Recent photos: Historic Kualoa sugar mill • September in Kaaawa

November 4, 2006 - Saturday

Never a dull moment in LaLa Land. A voicemail message on her office phone in Manoa led to two days of cell phone calls with staffers from Giraldo Rivera's show, until Ralph and his black Lincoln were dispatched to the Los Angeles Convention Center on Friday afternoon to pick up Meda and deliver her to the Hyatt in Beverly Hills for an interview.

Meda, Ralph and the Lincoln

No Geraldo, but the interview tape and a copy of one of her books were apparently expressed off last night to New York. Hopefully they will let her know whether any of the interview is going to make it onto the air.

I'm told that the voice in the Lingle radio ad referred to in yesterday's entry are Micah Kane and one of his daughters. Kane is former head of the state Republican Party and now director of the Dept. of Hawaiian Home Lands.

The Akron Beacon Journal, recently purchased by Star-Bulletin owner David Black, is reportedly following the S-B and cutting a deal with Monster.com. The former Knight Ridder newspaper had been part of the CareerBuilder network, owned by Gannett and Knight Ridder.

In another recent story out of Akron, Black hints that he could be interested in bidding for a group of four Copley community newspapers in Ohio that are up for sale.

Finally, a letter in which Meda's mother told of surviving the terrible tornado that hit Woodward, Oklahoma in April 1947 is quoted in a recent entry in a blog devoted to unsolved mysteries. An extended quote from the letter appears mid-way down the column.

November 3, 2006 - Friday

A reader had a very interesting comment & question:

I see all these Lingle commercials mentioning Iwase and I wonder if he's gaining on her in the polls.

If you've got a big, insurmountable lead in the polls you don't even bother mentioning your opponent. But Lingle's ads are starting to sound almost desperate.

Did you hear the new radio spot? The little kid saying, "Daddy, why does Randy Iwase say such nasty things about Auntie Linda?" And daddy replies, "Desperate people say desperate things, sweetheart."

Good God! How stupid.

I wish that I knew a bit more about current polling, but I don't.

In the meantime, here's a bit more info gleaned from the Lingle campaign's spending reports. Below I've culled out the top ranked recipients of campaign expenditures. The top three may be unfamilar. They were to me.

November 2, 2006 - Thursday

That proposed exemption so that Hawaiian Electric can proceed with design and permitting for a system to deliver 9 megawatts of standby emergency power at Honolulu Airport was approved by the state procurement office on last Friday. The approval was finally posted on the SPO web site yesterday. Despite all the public bellyaching about the airport power outage after last month's earchquake, I don't believe there's been any reporting about this generator contract, which was, according to documents submitted, in the works when the earthquake hit. Why the continued silence? It's still a mystery to me.

Okay, confession time. I'm missing all the rain and related excitement in Kaaawa. We arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday night, leaving a friend and favorite cat sitter trying to keep the critters occupied and out of the rain. And what a rain! Yesterday, by all accounts, provided a flashback to the March floods in Kaaawa.

It's only the second day of rain, but it's already flooding in certain areas. I'm hoping to get a report on the status of the stream and bridge next to the Kaaawa Fire Station, but haven't heard anything yet. Didn't I just read that a dry winter was being predicted?

I have to say that from this distance, the Advertiser's frequent breaking news updates, although sometimes quite brief, have been extremely useful and offer the most thorough information available, at least that I've been able to find.

Yesterday I was looking at Gov. Lingle's fundraising numbers and thought of checking on media expenditurs. It's an interesting picture. The bottom line is that the newspapers' account for only a small fraction of Lingle's advertising dollars, at least according to my quick-and-dirty analysis.

Here's a rough summary of where Lingle's campaign spent the most money. Honolulu's two dailies and MidWeek combined to account for just 5.2 percent of Lingle's media dollars, compared to approximately 70 percent paid to the four major broadcast stations plus Oceanic Cable.

You can click on the list to see a fuller (and larger) version.

I consider this a rough list because it relies on the latest aggregate figures reported on Lingle's most recent campaign spending report, which covered the period through October 23, 2006. I did not attempt to go back through prior reports to catch any large media buys that, for whatever reason, were not reflected during this most recent period.

Do Lingle's numbers accurately reflect the waning role of newspapers as a political advertising vehicle? I don't know of any overall numbers available to answer that question. Perhaps someone more savvy about the marketing world can offer a more informed opinion.

And if you checked in here early yesterday, read the "update" in yesterday's entry from a reader who ordered via Amazon.com and reports the system is still taking orders from Hawaii as usual.

November 1, 2006 - Wednesday

Rain and more rain. That was Kaaawa yesterday. Meanwhile, we drove into town and, once through the tunnels, it was dry and sunny in Honolulu. Strange weather, and not popular with the cats, who don't enjoy being forced indoors.

Oh, no, can it be true that Amazon.com has kicked Hawaii residents out of its grocery deals? This in from a reader:

After all the positive write-up I tried to place a grocery order this morning and got the following response from Amazon:


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Amazon.com Customer Service <cust.service03@amazon.com>
Date: Oct 31, 2006 11:41 AM
Subject: Your Amazon.com Inquiry
To: "carrieleonard@gmail.com" <carrieleonard@gmail.com>


Thank you for writing to Amazon.com.

I'm sorry, but we are not able to ship any grocery items to Alaska or Hawaii.

Unfortunately, for health and safety reasons we cannot ship any grocery items including food, personal care items such as shampoo and skin care, and household items to Alaska or Hawaii or APO/FPO addresses.

Thanks for your understanding and thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

If this reflects Amazon's new policy, it's a policy implemented in the last 36 hours or so and deserves some comment.

[Update: Alex, who brought the Amazon deal to my attention earlier, just responded that he was able to order again this morning without any problem. Here's his report:

I just and ordered some more stuff with the Grocery3 discount and free savings this AM.. Seems to work fine. Not sure -- maybe your reader was picking highly perishable stuff that doesn't ship to Hawaii. Amazon can be persnickety / complicated in its rule sets. But I guarantee you, for most dried goods and packaged goods (like, say, Annie's Organic Mac Cheese boxes) the Hawaii deal is still in effect. It's also possible the person who wrote in doesn't understand the way Amazon works and may have tried to ship something perishable via super saveer that cannot be shipped that way.

Perhaps this is a prime case of "don't ask, don't tell".

Another reader notes:

i get the afternoon star-bulletin.

mine arrived at my house at 5:20 p.m. on Oct 30.

not a word on the Transit announcement and a dated editorial which indicates the paper didn't have a clue Mufi would be releasing a preference that day.

that's not good.

Finally, the author of this long comment regarding the Governor's Comprehensive Communications Review Committee asked to remain unnamed, and I'm willing to go along with the request for the sake of the ongoing discussion. It's a somewhat cynical view of the situation and of both the public and the media.

A lawyer who defends himself, it is said, "has a fool for a client." Surgeons rarely operate on themselves successfully, or their families. And the media is notoriously bad at covering itself. Only a few national newspapers have successfully employed media critics, though the web has opened up possibilities for responsible media coverage/criticism by people (like Jack Shafer at Slate) who have some journalistic standards and credentials.

So, I am trying to imagine - from a straight practical POV -- the media in Honolulu covering the Governor's Office's "comprehensive communications review committee," made up of media executives. In short, we would have a bunch of reporters, most of them young and impressionable, asked to cover a meeting of their bosses. Do you keep the camera focused on your own executive, or those of the competition? What if something negative is said about your employer? If your boss says something stupid or useless you can lose it on the cutting room floor. But what if the executive of a rival media outlet says something brilliant? Some outlets refrain from even mentioning (or downplay) the prizes won by the competition. Are we going to give space or air time to the competition saying smart stuff?

Media in this town mostly promote themselves with positive images of what they do well, only criticizing the competition by implication. (We have a helicopter, unnamed others do not; we were the first with this or that, unnamed others came later, etc.) They don't criticize one another negatively or by name because they know their turn will likely come to be criticized. You may see this as a bad or unfortunate reality. But reality it is.

The Lingle administration - to provide for some public awareness --could have invited cameras for the beginning of the meeting and then expelled them so some real business and frank discussion could take place. But they would certainly have been accused of grandstanding in advance of the election. So why bother? I doubt any of those invited to the meeting were eager to see their mugs on the six o'clock news, filing into a meeting to discuss their failings.

Finally, from the point of view of reader/viewer/listener interest, I am guessing these meetings are pretty dull. Technology and staffing issues are likely to be paramount. How much coverage of that is likely to sell newspapers or attract channel surfers? In short, this should be a topic for the "alternative media" if they think any among their readership care. And it is hardly necessary to be inside the meeting to do this story. Just a little harder. Is it worth the effort to interview a lot of people? We'll see.

One must applaud Doug Carlson for his crusading attitude on all this. I think the title of his blog sums up the attitude most inside the media have to this obligation, and the level of interest most outside have toward it. CHORE. I just can't understand why Doug was not invited to attend, or even chair, the meeting.

Any comments can be sent to me at ian(at)ilind.net.

October 31, 2006 - Tuesday

It's been raining most of the night here in Kaaawa. Not necessarily one of those hard rains that sounds like hail hitting the roof, but not on the light side either. A fairly steady, continuing rain that is giving everything a good soaking. The plants will really appreciate it. The cats don't. And, as it gets closer to 6 a.m., it appears that our morning walk is going to be cancelled on account of rain, which doesn't happen too often.

The Los Angeles Times reports today on the continuing long term slide in newspaper readership. E&P lists figures for major newspapers, while noting some small papers are growing slightly.

Larry Geller found this error message while checking on Star-Bulletin columnists, and sees evidence S-B web staff are stretched too thin:

We are sorry, but the columnists database
is out of order. The script that runs it broke
during our last server upgrade.
We do not have time to rewrite it.

All columnists appear as a part of our regular daily edition.

They are archived there, forever, and never move once posted.

Please see the regular online edition at
http://starbulletin.com for your columnist fix.

In case you didn't connect the dots, blogger and BOE candidate Kris DeRego, mentioned here on Sunday, is the same candidate who had his endorsement revoked by the Honolulu Advertiser last month after several embarrassing disclosures. DeRego responded with his side of the story in a subsequent letter to the editor.

Alex Salkever, the brains behind Hawaiirama.com, passed along this tip about another Amazon sale:

Amazon is offering $10 off for every grocery order of $50 or more. The way to play this is simple. Design your order to hit roughly $50, max. Type in "Grocery3" in the proper place for promo offers. Then, reload and do another order if you need to order more. If you keep it close to $50, then you've essentially taken a 20% discount off the already low-low prices. If you stick to stuff that ships for free, this is an insane bargain. For example -- we ordered two boxes of 7th Generation Chlorine Free diaper wipes (eco-happy moms and dad's take note). They run roughly $30 odd dollars a piece. 12 come to a box, if I'm not mistaken. With the discount, we lopped about 15% or so off the total purchase. They are shipped to our house free. If we were to buy the same thing at Times or Star Market, it would have cost us approximately $120 or so. So we're talking savings of over 50%. Even Costco can't touch this kinda discount. It's quite insane.

"Gotta love Amazon," he comments. And he's right.

My mother was sorting through old family photos when I stopped by the house yesterday morning. This one caught my eye. It's a group of students gathered in a courtyard at the Priory, an Episcopal school in downtown Honolulu, located next door to Washington Place. My grandmother is there, along with her sister and several other girls. It probably dates from prior to 1905. My grandmother was born in 1888, if I'm not mistaken, so you can make your own guess of her age at the time and the age of the photo.

click for larger photo

October 30, 2006 - Monday

I received an interesting "on the scene" report describing the October 10th transformer failure at a state office building on Ala Moana Blvd:

I work in the AAFES building, home to both PSD (Public Safety Division) and DOH (Dept. of Health), where the transformer exploded.  Literally.  Above our heads, we heard a very loud explosion and then the lights went out.  I rushed to my window to see if the outside world was still there.  Had Kim-Jong-whatever-his-name-is-from-NorthKorea hit Hawaii?  No.  Ok, good.  But then a series of explosions continued and the building was totally rocking.  Suddenly, in the dark, people were yelling 'get out! get out!'  We all quickly evacuated the building.  

I was at the DOH/Kinau Hale when the arson fire occurred last year(?), so I was having some reverbs.  But we quickly learned that it was a very large transformer, and I was calmed.  As HFD, DAGS, and HECO arrived, we learned that the state-owned transformer would need to be replaced, a process that could take several months.  To power the building, a very large generator was brought in.  I guessed to myself the incredible costs that were going to be incurred, especially if it was going to be used for a prolonged period.  Your blog now highlights the estimate of those costs.

However, to I assume DAGS' credit, I'm happy to inform you that a new transformer was located and installed within about two weeks of the old transformer malfunction.  We all thought we were going to be running on generator-juice for a very long time, but I gotta hand it to DAGS, they did an excellent job of fixing us all up and saving the State some big-bucks.

I also ran into a blog over the weekend that used Honolulu Airport as an example of how NOT to create a user friendly environment.

Here's an important question for pet people--Have you ever heard of anything like this? Duke has developed an unusual malady. I've been searching for information, and so far have found only a single description online:

The cat has a unique reflex that has been noticed by clients and veterinarians alike. It is an odd reflexive twitching , head jerking or licking behavior initiated by stimulation over the lumbo-sacral area of the back.

Often this reflex can be fired off by light touch to the back as in petting so it is noticed commonly. The threshold of activation of the reflex can be so close to firing off due to subluxation irritation, that any stimulation will easily create this response. At times, just holding a hand over the back of the cat and not even touching the skin or hair will fire off the reflex.

This skin-spinal reflex pattern can look like a seizure or a licking spasm directed to the cat’s foreleg or shoulder and is the source of much confusion for practitioners...

That description comes from a site pushing veterinary chiropractic care as a treatment, but I'm hoping to find some additional information. Anybody have any experience with something like this?

October 29, 2006 - Sunday

I got an email from Chris Haire at Honolulu Weekly a few days ago recommending that I take a look at a new blog by Kris DeRego.

DeRego calls it "Hardball Hawaii". It might be more appropriate to call it "Foul ball Hawaii".

In one post, DeRego accuses Board of Education candidate John Penebacker of violating state laws relating to alleged "lobbying" on behalf of the DOE. Strong words, but DeRego displays his ignorance about the structure of American government and casually misreads the law in order to conclude Pennebacker was a lobbyist.

Where to start? Here's an extended excerpt:

According to the State Ethics Commission, the Hawaii Lobbyists Law defines "lobbying" as "communicating directly or through an agent, or soliciting others to communicate, with any official in the legislative or executive branch, for the purpose of attempting to influence legislative or administrative action or a ballot issue." By that definition, Penebacker's contracted duties of monitoring and developing BOE legislation clearly fall under the category of "lobbying", since such duties would almost certainly have required Penebacker to confer directly with congressional representatives and their staff members. If that is the case, Penebacker would have been legally required by HRS 97-2 to register as a lobbyist, which states that:

You are a lobbyist if you are an individual (not an organization) and are (1) engaged for pay and (2) spend more than five hours in any reporting period or spend more than $750 lobbying during any reporting period. "Engaged for pay" also includes being paid by an organization or business you work for if lobbying is a part of your overall duties, whether or not your salary is specifically allocated for lobbying duties.

DeRego confuses Congress with the state Legislature. He assumes, incorrectly, that tracking or monitoring legislation is by definition "lobbying". He claims to quote from the relevant statute, but the quote actually isn't from the statute but from the instructions for the Ethic Commission's lobbyist registration form. I can't tell, from the context, if he knows the difference.

And, if that isn't bad enough, he fails to disclose that he is running against Penebacker for a seat on the Board of Education.

In another post, DeRego attacks Mazie Hirono while failing to understand or appreciate that state elections are governed by state law, while candidates for federal office are subject to an entirely different set of federal election laws.

DeRego first published some of this on Xanga, where he claims expertise in "Political Communications & Campaign Management, Speechwriting", while listing his occupation as "government" and his industry as "media". In his Xanga profile, DeRego discloses that he is an undergrad at UH, hopes to graduate next spring, and has a triple major in Political Science/Religion/Economics. A bit of resume checking might be in order here.

He also says he shops at Macy's, Armani Exchange, Guess, Salvatore Ferragamo, Kenneth Cole, Lous Vuitton, Neimann Marcus, Linea, and professes to love brands like Hugo Boss, Armani, Kennth Cole, Via Spiga, Ferragamo, Jordan, Quicksilver, Hurley, Claiborne, CK, Tori Richards, Custo Barcelona.

Like his choice in clothing, DeRego's blog looks good but lacks substance or, worse, is substantively misleading.

On second read, perhaps I'm being too hard on a new student blogger, although I think even in the blog world, it's important to get things right. There's a difference between provocative and wrong. But perhaps Kris will grow into the role.

Here's an update on what I thought was a simple request to look at minutes of the state's Commission on Transportation, which is now turning into a real chore.

The law seems clear that minutes are among the common records that should be readily available to the public during regular business hours.

§92F-12 Disclosure required. (a) Any other provision in this chapter to the contrary notwithstanding, each agency shall make available for public inspection and duplication during regular business hours:

...(7) Minutes of all agency meetings required by law to be public;

My intitial request was sent to the Department of Transportation's Public Affairs Office, where it was referred in turn to the Statewide Transportation Planning Office on Tuesday, October 17.

I followed up this past Thursday with a phone call, more than a week later, and got no reply. Early Friday morning, I sent off an email, and got back this reply from from the PAO staffer who made the inital referral.

I just got back from vacation and learned that the secretary who keeps the minutes on the meetings is on vacation until next week.  Her coworkers tried to look for the minutes, but was unable to locate them.  She will be back by the end of the month and I'll talk to her then.

It's now twelve days and counting. We'll see what happens next.

Jeff and Sandra recently relocated from the big TX and moved in to a rented place in Kaaawa, and we met them (and their dog, of course) on our morning walks. Jeff's finishing a dissertation in political science, and Sandra works for a big insurance company. Last night we invited them over for dinner, where Sandra confessed that her father is now a fan of this site. So here's a photo for dad from last night's festivities.