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September 13, 2003 - Saturday
A reader suggested this comparison between administrative salaries at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Hawaii under the Dobelle administration. Wisconsin, he notes, is a larger system. Very interesting.
Also regarding UH, another reader commented on the "problem" of reporting the grades of football players before last year's Christmas bowl game.
Most departmental secretaries at Manoa required that grades be turned in on Monday before Christmas because Records needed the grade sheets by Tuesday.
With advance arrangement, an interested and authoritative party could have learned the student's grades. Lacking was, er, a little due diligence.
The facts claimed above and the inference in the previous sentence can be verified by consulting an authority -- any departmental secretary at Manoa.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle provided this special speech to the nation earlier in the week, which is worth a read.
| At home, this was the stormy dawn on September 11.
Lindsey is still missing, leaving my mood a lot like this as well. Events yesterday didn't help, but I'm not really up to sharing that story today. It will have to wait the passage of a bit more time.
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September 12, 2003 - Friday
It didn't start raining here in Kaaawa until we were nearing the end of our morning walk yesterday, but we had already heard the road to town was flooded somewhere around Waikane and drivers were being turned back. No one was getting through in either direction and waiting traffic was backed up for miles.
So when we got home, we went looking for information. Would we be able to drive in later? Where would you look? The Highways Division of the State Department of Transportation seemed like a good idea. "Aloha," says their web site, with its fancy photo of the H-3 freeway. And there's a prominent place to click for "News and Information".
There's a long list of promised topics prepared by DOT's Public Affairs Office. Lane Closures. Looks promising. Click. Well, if you really needed to know about lane closures that had been scheduled for the week of July 21-25, the last update nearly two months ago, you would now be a happy surfer. But if you were looking for information on emergency road closures that trapped thousands of commuters in one section of Oahu, you would be #!$% out of luck.
Hey, how about the number listed in the telephone directory for the DOT Highway Lane Closure Hotline? Sounds like just the ticket. The phone rings and rings. Then a recorded voice answers. "You have reached 808-536-6566. Your party's mailbox is full. It can't receive any more messages. Please call again later." Another dead end.
DOT's always been an information black hole, and introduction of a glitzy web site doesn't seem to have changed that much.
We ended up calling the Kaneohe Police Station, where an officer had obviously been fielding telephone calls all morning. Folks in Meda's office exhausted themselves in a similar frustrating search for up to date information and ended up relying on a radio talk show for their update.
When traveling on the mainland, it isn't uncommon for local governments to track daily freeway traffic during rush hours, issuing alerts about slow downs and accidents as they happen. It doesn't seem too much to expect that some local traffic authority create a central online site for current road closures. But this is Hawaii and we do things our own way. Often badly.
| Lindsey, please come home. All is forgiven. I promise not to fuss about scratching the holes in the screen door, or the 3 a.m. wake-up drill. And if you want to climb back in the corner of the kitchen counter and pee on top of the toaster, be my guest. Neighbor Elizabeth even says she won't complain any more about your breaking and entering, even in jest. Just come home. Please. |
Lindsey
Still missing |
September 11, 2003 - Thursday
A quick online check just after getting up this morning appears to indicate no 9/11 repeats, at least so far. But the New York Times has a sobering report this morning on world opinion towards the U.S.
I'm surprised that neither paper has followed up on the UH Board of Regents' unusually candid description of its review of President Dobelle (see Tuesday's entry). It was obviously rich in meaning and political implications.
Reader Joe P., who I think is still writing from Japan, sent this note earlier in the week:
I noticed that neither you nor the starbulletin.com website published Paul Minczer's anniversary illustration this year (I've had trouble accessing this page, so I saved a copy of the image for posterity).
Despite its cat relevance I can see how this could get past you, but as it had become somewhat of a de facto in the sb.com site I'm disappointed that I could not find it there. Think this had something to do with Blaine being gone?
- Joe
Minczer has marked the anniversary of StarBulletin.com every year with a new cartoon. Joe's right--we all missed it this year.
We were shuffling through Foodland in Kaneohe yesterday looking for culinary inspiration or, in its absence, things on sale. I was staring at a tray of turkey legs and found myself wondering what to do with them. I ended up making them the center of a little stew, as if they were ox tails or lamb shanks. It all turned out very well, despite the fact that I got distracted and forgot the carrots. But a bit of fresh asparagus on the side, a bottle of white wine, and a few slices of hot bread to wipe up the gravy, and it was worth eating.
September 10, 2003 - Wednesday
There's an interesting section in the late David Yount's book ("Who Runs the University?" University of Hawaii Press, 1996) describing Hamilton McCubbin's previous flirtation with a high administrative post at UH. McCubbin was a finalist for the position of senior vice president for academic affairs in 1991 and had the backing of then-Gov. John Waihee.
According to Yount, UH President Simone finally decided to offer the job to McCubbin and made a personal telephone call to make an offer. McCubbin immediately gave an interview to Ka Leo, the student newspaper. That interview, while confidential negotiations were underway over details of the appointment, was seen as backing Simone into a corner politically.
Yount hedges on whether the move was blatantly manipulative: "It wasn't clear...whether McCubbin was simply naive and inexperienced or whether his statements to Ka Leo were part of a deliberate strategy to force Simone to accept his terms."
McCubbin's appointment was eventually approved by the Board of Regents but months later, about five weeks before he was to start work, McCubbin withdrew.
It's a short section of the book but quite interesting in light of McCubbin's current controversial bid for a similar post in Manoa.
| Another find while digging through a box of old papers was this photograph of my great grandmother, Kina Kahooilimoku, who was born in Hana. The photo is believed to have been taken when she was in San Francisco in 1891. The children would be my grandmother, Heleualani Eva Cathcart, and her younger sister, Helen. Click on the photo to see a larger version. |
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And for those who are concerned, Lindsey has not returned.
September 9, 2003 - Tuesday
In a very unusual move, the chair of the University of Hawaii Board of Regents has a letter in today's Star-Bulletin correcting the impression conveyed by an earlier story that President Dobelle received a "glowing" personnel review (scroll down several letters to the one from Patricia Lee). Dobelle's p.r. machine was initially very successful at getting their spin on the story, but now pay a price. And looking back on the original story, there appears to be no factual basis for use of the term "glowing". You've got to wonder how that happened.
A Star-Bulletin correction today is another example of how computer spelling checks get us in trouble. The S-B notes:
>> Dan Quinn is the state parks administrator. A "Newswatch" item on Page A4 in the early edition yesterday incorrectly spelled his last name as Quinine.
A reader offered this comment on the relationship of blogs and journalism, introduced in a reference on Saturday to a column by writer Matt Welch.
Blogs almost never break news. They don't do this because most bloggers only read other people. They don't pick up the phone. They don't do leg work. They surf the web and opine. This is great. Its useful for keeping regular journos in line with mob fact-checking. And its all we can expect. Most of these people have day jobs. And journos that do work on things full time can only be improved if they are held to higher standards.
In that light, blogs are and always will be a secondary or even a tertiary level of journalism -- for the most part, an avid avocation. The best of them will morph into paid micro-sites or big pundit sites like Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan (both of which, I might add, have been guilty of the exact same problems they say plague folks like Ann Coulter and Robert Scheer -- generalists can't be experts in everything, even if they are super bloggers). In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
One other thing Welch avoids. Despite their efforts at outreach, blogs are a decidedly inbred community. To an enormous degree, it is the same people reading each others Web sites. Instapundit gets 100,000 visitors per day and that represents a significant chunk of blog traffic (perhaps some 4% or 5%, I think). Its all downhill from there; he is the most well read blog on the planet and the 80/20 rule of Power Curves applies in blogs as elsewhere in crowds and hierarchies. There are currently several million active blogs. The math implies that to a certain degree there must be a large component of bloggers reading bloggers. While this is great, its the same problem as Alt Weeklies have -- preaching to the choir. And it also illustrates that blogs CAN reach everyone but, in all likelihood, they probably don't and never will. Blogs are great for having fun on the Web. As a serious news influencer I would say they remain on the margins. That said, I read them and love them. For me they are useful. I am a media junky and definitely not the average sample for the public at large.
| I spent much of yesterday trying to distract myself, so here's another series of "old kine pics" from a 1920 trip to Kilauea Volcano on the Big Island. No, I wasn't there, but I came across these snapshots of Meda's grandparents while digging through other old papers over the weekend. The large lava lake appearing in many of the photos is Kilauea's Halemaumau crater. |
Kilauea 1920
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Another day and Lindsey still hasn't been seen. This is not good. It is, in fact, extremely depressing.
September 8, 2003 - Monday
It has been, I have to say, a very miserable weekend spent on the edge of nausea and depression. Mr. Lindsey, our oldest male cat, failed to show up for dinner on Thursday and then didn't do his usual scratch at the front door the next morning. He hasn't been seen since. To make it worse, I had to put Meda on a plane for Portland, Maine, on Friday and return home to start the search alone. It has been most difficult.
For the past three days, I've been up and down all the nearby streets, over through two yards down and across the road where I know he would go in the past, down into the dry stream bed beyond, and around to the string of homes on the other side of the stream. I've combed the overgrown 4-acres just below us. And I distributed flyers with his photo, hoping someone might see him. I'm still hoping, because you don't want to give in to what's beyond.
Meanwhile, other things are happening. A Star-Bulletin editorial on Saturday suggested that former Kamehameha CEO Hamilton McCubbin stick with his earlier announced plan to spend more time with his family and drop out of the running for a top spot at the University of Hawaii. This has drawn a response from McCubbin, written in the third person as a defense of "the Hawaiian candidate", which was emailed yesterday to UH Chancellor Peter Englert and others.
"This Hawaiian candidate will not fetch, sit, heel, roll over, play dead, or withdraw," McCubbin writes.
Ah, things are getting interesting!
The Honolulu Advertiser joined the majority of newspapers in censoring yesterday's Doonesbury comic strip. I looked for an editorial note somewhere about the decision, but came up empty. Maybe it was there and I just didn't find it. Even if it wasn't printed, the censored item is available online for your review.
September 7, 2003 - Sunday
Start your day with this Los Angeles Times column that is right on point. Here in Hawaii we turn the lack of school funding into a virtue by sponsoring charitable drives for essential school supplies. In my view these miss the point--we should all be paying our fair share for those essentials via the system created for such basic sharing. We call them taxes.
Here's an interesting story on the competition for online job listings between Gannett's CareerBuilder service and rival Monster.com. Locally, the Star-Bulletin is affiliated with Monster.com, which the Advertiser pushes CareerBuilder.
| I heard what sounded like coughing somewhere outside early yesterday morning, and thought one of the cats had a hairball. I stepped out onto the back deck--nothing there.
A few minutes later, there was some kind of disturbance out in front, with several cats scrambling onto the deck, looking back into the yard. So I quickly went outside in the morning twilight expecting to break up a looming cat fight. Instead, over on the side of the yard, I saw a big black dog over by the fence beyond the garage. It was about the size of Mr. Axel, a 100-pound black lab who we see on the beach most mornings.
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 Click for a larger view of Mr. Pig |
Then this black animal moved, and I realized that it was not a dog, but a large wild pig. I ran back into the house for my camera, pumped up the light sensitivity to "see" better in the twilight, and snapped a few blurry photos. Enough to show that Mr. Pig did indeed spend some time in our yard.
It isn't the first time that pigs have come down from the valley during sustained dry weather. They're looking for things to eat, and usually head back up the valley by the time the sun comes up. I'm not sure why this guy was coughing, but he just didn't sound too healthy.
Leo and Duke ran back inside when Mr. Pig came by, but little Mr. Toby gave chase, although keeping a respectful distance.
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