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December 13, 2003 - Saturday
How about those UH Regents? Yesterday's decision to terminate chief financial officer Wick Sloane will be reverberating through the system for a while.
The Honolulu Advertiser reports this morning: "Chairwoman Patricia Lee said the board had acted on Dobelle's recommendation in not renewing Sloane's contract."
KITV reported last night that some of Sloane's duties had previously been reassigned to others:
Sloane used to regularly brief the regents and the legislature about UH finances, but Dobelle has dispatched his chief of staff, Sam Callejo, to handle those duties instead. And while Sloane helped negotiate contracts with the UH faculty union last year, he isn't doing that this year, either.
Obviously, there's a lot of reporting left to be done on this story.
Meda finally figured out why our local gas prices are so high--Chevron must be buying gas from Halliburton and bringing it in from Iraq, where the Defense Department is paying $2.27 per gallon, a very Hawaii-like price.
| We were walking on Hauhele Road on our way back from the beach about 7:15 yesterday morning when a brilliant rainbow arched across the sky. By the time I got my camera fired up, portions had faded, but this section remained bright. |
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Speaking of such natural wonders, it seems that S-B writer Burl Burlingame has other things to worry about, like the lightning that hit their house in Kailua a couple of weeks back, leaving wiring melted, outlets smoking, and foot-long splinters blasted out of a hole in the floor. Lightning didn't actually hit the house--it hit outside, ran through a metal fence next to the house, and then through pipes or wiring or some other metal right into the house. Sort of an omen, I suppose, of the meltdown in the newsroom.
December 12, 2003 - Friday
Honolulu Weekly reports that things got ugly at a Gannett bargaining session with the new Newspaper Guild unit at the Honolulu Advertiser's Pacific Media Publishing. According to the Weekly, police were called after a scuffle during a bargaining session in late November.
Editor and Publisher reports that Gannett plans to launch new weekly papers aimed at younger readers in four more cities next year.
And the Gannett monopoly is kicking things up a notch in Indianapolis with the introduction of new copy cat publications aimed directly at the competition, according to the Indianapolis Eye.
The column, by Brian Howey, quotes the Los Angeles Times:
"With no significant competition to worry about, a company like Gannett can — and does — jack up its circulation and advertising prices almost at will, a practice Gannett boasts of openly when speaking to security analysts about what a good, safe investment Gannett stock represents. The publishers of most of these papers are, in fact, largely scorned for looking on their papers as cash registers — for sacrificing quality to profit, for producing newspapers that are too often timid, parochial and mediocre."
That certainly sounds like what will happen in Hawaii if the Star-Bulletin folds, a strong incentive for advertisers to keep a reasonable share of their business going to the smaller paper.
| I finally got around to putting together some of our November mornings. Just click on this photo to enjoy the latest batch |
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December 11, 2003 - Thursday
Bad news from San Francisco, where long-time Star-Bulletin columnist Dave Donnelly is hospitalized after falling and breaking a hip while there on a visit. This could put Donnelly out of commission for a while, and some in the newsroom worry that he's going to be pushed into an unwanted retirement.
Burl Burlingame's Honolulu Newspaper War site, which has chronicled the continuing struggles of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the foibles of Gannett, is gone. Now, in its place, is a black page with this cryptic two-sentence message: "I can no longer be interested in maintaining this site. Thanks to all of you who were interested in preserving a variety of editorial voices in Honolulu."
Burl says the decision to remove the site was not the direct result of pressure from above. But after being suspended for three days without pay for uttering the "f---word" in the newsroom during a tense deadline moment (Mercy! Imagine that! Foul language in a newsroom! My stars!), he seems to have at least temporarily lost the faith necessary to keep spending his own limited time and money offering this public defense of the newspaper and its management. Or so it appears from here.
And speaking of Burl, today's Star-Bulletin (remember, we get the a.m. edition delivered here in Kaaawa) includes a thin tabloid insert on the history of flight in Hawaii to coincide with this month's celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brother's flight. It looks like Burl wrote it all, including profiles of significant figures in Hawaii's air history and "100 milestones in Hawaii Aviation History", an attractive bit of condensed history. Unfortunately, I don't see any of this at Starbulletin.com yet.
| This is Missie, who was recently rescued--and I really do mean rescued--by the nice folks at Kama'aina Metals in Restaurant Row, where she is now spending her days (located at Four Waterfront Plaza--enter from the main courtyard near where the big clock used to be). Here comes a shameless plug--If you're into jewelry and such things, Kama'aina Metals is a great place to shop, and you get to visit with this little rescued gal as well! What a deal.
To read the remarkable story of Missie's rescue, just click here.
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Missie
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December 10, 2003 - Wednesday
The Seattle Times reports that an agreement with the Hearst Corp. assures that the Joint Operating Agreement with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will continue at least through 2007, despite legal efforts by the Times to cancel the JOA.
An astute reader shared her view that John Kerry's highly publicized use of the F---word in reference to President Bush's Iraq policy was done to get an intended effect:
I believe Kerry's use of the F-word was calculated. Just yesterday, CNN's pundits were talking about how boring his campaign was, what a wonk he is, failing to inspire or even draw mild interest on the part of the public. I think this alleged "gaff" was an effort to connect with his generation, to resonate with the old "Fuck the War" still rattling in the recesses of our Viet Nam generation minds. Today, his spokespeople said he regretted nothing about making the comment.
It certainly makes sense. Of course, the whole thing was blown out of the water by Al Gore's surprise endorsement.
Things are heating up locally as we creep towards election year. In our neighborhood, Windward Democrats have been working the phones catching up with current or former party members (as in our household), rebuilding a district organization, and activating a web site (www.windwarddemocrats.org).
The Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Quaker-based lobbying group in D.C., has a new legislative action message concerning the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where our country has been breaking new ground in questionable treatment of prisoners beyond the rule of international or American law. If you have a chance, ask our members of Congress to hold the administration to account.
December 9, 2003 - Tuesday
I couldn't help noticing this tidbit yesterday--a new deal between Time Warner and Sprint which will allow TW to begin offering "digital telephone" services over its cable lines within the next year. According to the story in the New York Daily News, "
"This is bad for local phone companies like Verizon," said Drake Johnstone, telecom analyst at Davenport & Co. He sees a price war, with Verizon and others lowering their prices.
If Time Warner makes the telephone push in all their service areas, then will we have the choice of Oceanic telephone service soon? A telephone price war here would really shake things up.
Very interesting. The UH Board of Regents have announced a previous unscheduled meeting for December 12, and have posted a long and very detailed agenda in place of the usual 3-4 page notice, an apparent response to the recent advice and criticism from the Office of Information Practices.
| We'll remember my father's 90th birthday on Sunday as the one that got us out driving through the flooded roads between Kaneohe and Kaaawa.
Here he is blowing out the candles on the birthday cake. No, there weren't 90 of them. And the cake was symbolic, since we had already pigged out on desserts at the Pacific Beach Hotel's Sunday Brunch, complete with the show of feeding the fish in their indoor "oceanarium".
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Just click for larger photos
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December 8, 2003 - Monday
The good news was that we were in a line of cars that made it through the flooding on Kamehameha Highway both in Kahaluu (really deep water with waves from cars in front) and Waikane (deep water), and the electricity only went out briefly last night in Kaaawa. The bad news was that minor car trouble meant I found myself stretched out in the mud in the pouring rain checking out the underside of our car. Make that a couple of times. It was not a fun drive home from the lunch to celebrate my father's 90th birthday. With any luck, the flood waters will have all receded before we make the trek to town today.
Mayor Harris may be working at an undisclosed location, but Honolulu managed to squeeze into the Top 10 Digital Cities ranking compiled by the Center for Digital Government.
And the "f-word" is in the news again. President Bush is apparently offended by candidate John Kerry's reference to Bush's f---up in Iraq. The person who forwarded this link to me commented: "Isn't this hilarious? Wash John Kerry's mouth with soap! He swore at the president. How dare he swear at the president!! My God I love it."
And down in Australia, a boozed up pol embarrassed himself on camera on the floor of the Senate, calling a colleague a "f---ing bitch" several times. Not good to do with the camera running.
And that's Monday for you.
December 7, 2003 - Sunday
The Orlando Sentinal reports today that hundreds of millions of dollars were shifted from the NASA space budget to fund Congressional "pork" projects, including some in Hawaii (this link may require a free registration). The newspaper points to the $3 million Mauna Kea Education Center in Hawaii, as well as $200,000 to the University of Hawaii for a documentary on Kalahari bushmen, citing Sen. Dan Inouye's position on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Hoolae Paoa, a former Hawaii resident with a record of convictions from 1978 through 1997, is a key figure in a controversial racetrack gambling project seeking government approval in Maine, according to several published reports this week. And in New York, another company headed by Paoa has been hit with a shareholder lawsuit alleging that money has been siphoned off through a series of high interest insider loans. It all makes for interesting reading.
It's December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor and my father's 90th birthday.
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