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I got up this morning "knowing" that it was Sunday and I could proceed somewhat lazily with morning chores, including today's update. Everything seemed fine until Meda finally popped out of bed at about 5:40 a.m., raced into the kitchen, and said the magic word--"Garbage!" My pre-coffee brain belatedly realized that it's Saturday, garbage day in Kaaawa. It just felt like Sunday because we didn't go into town yesterday. And out here in Kaaawa, the city garbage trucks sometimes sweep through the neighborhood beginning around 5:30 a.m., and the next pickup isn't until Wednesday. So I grabbed the bag from the tall can in the kitchen while Meda made one pass through the mystery things in the refrigerator, then I was out the front door, down the stairs, and up the driveway, cats following in my wake. I made it, literally with about 15 seconds to spare. As I got to the top of the driveway and put the bag down, the truck was already backing down our street, and reached our house before I had walked back down to the garage.
Kaaawa sunrise, June 2
After 2-1/2 months of unemployment, this qualifies as "excitement". I'm going to have to make some decisions soon, before this degree of detachment begins to feel normal.Today's Star-Bulletin was extremely thin on advertising. The front section featured two full page house ads, along with another 4-column ad pitching subscriptions. These appeared to make up nearly half of all advertising in the section.
And on the energy front, a report from the annual conference of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, which was held in Southern California last week:
Caifornia Attorney General Bill Lockyer regaled the audience with his self-deprecating humor and admitted that he was getting a lot of flack for his recent attempt to attract some attention to his office's investigation of energy companies by telling the Wall Street Journal, ""I would love to personally escort [Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth] Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi my name is Spike, honey.' "
Yesterday's comments on Hawaii electricity costs brought several comments.From former Star-Bulletin writer Peter Wagner: "Regarding Hawaii's sky-high utility rates and how they got there, see latest issue (June) of Island Business. Cover story looks at Parker Ranch and other Big Island users building their own renewable energy systems because of HELCO." That's Hawaii Electric Co., HELCO, the Hawaiian Electric Subsidiary that supplies (barely) electricity for the Big Island.
Peter also noted a story by Frank Cho in yesterday's Honolulu Advertiser, describing HELCO's attempt to stave off further inroads by renewable energy suppliers by offering discounts to large commercial users, while upping rates paid by residential users.
My sister in California sent this interesting description of her electricity bill.
Electrical Energy Charge $70.16 -- charged at $0.12418/kwh -- that's for the electrons run through our meter.Transmission Charge $3.16 -- that's for getting it from the generator into PG&E's distribution system. In the deregulation process, PG&E and others though they were going to make their money in transmission and distribution, since there are a limited number of transmission lines in California. If we used energy from another producer, as we are entitled to do under deregulation, we would pay them to get the power into PG&E's distribution system. This is a new charge since deregulation.
Distribution - $20.70 -- this gets the power from the nearest substation to our house. Another new charge since deregulation.
Public Purpose Programs - $1.98 -- Lord knows what this is. We're paying for propaganda?
Nuclear Decommissioning $0.29 -- A windfall from deregulation to the major utilities. They get to charge us for taking nuclear power plants out of service. Now that we NEED the nuclear plants for volume generation, we still get to pay for tearing them down!
Competition Transition Charge - $43.07 CR -- Ditto above.
Trust Transfer Amount $5.71 -- This one has to do with the PG&E bankruptcy.
We are allowed a baseline rate of $0.11589. We get 872.1 kwh at this rate. If we use more than our baseline allowance, we pay $0.13321 for the additional kwh. Note that we actually paid more than the baseline rate for our power in April.
And, changing the subject, I ran into an interesting collection of local photographs yesterday, Hawaii Hazy Moon.
I was quickly reminded of the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles (relation, if any, to Hawaii Hazy Moon unknown), and a web search yielded this gem from closer to home:
Though clear waters range to the vast blue autumn sky,
How can they compare with the hazy moon on a spring night!
Most people want to have pure clarity,
But sweep as you will, you cannot empty the mind.
--Keizan Zenji
We've been reading a lot about California's power crisis. Months of news reports. Poor Californians.So why was I surprised by one sentence uttered on the PBS News Hour last night by David Freeman, chief energy adviser to California Governor Gray Davis and former head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power?
Somewhere in the middle of this lengthy segment, in which Freeman was opposed by an "energy economist" and power company consultant, Freeman observed: "But we have the highest prices for electricity of anyone in the United States of America, except Hawaii now."
Say what? We've gotten used to high costs, but the California "crisis" has dominated the news to such an extent that I assumed their electric rates had soared past ours. But it seems the power crisis and soaring prices that have crippled California's economy and rocked Wall Street are just part of our everyday island reality, courtesy of Hawaiian Electric. Is it true? If so, what does this mean, both for Hawaii and for the mainland? In the midst of a newspaper war, you would think there might be some competitive advantage to exploring these questions in detail. Over at the Star-Bulletin, though, reporter Rob Perez, whose detailed consumer reporting was at least partly responsible for triggering the state's lawsuit against the big oil companies, is no longer available for this natural assignment after moving over to write columns several times a week. At the Advertiser, well, there are so many new names that it's hard to tell if they have the firepower to do it.
An interesting little essay, "Surprise Part: Why Pearl Harbor is a lie" was making the rounds on email yesterday. It makes the point that removing "offensive" racial stereotypes from this Hollywood extravaganza seriously distorts the historical record and further undermines the ability of Americans to understand and interpret world events.
Ms. Wally provides the feline fix of the day.
As a tiny kitten, she and her sister (Ms. Kili) survived being dumped from a moving car into the middle of Kahekili Highway near Temple Valley. They were extremely lucky that we came by just a few minutes later, plucked them from danger, and the rest is family history.
I managed to get up early on Sunday morning and finish the day's entry by about 5:45 a.m. The first email came back at 6:39 a.m. from a Honolulu attorney, letting me know that the "Previous week" link wasn't working properly."I missed your column this past week because I've been in trial. Can you fix this?", he pleaded?
Strange as it seems, quite a few folks make at least an occasional stop through these pages. I've got two different counters. The one displayed at the bottom of this page shows over 76,700 visits since November 2, 1999. But there have been periods when that counter was "down" and not working, so the actual total is somewhat higher.
A second set of statistics, maintained by my current hosting service (HostRocket.com), counts over 26,800 visits since the beginning of this year, with 49,400 page views, or individual pages called up.
It's nice to know the effort isn't totally wasted.
I had at least one extraordinary read this weekend, a New York Times story by Tim Egan on the depopulation of the Great Plains. The only growth running counter to the depopulation trend has come in Indian counties."All of these numbers suggest that the experiment on much of the northern Plains with European agricultural settlement may soon be ending," said Myron Gutmann, a University of Texas professor who is an authority on Plains population trends.This is just wonderful reporting, based somewhere in the background on census data. I was in awe as I read through to the end.
It was also awe inspiring to see the military-industrial-entertainment complex at work with the uncritical reporting of unbridled militarism over this weekend, beginning with Pearl Harbor-The Movie, now reported to have been subject to several key edits after a script review by Navy officials, and continuing through the endless nationalist appeals for more military might that plagued print and airwaves for Memorial Day.
I hungered for a sane perspective on the losses of wars past. After all, it isn't bad to pause now and then to reflect on the horror of war, and the continuing horror of our reliance on war as a preferred means of solving problems. Instead, as smiling anchors explained again and again yesterday, we're supposed to believe that past wars justify future ones and, by suspending our disbelief, imagine that all those fallen warriors died in patriotic glory before learning to hate the nationalist jingoism of public officials and media propagandists who sent them on their way.
Maybe the rest of the week will be marked by a return to normalcy. Or maybe this is normal and I'm just realizing it, again.
The Star-Bulletin finally got around to sending a bill for its new 7-day product, two months after my former employee subscription expired.
This is Mr. Lindsey again. I was harassing him for a few more photos late Sunday afternoon, and he was barely tolerating it. But he's a pretty good sport. Kiss his head a few times and he starts drooling. It works every time, at least for me.
Memorial Day, and background worry. Why? Twice in the last week, unusual and unnerving sounds surprised us as our 2-year old VW station wagon hit the same stretch of Pali Highway as we left downtown Honolulu on our daily trek back to Kaaawa. The first time, we pulled off the road to see what horrible thing had happened. We found nothing, and the noise didn't return. Several days later, at just about the same place, a weird fluttering sound filled the car. No warning lights went on, and the car seemed to drive all right, so I kept driving. I guessed later that this round was caused by a mango leaf deposited into a sensitive area, but then we were struck by both sounds hitting at the same stretch of road. And then I pointed out that it is just where the highway passes alongside the two cemeteries--Nuuanu, where my grandparents and their friends lie, and Oahu Cemetery, where Meda's mother's family has their own section. Obviously, we don't believe in ghostly explanations, but maybe it's time to stop by and pay our respects. Just in case.
Back in Kaaawa, Mr. Silverman missed last week's photo shoot, but showed up over the weekend to claim his time with the new "Bizzy-Kitty" scratcher. These are wildly popular among our cats, although we only rarely indulge them because of the mess it makes as the cardboard is shredded. When we opened it on Saturday, Miki staked her claim and didn't budge for hours, leaving the other cats circling or waiting at a respectful distance for their turns.
Silverman was no exception, and you can see how happy he was. Oh, and it isn't just Bizzy-Kitty, it's the catnip packaged with it that creates the effect, if you hadn't guessed.
Mr. Silverman gets Bizzy.Oh, the answer to my question yesterday about what would fill the Sunday papers? More Pearl Harbor!
The cats finally decided that it was time for me to be awake and out of bed, so here I am, again.
We're a third of the way through what promises to be a lazy weekend, although I did update the photo gallery (and cats are even in a minority this week), so lazy doesn't necessarily mean worthless.
I was pretty kind to John Simonds' "readers' representative" column in the Advertiser last week,, but a diary reader was in a much more critical mood and provided these comments:
The first three entries referred specifically to the PM Advertiser. Gee, do you really think anyone reads that? I don't. I think this column is a thinly-veiled attempt to demonstrate to the morning and online Advertiser readers that there is something to read in the PM edition, like the all-important stock closings (which are guaranteed to be perfect and complete, from now on).And for those in the community who don't really read (a big target market, I suspect), they are subliminally offered the chance to hunt for errors, which appear to be fairly common. Who could resist the opportunity? The PM Advertiser is like a big Easter Egg Hunt, and they actually print the corrections in a real column, by a reader representative, so you can clip it and show your friends how smart you are when they print your discovery of error.
Other 5 a.m. knee-jerk responses from me:
"A corrective item issued by the wire service failed to get The Advertiser's attention in time to replace the earlier, inaccurate item."
This is exactly like saying "Mommy, the cookie jar broke." instead of "I broke the cookie jar." The former places the blame on the jar itself. Just as this guy's statement blames the wire service's correction for not drawing attention to itself. Oh, pulleeze.
"Adams is determined to find a reliable daily column of information nuggets and has sent out requests for proposals to Mainland feature suppliers. She says she is looking for a columnist who is dependable, accurate and affordable."
Why don't they find a local writer, and have the column be locally oriented? Oh, that's right -- then, they couldn't use it anywhere else in their machine, and they'd have to pay a real writer.
I'm going back to bed.
And so it goes on Sunday morning. Now that we're past Pearl Harbor, what will fill today's two Sunday papers?
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