Monthly Archives: November 2017

A delayed Feline Friday

If you tried to check in here earlier today, you probably discovered the site was down and unavailable. I think it was offline for five hours or more before the techs at my hosting service got the server up and running again.

And all of those technical failures prevented me from loading today’s Feline Friday photos…my apologies to the cat lovers out there. For those who skip the cats, well, you’ll have to come back later for other news.

So without further delay, here is the week in photos of our favorite cats. Toby is still with us, although this hasn’t been a good week for him. More on that later.

In the meantime, please enjoy the photos. Just click on this picture to see today’s full batch. With any luck, the site won’t crash again any time soon.

Feline Friday: Nov 17, 2017

Throwback Thursday: With some of my mom’s plants

In our back yard back in the day.

Note the panax hedge in the background, which separated our yard from our neighbors. It was highly permeable, and I remember going back and forth through it all the time. Neighbors obviously didn’t mind, and I remember thinking how cool it was to cross the boundary and check out the other side, which was somewhat the same but different.

Today the hedges have been replace by walls built by later generations of neighbors over my mother’s opposition.

Late in life, she complained about how all the walls have transformed Kahala. She was right.

In the backyard garden.

Sometimes I wish I could write like this

I usually try to be very careful when I write, so it’s sometimes a great pleasure to read a column by someone who just lets it all out.

In this case, it’s a column from the Dallas Observer by Jim Schutze: “Fired Assistant DA Jody Warner Accuses Uber Driver of Scaring Her. Oh, Please.

It’s one of those rare columns in which he writes what most of us might think privately but never express in so many words.

Ah, and what words!

District Attorney Faith Johnson fired Jody Warner, 32, an experienced assistant prosecutor, on Monday after Johnson reviewed an audio recording of Warner drunkenly threatening and abusing 26-year-old Uber driver Shaun Platt over the weekend. In a press conference Tuesday, Warner set some kind of new world record for the least apologetic apology since Donald Trump did Access Hollywood.

Bad enough. But wait. Worse than Trump. Way worse. Through tears and much wiping of the nose, Warner made a completely off-the-wall gratuitous suggestion that Platt, the driver, was some kind of sexual predator and that’s why she got upset. That would have been like Trump saying he had to grab women there in order to proactively protect himself from personal violation.

I would throw in some more quotes, but instead I’ll just have to let you read the column yourselves.

My thanks go to a high school classmate who called my attention to the column. “Even if you have heard about this incident, read this particular account,” she said in an email. Oh, she was so right.

Two new visual resources

Here are a couple of new resources worth noting.

“Documenting Activist: The early days of the Native Hawaiian Movement,” was aired at the recent Hawaii International Film Festival.

It consists of newly digitized archival footage, including a 1984 KITV special on the Hawaiian movement and clips from 1976-1977 Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana video footage.

Veteran videographer Joan Lander, of Na Maka o ka `Aina, writes that “the good folks at ‘Ulu’ulu put this past Sunday’s ‘Documenting Activism‘ presentation up on their website.”

The link will take you to the online video.

And the Hawaii State Archives recently announced the release of its digital release of the Queen Lili?uokalani Photograph Exhibition in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of her passing.

The image files are very large, so you probably don’t want to browse the collection if you have a very slow internet connection.