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March 27, 2004 - Saturday
UH President Evan Dobelle, fresh from the apparently successful contract negotiations, reportedly is taking over as host of PBS Hawaii's "One on One" weekly interview show following the current series of reruns. The problem, as one learned professor noted, is that Dobelle is much better at talking than listening, and a good interviewer needs to be a perceptive listener. Paul Costello, now departed for a new post at Stanford, was very good at it. Whether Dobelle can pull it off remains an open question.
From Joe P., a reader currently living in Japan:
Hi Ian, long time no write! Still in Japan, took my family and my mother to the Hakone hot springs last week. Despite it being the first day of spring, we still had about a foot of snow dumped on us, and spent the first day frantically searching for a place to stay once we couldn't get up the mountain to the place we had reservations for.
So please send us some of the "frigid Kaaawa air" you've talked about before!
Anyway, here is my traditional annual announcement of the traditional Star-Bulletin anniversary cartoon by Paul Minczer. Enjoy!
- Joe
Thanks to an observant reader who caught this item last weekend in Alaska Ear, a column appearing in the Anchorage Daily News:
HE'S BAAACK . . . And Ear for one is delighted. Robert Meyerowitz, former editor of the Anchorage Press, says his new job as editor of a weekly in Honolulu "wasn't a good fit" so he's come home. Ear isn't surprised. That endless water and unremitting sunshine are enough to drive anyone back to Alaska.
C-SPAN reports that its current "most watched" video is the testimony of Richard Clarke and Richard Armitage before the September 11 commission.
I was contacted a couple of days ago by a reporter with the Dublin Sunday Tribune who was working on a story about the evictions of plantation families from Galbraith Estate lands at Poamoho. Galbraith was from Ireland and most of those named in his will were relatives in Ireland, hence their interest today. Disclosure--the Robert William Cathcart named in the will was my mother's grandfather, also born in Ireland.
| It's been wet this week. Heavy rain and wind forced us to give up only part way through our walk one moring. Even the reasonably decent mornings have been gray and threatening.
Here's Mr. Axel walking with Ms. Julie on one of those gray mornings.
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Mr. Axel at dawn earlier this week. Click for larger photo
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March 26, 2004 - Friday
Yes, I'm late today. I looked at the clock at 4:30 a.m. and decided to go back to sleep in honor of Prince Kuhio, whose memory we are celebrating with a holiday in Hawaii today.
My excuse, such as it is, relates to the extra stress of this week's domestic events.
Mr. Silverman showed up on Wednesday morning with a bloody shoulder, earning a visit to the vet and the special bonus of an overnight stay. The injury turned out not to be serious, just a good bite, but we took the opportunity to bring his shots and other things up to date. Since getting sprung from the slammer late yesterday afternoon, he's been sticking around the house. He even slept inside all night. Voluntarily. He's asleep on the kitchen counter now. It's quite an interesting cat psychological reaction to the one night of confinement.
It hasn't been a good week for technology in our household, either.
First was the fading powerbook that suddenly stopped recognizing its charger and after several hours automatically powered itself down. It's now winging its way to the big Mac repair facility in Tennessee or thereabouts, and of course its not fully backed up, leaving me with a bit of worry about those unsecured data.
Then there's my search for a Mac-compatable database program that can help me efficiently analyze a data set with nearly a million records. The most popular Mac data program, Filemaker, is just too cumbersome and too slow to handle the job. I've been using my old copy of Microsoft's FoxPro v.2.6. And I mean old. I believe this version was released in 1993, more than a decade ago, and that's way older in computer years than it would be in dog years. Just plain old. But alternatives have, so far, been scarce. All suggestions are welcome.
Then there's the receiver. It's that boxy thing that sits at the center of our music/television/whatever system. It finally succumbed after many years of faithful service. The cause of death could have been the salt air, humidity, or simply the piss of death, a constant feline threat to electronics around here. In any case, it died with a symphony what sounded like random sparks in stereo, a crescendo of clicks, pops, and an occasional loud crack. You can only wiggle wires and curse ineffectively for so long before being moved to more direct action and so, emboldened by the extra time available during spring break, off we went in search of a new receiver.
I don't know how long it's been since we shopped for one of these. At that time, though, "home theater" meant those special nights when you made popcorn to go with the TV movie, and no one asked how many speakers you had. The answer would always have been "two". It's now another world. I knew it was bad when I couldn't decipher the basic specifications of competing products, and various sales people in different stores weren't really sure whether these receivers designed for the new "home theater" will work with something as old fashioned as basic stereo speakers.
We finally purchased via a process of elimination. The Sears sale dissolved in a ritual of bait & switch, CompUSA failed me, and Costco had but one choice. So that's the one that came home with us.
| And that's when the real trouble began. Removing the now dead receiver was a simple matter of unplugging. But plugging all those wires back in turned out to be a brain numbing experience. This thing is wired like the cockpit of a 747. It's got types of in's and out's that I don't recognize and can't find in the meager instructions included in the box. |
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None of the illustrated examples includes all these particular components, even though ours are very simple. I've visited Oceanic's web site, and waded through Sony support, all to no avail.
After hours of trial and error, I did manage to get the television and the DVD player working at the same time. That was Wednesday night. Last night I lost the television's sound briefly but got it working again before we missed too much of the evening news.
I still haven't figured out how to hook everything together in a way that will allow us to watch DVD movies down the hall. We can watch the news in the bedroom, just not a DVD. So that's one problem.
Then there's the controller population explosion. Although the new command center has a "programmable" feature that is supposed to make it the center of the electronic universe, I can't get it to work. Well, I've got it to allow me to turn the television off and on, but I can't select channels. And I haven't figured out how to control other devices or functions. What's worse is that I can't figure out what all those little tiny buttons with their little teeny tinier labels are intended to do. If this is an eye test, I've failed. If an IQ test, I haven't figured it out.
It's not that I'm a technophobe by any means. I like fiddling. I enjoy taking apart the computer, installing this and that. I've puzzled through long if-then-else-where-while-etc loops in various programs, maintain this very complex web site, and generally enjoy logical challenges. But this new fangled stuff should come with a warning label: "Don't try this at home."
March 25, 2004 - Thursday
The Bush administration is now claiming that federal employees can be fired based solely on their sexual orientation, despite a federal law that appears to state just the opposition. Not the first, but simply the latest trip down the rabbit hole with W.
Thanks to recently retired Star-Bulletin reporter Russ Lynch for callling my attention to Sen. Fred Hemming's letter to the editor in Tuesday's Honolulu Advertiser. In a letter the day before, Hemmings referred to union and DOE leaders as "lunas", a reference back to the field bosses of Hawaii's plantation past. When the letter appeared in print, however, the word had been changed somewhere inthe editing process to "lunatics".
Hemmings commented: "I'm sure there are many people who would agree that your version is a more accurate description of the leaders in our education system, but I cannot take the credit. "
Interestingly, the error has been disappeared without from the newspapers online edition. Without Hemming's follow-up letter, the online reader wouldn't know it had ever happened.
I don't often see eye-to-eye with Hemmings on political issues, but I enjoyed the comment on the Advertiser's luna-to-lunatic shift.
Actually, Lynch's letter was so informative that I'll just include it in full:
In the three months since I retired from the Star-Bulletin I have made major discoveries about time -- mainly, I have time to read both local dailies cover-to-cover and hit your Web site pretty much every day. I am still a loyal SB-er and inclined to find fault with "Brand X" more often than the S-B, although I do try to be as neutral as I can.
I was reminded, reading the wire stories about Jack Kelley at USA Today, of some of the findings of the new "State of the Media 2004" report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. See www.stateofthemedia.org for the full report.
Mainly, conclusions that readers don't trust newspapers nearly as much as they once did. The Kelley case provided just another reason why that should be so. My guess is you've been looking at the Media 2004 report and found, as I did, that there's a lot to absorb, but the Executive Summary bits help and the conclusions are backed by detailed statistics elsewhere in the report. I did what I didn't used to be able to do because of time... printed out the PDF pages (there's a lot of them) and took them away to a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee for a more-detailed perusal.
There's a lot of good stuff in there, making it clear that the Star-Bulletin is far from being the only one with budget problems, pressure on expenses and resultant staff shortages. Certainly, we have heard a lot of this before but it is nice to see verification from authoritative sources.
A few points:
"Declining audiences, newsroom cutbacks, changes in content, and a focus on profits rather than innovation raise serious questions about the long-term health of American journalism . . . . ""The percentage of Americans reading newspapers has been shrinking for two generations. In the last decade the situation has worsened."
"There are 1,457 daily newspapers in the United States, 154 fewer than in 1990. The age of the patriarchal local newspaper owner is over. Today 22 companies own 39% of the newspapers in the country and represent 70% of the daily circulation (73% on Sunday), according to data from Editor and Publisher."
"During hard times, many newspapers have made sharp cutbacks in newsroom staffing and expenditures. During good times, while there are modest expansions, many have not made up for what was lost, particularly in staffing. Today, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) data indicate, newspapers have about 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990."
"The percentage of people who believe what they read in their daily newspaper has declined from 80% in 1985 to 59% in 2003."
Keep up the good work. (Hell, I have so much time on my hands I even read about the cats!)
March 24, 2004 - Wednesday
Sometime yesterday morning the external charger for my Mac laptop went dead. At least I think that's what happened. No charger, and eventually that laptop battery runs down. I've been doing these daily updates on the laptop, and so whatever tidbits I was collecting yesterday are trapped in the powerless powerbook. That's not my favorite way to start the day.
Noted: A second Republican senator has now publicly defended John Kerry against campaign accusations that he is "weak" on defense issues, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Washington Post reported last month that Bill Moyers plans on giving up his PBS program, "Now". How did I miss that announcement? What a loss.
The announcement came about the same time as a warning that Moyers was under political attack:
The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Newsletter warns that Bill Moyers and his program NOW is threatened with removal. Two Bush appointees to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting want to remove Moyers' NOW and further want the power to censor any program content. Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy "reports PBS is under extreme pressure to cancel the Bill Moyers program NOW. Unless we wake up to this and rally behind the program, NOW will soon become THEN.
The conservative case against Moyers was trumpeted by "The Center for Consumer Freedom", which describes itself as a "coalition supported by restaurants, food companies, and consumers working together to promote personal responsibility and protect consumer choices." The Center attacked Moyers as a radical environmentallist posing as a journalist. Sad reading.
I guess I've seen this one before, but this web site, www.costofwar.com, continues to assess the ever increasing cost of this U.S. military occupation of Iraq.
And so it goes in Kaaawa this a.m. I got the garbage out to the street by 5 a.m., in time for even an early pickup. I've already had to throw Leo out of the house after interrupting his attempt to "spray" the coffee maker. Silverman, the outside guy, has already been in for a morning snack, and Harriet spent one of her relatively rare nights sleeping in the house before marching out just a few minutes ago, followed shortly thereafter by a brief but heavy rain that is still dripping off the trees.
March 23, 2004 - Tuesday
Congratulations to the Star-Bulletin's Rob Perez, who received the Honolulu Community-Media Council's Fletcher Knebel Award last week (you've got to scroll down to the small item that appeared in the SB). Perez received the award for his "Raising Cane" column, which ceased publication in December.
It appears that HB2361, which would have effectively crippled the state's sunshine law by opening a huge and ill-defined exemption, has been blocked for the time being. The Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Transportation, and Government Operations has "deferred" the bill, normally a polite term meaning that it has been killed. I hope that my small contribution of testimony, joining that of the Society of Professional Journalists and others in opposition, played some role in the decision.
An appeals court in Washington State has sided with the Seattle Times and overturned an earlier court ruling that prevented the newspaper from moving to dissolve its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer. This decision may not be totally bad news for the future of the two-newspaper city because there are now hints that the Seattle Times might be willing to renegotiate the terms of the JOA in a way that will allow both newspapers to continue. Background on the case is available from the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.
We ran into our neighbor in Safeway yesterday afternoon (the one with the high priced home for sale). They've already had one full price offer ($865,000) from someone on the mainland, and the "For Sale" sign just went up today. She said they hadn't thought of selling previously, but if someone's willing to pay that kind of money they'll move. She says, however, that the "sight unseen" offer could be withdrawn after the prospective buyers inspect the property. We'll see!
| Meda gets the credit for these finds. She spotted two--that's one plus another one--glass balls on the beach during our walk early Sunday morning. One is blue, the other green. They were apparently swept in on the front edge of the high surf that's been pounding our coastline for several days. We found one other glass ball several weeks ago, which was our first since 1999. Now two in one morning! |
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Do take notice of the muddy paw print to the left, which somehow slipped into the photo.
March 22, 2004 - Monday
It may have technically been Spring, but yesterday's weather was undoubtedly of the winter variety. It was grey, wet, and cold all day out here in Kaaawa. A day for just hunkering down.
| So it was a day for odd jobs like updating the annual census of the cats sharing our household. I had already taken a fresh round of photos the day before, so yesterday I managed to put them together. So just click on Ms. Wally's eager face for Cat Census 2004. |
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And what in the world is happening to Kaaawa? Suddenly there are two "For Sale" signs out on our tiny little street. They're asking $595,000 for the house on the corner, and then the next house--just the second house over from ours--has just been listed for an unbelievable $865,000. Is there going to be a wave of rich folks moving in? Ouch.
March 21, 2004 - Sunday
Well, I blew it. I had it in my mind that today is the Spring Equinox, but no, it was yesterday, March 20. Some years it is the 21st. So it goes. It was a wet and cold day. On the Hawaiian scale, of course, probably down near 70 degrees in our house much of the day, colder in the evening.
Ray Barrington at the Green Bay (Wisconsin) News-Chronicle, another paper in an ongoing struggle for survival against Gannett competition, offered up this comment on Gannett's possible purchase of the Chicago Sun-Times:
For once, seeing Gannett news in your blog made me smile. Gannett buying the Sun-Times and trying to take on the Tribune? Lotsa luck. One year of Gannett running that place and they'll be laughed out of town. It may sell in Green Bay - grudgingly - but not in Chicago. And they'll never make the profits they want. Which is certainly fine with us.
Oh, and the take up here on that ex-Gannett CFO who's getting a $600K golden parachute is that we wonder how many reporters that would buy for the other paper in town ... full-time?
Thanks for that, Ray.
The Supreme Court web site has posted the full text of Justice Scalia's much talked about defense of his hunting trip with the VP. It is a 149k file in pdf format. Click here to download.
Take a minute to check out the Daily Misleader, which promises an ongoing collection of " misrepresentations, distortions and downright misleading statements by President Bush and the Bush Administration."
| There was an epidemic of yawns around here yesterday as well. Perhaps the cats were just showing off for the camera. |
Mr. Leo
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Ms. Wally
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Or it could have been a bit of displacement behavior, just to show they weren't concerned about being followed. Or perhaps it was just legitimately that kind of day.
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