`ahu population shifts from urban Honolulu and Windward O`ahu to West O`ahu.
Ian, you have eleventy hundred cats, about whom you’ve just described an elaborate daily feeding and medicating ritual, and you’re asking if people who buy expensive stove/ranges are crazy??
😉
Ooops. Guilty as charged.
I can report that the only people who tried to influence the Hawaii County Redistricting Commission were interested citizens.
But, if anyone wants to buy me lunch…..
aloha,
mike
I once saw an interview with an expert on college sports (I think he was an academic) and his opinion is that American college sports, especially football, are really semi-professional and no longer amateur sports, and they should be treated as semi-professional. That would increase the benefits to and protections of the players, but spending more on players is not necessarily in the interest of universities — not just in terms of money, but in terms of self-image. The modern university, with its roots deep in the guilds of the Middle Ages, is still reluctant to perceive itself as what it has become: a corporation that relies mostly on temp work for almost all of its tasks, be it teaching (grad students and adjuncts), entertainments (athletes), research (postdocs and visiting professors), or even administration (nomadic mercenaries). For those who insist that “universities should be run like businesses”, they should know that this has been the case for some time now.
There was a controversy about a former volleyball player at UH having a previous career as a professional athlete, I believe. In the future, that might be more acceptable. In the distant future, university athletes might become fully professional, and not even be students. And why not? They already are professionals, really. The only thing standing in the way of this is the snobbery and pompousness of professors (I suspect that professors act this way because they are not at elite universities, and so they are insecure in themselves).
One odd item:
I remember reading an article online in the Star Advertiser about a year ago on how a former football coach was doing now. He is doing quite well. But the comment section was rife with rumors about how he supposedly had a love child with a former star volleyball player. Bizarre. Why would people have this huge fascination with the private lives of these people who have nothing to do with anything? Also, the rumors seemed really improbable — even plain dumb — but that’s beside the point. It’s irrelevant. Small town life at its worst.
But the real juicy story was that this football coach was largely a fraud. He only won games because the athletic director set up games with the worst teams. When the UH football team was compelled to play real teams, they were consistently trounced. In fact, I believe that the athletic director was fired for doing this, and could have been legally charged with fraud. But the coach is still a local legend.
UH has a losing team, and local folks still have not figured it out. Indeed, UH will always have a losing team because Hawaii cannot afford to compete with bigger, richer states. No matter how much is invested in sports at UH, other places can invest much, much more. That just does not seem to sink in at all.
When issues are personalized to the point of fantasy, even while the Titanic heads into the icebergs, the future does not bode well. But most people are happy nonetheless.