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The rumor mill is reporting that the list of new assignments went up on Honolulu Advertiser bulletin boards sometime yesterday. I haven't seen the list yet, so can't report whether there are many unhappy campers as a result.And the Star-Bulletin reported yesterday that a grievance is being filed over the Hawaii Tribune-Herald's attempt to lay off five staffers and convert their positions to part-time because the move failed to comply seniority provisions of the Newspaper Guild contract.
The S-B also reported in a news brief that KITV has selected a replacement for popular news director Wally Zimmerman, who was abruptly terminated at the end of July. The new guy has been in Wisconsin. Yet another influential news position filled by someone with no sense of the local community and its issues.
And over in San Francisco, Examiner editor and publisher Ted Fang has been dumped from the family controlled business by his mother, according to a report in the rival Chronicle.
I'm not sure whether folks in the Star-Bulletin's editorial department were being a bit tongue-in-cheek when they highlighted as "quotable" a comment by Office of Hawaiian Affairs chairman Clayton Hee responding to the debate challenge from UH Prof Haunani Trask.
"Haunani-Kay Trask is living proof that common sense and compassion are not prerequisites to a Ph.D.," Hee is quoted as saying.
Of course, anyone who has seen Clayton in action knows that common sense and compassion are certainly not prerequisites to lead OHA, as he tends to display neither attribute. It's a quote that could come back to haunt Clayton the next time he blows his top in public.
It's raining this morning in Kaaawa. Hopefully it will clear up in the next half-hour or so and make way for our walk.
I was invited to talk to a local high school class yesterday about media issues. It was a small class, fewer than a dozen students. OK, so you can tell it was a private school.It provided some sobering feedback.
I asked the students how many read a newspaper. A very few hands went up. "Sometimes," one student said, perhaps overstating the frequency of her newspaper experience.
I asked how many of their homes get a newspaper delivered. Most of the hands went up, either for the Star-Bulletin or Advertiser. Several indicated they got both. So most of them have a newspaper available but only occasionally read it, if ever.
And then I asked where they go for news. It was a chorus: "The Internet".
Television? "Nooooo," came the reply. Several said they didn't even have a television set.
I brought along copies of several newspapers. They recognized the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin, but when I got to Honolulu Weekly, several commented, "Everybody reads THAT".
Their teacher speculated that the Weekly would be doing much better financially except that so many young people leave Hawaii, reducing its natural market. An interesting observation.
This is the stuff that gives newspaper editors and corporate managers permanent indigestion. Rocky times ahead in the newspaper business, and the news business in general, if this is any indication.
This is Ms. Harry, a.k.a. Harriet, caught with her tongue in mid-lick.
This photo has no reason to be included here today, except that Harry doesn't make herself available for as many photo ops as her sister, Lizzie.
These days I have to walk about back and start down the trail into the empty state parcel, then call for Harry until she comes running and crying out of the bushes. I can normally hear her several seconds before seeing any signs of movement.
The only thing I an say is that she's quite a happy hunter, and there are probably a lot fewer mice and rats in that corner of the world than there used to be.
Star-Bulletin owner David Black wasn't the only one from his newspaper chain examining Hawaii options last year, according to this interesting note from July 2000 found in the Bremerton, Washington-based Sunlink.com:Pat Jenkins, editor of Sound Publishing's Port Orchard Independent, left last week to become editor of the Kauai Garden Island, a daily newspaper owned by the Pulitzer Community Newspapers chain."Pat's got a job as an editor of a daily. So it's a very good job," Shepard said.
So good that Jenkins was able to recruit Dennis Wilken, editor of Sound Publishing's Bremerton Patriot while also serving as the group's county bureau reporter, to be his senior reporter at the approximately 16,000 circulation Island Garden.
Sound Publishing, of course, is Black's U.S. subsidiary which owns a string of community newspapers in the Puget Sound area.
And Sound Publishing Holdings is the company identified at the Star-Bulletin's legal owner in a "statement of ownership" found in the paper's pages recently. Small world.
Trask vs. former Star-Bulletin publisher turned columnist John Flanagan, up close in a face to face debate over U.S. foreign policy? That's what Professor Haunani Trask called for yesterday in response to criticisms by Flanagan. She also posed the same challenge to Gov. Cayetano and OHA chair Clayton Hee, who has said he intends to run for Lt. Governor next year. An article on Trask's challenge appears in today's Star-bulletin.
"I have statistics and books and if (Cayetano) wants to criticize me, let him come up and present his evidence," Trask is quoted as saying. "I am a scholar. Where is his scholarship?"
What a show it could be, perhaps with the debaters chained at the wrist like a wrestling extravaganza, with no one cut loose until they give up and admit defeat. For now, though, it remains bit of conceptual art confined to the imagination. Too bad.
David Black's newspaper chain continues to expand with last month's acquisition of the Journal of the San Juan Islands, a small Puget Sound weekly with paid circulation of 5,000.The Journal had previously competed with The Islands' Sounder, owned by Black's Sound Publishing. According to the Journal's story on the buyout:
The purchase means that, for the first time, all newspapers in San Juan County are owned by the same company. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.There will be no merger of newspapers, Tempelmayr said - The Journal will serve San Juan Island; The Islands' Sounder, Orcas Island; The Islands' Weekly, Lopez Island. There will be some shared coverage between the newspapers.
Staff cutbacks followed the sale, according to the San Juan Islander.
The sale of the Journal of the San Juans to Sound Publishing Inc. was finalized yesterday Sept. 14. Some staff reductions have been made: Judy Sterkel who was the ad rep for the Sounder was let go as was Journal reporter Jeff Vanderford and Sounder reporter Lauren Theodore. Other staff changes are still to be determined.
I raced home yesterday to get here before dark, hoping to check up on the fate of "the baby", the chicken injured by the neighbor's dog over the weekend.
With a little cat food as a lure, baby soon showed up, and by all appearances is doing fine. I quickly grabbed the camera. That's the baby, the fine speckled specimen in the photo.
I'm worrying a bit that she's really a he. Look at that wonderful white mane, which has been inherited from the line of roosters that have ruled the roost on our end of Kaaawa. Time will tell.
The baby.
Click for larger photo.
I delivered Meda to United Airlines departures about the time the sun rose this morning. She called later to report no lines, with minimal hassles in getting checked in and through security. That's good news for island travelers. Yet to be seen is how full the flight will be, although Star-Bulletin columnist Dave Donnelly says his recently flights to and from San Francisco were packed.The Hawaii Tribune-Herald newspaper notified five employees at the end of last week that their jobs would be cut back to part-time from full-time in two weeks. The announced cutbacks don't appear to involve any reporters or newsroom employees at the paper, owned by the Donrey Media Group. I haven't heard any further details, but Tribune-Herald staffers are members of The Newspaper Guild, and their contract provides some protections and benefits in these circumstances.
Today's early airport run displaced our normal morning walk. But this was the view yesterday. Tides have been quite high, and the ocean's been rough. There was even a story going around last week of a large glass ball coming to shore right about where this picture was taken. If true, it's the first ball we've heard of in several years. The last wave of glass balls arrived 3-4 years ago, and at that time we were finding at least one small ball a week for a couple of months. We'll have to wait and see whether this new sighting is a sign of more to come.
We both broke one of Kaaawa's basic rules: Don't get personal with the wild chickens.These feral chickens are, after all, a neighborhood nuisance. Their numbers always threaten to get out of control. And chickens are not sweet birds. They are really pretty nasty, ill-tempered, and aggressive. We don't own these chickens, but there's a little bunch that roams through our yard during the day and then disappears as evening approaches to roost somewhere down our hillside, across the street, and behind the houses on the far side.
Several years ago we got attached to a big rooster who was the center of this band. We just called him "Big Guy". One day I was working here at home when a ruckus started. "Big Guy" and one of his rooster offspring were fighting. It ended up being a fight to the death. I dug a hole and buried the Big Guy on our hillside.
So on Saturday afternoon, Meda called for help. When I ran out, she was out of breath. "Betty...chicken...in her mouth...think it's the baby."
Betty (a.k.a. Sunshine) is a black, part pit bull puppy that neighbor Bob rescued and is trying to reform. She's a sweet dog in almost all respects, except that she relishes escaping his fenced yard, and she likes to chase and kill chickens. This time, she had "the baby".
I ran down the street and saw Betty and another dog from around the corner frolicking near what appeared to be a chicken carcass on its back, legs pointing to the sky, but when I picked it up, those little beady eyes looked back at me. She wasn't dead. At least not yet.
I have to explain about the baby. She's not really a baby any more. She's pretty much a grown up chicken. We fell into the trap of thinking about her as special. Her mother is a little brown hen who showed up one day with what appeared to be a broken leg. It dangled uselessly, and I assumed she was a goner. I don't think I've seen another chicken survive that kind of injury out here. And sometime a bit later, she disappeared, confirming my opinion.
But then then one morning, amidst the peeps of new chicks, up the hill hops this little hen with about a dozen freshly hatched chicks. This has become a wrenching sight. Chicks are all so cute, but the last thing we need out here is more chickens. In any case, this crippled hen couldn't do her normal jobs. She couldn't scratch to show her chicks food, but somehow scratched with her beak and accomplished the job. She tried valiantly. Over time, most of the chicks died. But at least one survived. The baby. She grew up to be quite a handsome bird, a speckled black-brown-and white hen.
Meanwhile, the little brown hen ever so slowly recovered the use of her leg. At first it dangled. Then she could use it to balance, but the foot was completely useless. Later, if she flopped the foot down just right, it would take a bit of weight like a crutch. And then, much to our surprise, she began walking on it again.
But on Saturday afternoon, with the dogs standing at the ready, I held the battered speckled black-brown-and white hen, formerly known as the baby, carried her back home and left her in a cat cage down in the garage.
By Sunday morning, much to my surprise, she was standing in the cage. A bit worse for wear, but standing. I put the cage out in the yard, opened the door, and let her out. She could walk, and eat, but for several hours she seemed to just want to rest. I found her later in the day in the tangle under a beefsteak plant in the back yard, plumped down in a patch of sun. Meanwhile, I tried to stay alert for any sign of dogs. And by the end of the day, I watched her join another hen in the trek down the hill, across the road, through another yard and to her mystery roost. Meda and I were both pleased by it.
Obviously, we broke the rule. We've gotten too personal with this chicken.
So it goes in Kaaawa.
Sunday's diversion is from the town of Maple Glen, in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, population approximately 5,881. That's about twice the size of Kaaawa, and 5,000 miles away. The story in the Intelligencer Record was referred to me by a very alert reader (you know who you are) because of the subject matter--cats.The lead:
Ruth and Rebecca Brown have 4,386 cats.The identical twins from the Maple Glen section of Upper Dublin Township have fashioned thousands of tiny, detailed cats from clay.
They're not just ordinary kitties, either. They are cats in Confederate clothing. Union garb too, for that matter.
As Civil War buffs, the twins bring history to life by creating sweeping battle scenes and dioramas of dramatic moments, as interpreted with clay cats.
"We've always liked cats," Rebecca explained, "so I guess it was just natural to make cats."
Just natural to lay out the Battle of Gettysburg complete with 1,300 uniformed cats of clay? This is quite amazing stuff, even for a cynical cat buff.
"The new cats are nice and spiffy and slim," Ruth & Rebecca said about their feline warriors. "The old ones are fat and lumpy."
Hmmmm. Are they talking about our cats? I trust not.
"Sometimes," said Ruth Brown, sister of Rebecca, "you just have to make the cats."
Amen.
And this week's updated photo gallery is a bit different. No sunrise, and only one cat. Instead, it's a portrait of a most interesting flower that I found in a corner of our yard.
Click on this photo (or the "photo gallery" banner up top) to check it out.
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