Entries from December 2007 ↓

The biblical Noah, the preacher of righteousness and originator of ark building, didn’t have much success convincing his contemporaries to pay attention to God’s will. He followed God’s plan, built an ark, and saved mankind (not to mention animalkind and the shipping industry).

What if Noah lived in Hawaii and God told him to build the ark here?

Uh oh.

Chances are good that local residents would ban together and file a lawsuit to prevent construction of Noah’s Super Ark, citing potential damage to the environment, perhaps even requiring a detailed environmental impact study. Who knows what damage a Super Ark could do to God’s precious, unspoiled islands?

Hawaii’s labor unions would picket Noah’s construction site, pointing out that his three sons were not union employees, perhaps calling the sons scabs, or citing substandard work from his inexperienced crew of ark builders.

Failing an effort to stop the ark’s construction, environmental experts would orchestrate pickets and protests over the ark’s eventual launch. Why? Well, an ark might require a large dock from which to sail, and facilities would have to be built using taxpayer money.

Divine intervention may be required to get Noah’s Super Ark to sail, though Hawaii’s lawmakers would want assurances from God that the ark would have a navigation plan to avoid whales, would not float faster than 13 knots, and not dump animal waste material into the ocean between the islands.

To ensure that Noah’s Super Ark properly adhered to the legislated restrictions, Nephilim would be required to ride the Super Ark with Noah’s family.

His sovereignty bruised by the unprovoked attacks on his lawful right to direct mankind toward a new world, the Almighty eventually moved Noah’s family and the Super Ark project away from Hawaii altogether, eventually settling in a more hospitable location near what would become Turkey.

If Mark Twain were alive today and visited Waikiki he would write a scathing review of the panhandlers in Waikiki.

Hawaii is an expensive place to live for those of us with jobs. For those without jobs, newly arrived from the mainland, newly devoid of sanity and financial resources, Waikiki is a Mecca, a place where panhandling is tolerated and lucrative.

Granted, living on the streets cannot be an easy life, even in paradise, and Hawaii’s swelling homeless ranks are a blight on a society that claims to care about the disadvantaged.

There’s a difference between being homeless, foraging for food, and wandering the streets in a daze, vs. a calculated method of begging for lucrative monetary handouts from locals and visitors near automatic teller machines.

What’s needed? Laws and enforcement, say our city lawmakers. Bill 81 will make aggressive panhandling illegal within 10 feet of an automatic teller machine (ATM) or a business that cashes checks. Great. Something is being done.

What? Only 10 feet? We can still see the whites of their beady little panhandler eyes at 10 feet. What’s wrong with 30 yards? Nothing, unless the panhandlers need to use the ATM themselves to check their account balance.

10 feet does not intimidating panhandling stop.

Hawaii’s most famous local playwright, Lisa Matsumoto, died drunk last week. She was very, very, drunk when her car, going the wrong way on the H-1 Freeway last week, crashed head on with another car. Matsumoto died, others were injured, including a close friend.

Matsumoto’s blood alcohol level was reported to be three times the legal limit. She suffered severe injuries in the crash, which was likely caused by ‘acute alcohol intoxication.’ It was 3:30 in the morning, and she was very drunk, and driving the wrong way on the highway.

Remember the television commercials that tried to prevent drunk driving? The theme was, “friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”

The premise of this national advertising campaign is simple. If you care about someone, don’t let them get into a car and drive when they’re intoxicated. Grab their keys. Drive them home. Call a cab. Call the cops. Do something besides letting your friend drive drunk.

The problem with that is simple. The “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” campaign has a major flaw.

What do you do when all your friends are drunk, too?

Enough is enough. For most of the past two years we’ve endured an endless stream of billing mishaps from Hawaiian Telcom. We were not alone. Tens of thousands of phone company customers had billing problems.

Not only could Hawaiian Telcom’s billing system not figure out what to charge us for monthly phone service and long distance, it became a family guessing game each month as to what the final charge would be on the statement. It was never accurate.

Finally, after plenty of bad press, bad customer service, and millions of dollars spent on revamping their billing system, Hawaiian Telcom got the bill right. It was good news that didn’t last very long. Today’s statement from the phone company came with an extra charge of over $90. For what?

Good question. It appears that the phone company had not been charging us enough over the past two years, and now they get to make it up their under charges in one swell foop.

Not so fast. It used to be that we suffered with the phone company’s inept service and countless billing problems with no recourse. Where else could you go for phone service. These days there is such a thing as competition in telecommunications. Oceanic Time-Warner has phone service. Cell phones are ubiquitous and reliable. Maybe the competitors and options are not better than Hawaiian Telcom, but they’re certainly not worse.

So, goodbye, Hawaiian Telcom. You’ve had your day. Improve your service and customer support or continue to lose good paying customers to your competition.

What does it take to clean the top of a table at your favorite restaurant? Not much, right?

Yet, the ability and methodology to clean a table top escaped the crew at Macaroni Grill in Ala Moana Center last week. I’ve cleaned my fair share of table tops through the years. It’s an art I learned from my mother, long an aficionado of things shiny and clean.

It can’t be that hard. Take a clean, dry cloth. Spray the table top with some kind of cleaner (Windex is the choice of my tables, though your mileage may vary). Wipe down the table top with the clean, dry cloth. Is that so hard? Yes.

What many cleaners fail to understand is the need to cover every inch of the table top with the cloth, and to replace the cloth after a few tables have been cleaned.

Instead, those same many cleaners simply grab a wet, grimy cloth, drag it in a haphazard manner here and there across the table’s top, and pronounce their effort done and the table clean.

And it clean it must be. Officially, if not in actuality. Often there are streaks of Not Clean left on the table top areas which were not wiped, and a putridly sour smell left from the wet in the cloth.

So it was at Macaroni Grill last week.

We noticed the smell right after we sat down at our table. A quick look under the paper table ‘cloth’ revealed the source. Unclean table, unclean smell. We asked for another table not near the unclean table.

The dining experience improved markedly. The waitress admitted that Macaroni Grill’s beer wasn’t as cold as she liked, and if I liked cold beer, I wouldn’t like theirs. But she suggested that if I wanted a cold beer and didn’t mind waiting 15 minutes, she’d have the bartender chill a bottle and a glass just for me.

Add five extra points to my Macaroni Grill report card. The calamari appetizer was the best I’ve ever had, anywhere, the grilled salmon was superbly tender and moist, and the asparagus gave me gas (not the fault of Macaroni Grill).

In other words, dinner at Macaroni Grill was good. Very good. It would have been better with a clean table top. Why? Because a wet rag does not a clean table make.

There is little to argue. Honolulu, Oahu, is in the early stages of a traffic nightmare that is likely to become much worse before it gets any better.

Why? Not enough land for too few roads, and too many vehicles. It’s math. We prefer the convenience of single passenger vehicles to the inconvenience of traffic woes. For now. When will it change?

The change is beginning, though I suspect the pain is not sufficient to cause mass change, despite mass transit rearing an ugly new head in the form of fixed rail.

A human’s nature does not easily change. Traffic experts tell us we have a problem. That much I already know. It’s the solution that scares me.

Cars, trucks, motorcycles are more convenient transportation devices than buses and taxicabs. The Bus system, while convenient compared to many mass transit systems elsewhere in the U.S., is less convenient and less expensive than moving about town in a car.

Change in traffic and transportation habits will occur only when those two basic issues are addressed– convenience and expense. For mass transit to be successful in the future it will need to be less painful (more convenient than The Bus), and remain less much less expensive than using an automobile or truck.

To date, traffic experts have told us that we have a problem, and that there is only one viable solution– fixed rail. Maybe so. But that solution still is required to meet, challenge, and solve the two major issues it faces– convenience and expense.

Otherwise, fixed rail becomes the solution that no one will use, to a problem than still remains. Convenience and expense.

It’s a tale of two views. Diamond Head in July, and Diamond Head in December. The former was dusty, brown, scorched, arid, harsh and uninviting. The latter carries a wreath of healthy green, far more picturesque for locals and tourists.

The difference between July and December can be summed up in one word. Rain.

Hawaii has both an abundance of rain and plenty of drought. That paradox is not new to the islands, or many places elsewhere in the world. When it rains, it pours. When it doesn’t rain, drought seems to pour.

Drought conditions and an abundance of rain can be nothing more than a mountain apart in Hawaii. Plenty of rain helps to sustain our islands and and retain their beauty. We suffer from too many people, too many uses of fresh water, an abundance of usage which is depleting the resource we often take for granted.

The power of rain goes beyond lawns and mountain vegetation. Rain changes attitudes and sleeping habits. Rain changes driving attitudes and surfing habits. Too much rain can be dangerous to crops, streams, lakes, rivers, and those who venture near. Not enough rain is dangerous to plants, crops, water tables, and those who require an abundance of water.

Have you seen Lake Mead near Las Vegas in Nevada? If ever there was a warning sign gone unheeded, the dry banks along Lake Mead would be high on the list. The lake suffers from an abundance of people and development in a land scorched with dry and heat.

Hawaii is more fortunate, yet as residents we seem not to recognize that fresh water, often abundant, is often in short supply.  The power of rain is better than the power of no rain.

There’s the hokey-pokey, the jitterbug, and the two-step. Put them all together and what do you get?

The Dr. Dobelle Stomp.

As in stomp on recorded history, the facts of life, and start life anew. Evan Dobelle, the same Dr. Dobelle who once was the University of Hawaii President, got a new job as president of little Westfield State College in Massachusetts.

How did he do that?

Westfield is no UH, but still. Are they so desperate for a good resume up there that they don’t bother to check references and places of previous employment?

Dobelle was fired from his post by the UH Board of Regents ‘for cause’ back in 2004. ‘Cause he was a crummy UH president who alienated staff, students, regents, lawmakers, and locals? Whatever the ’cause,’ Dobelle and UH came to an understanding that he wasn’t really fired, so, he decided to resign and take $1.8-million taxpayer dollars with him.

For the moment, Dobelle is president of the New England Board of Higher Education, a post he’s likely to vacate once he starts his new job as head of Westfield. If you listen carefully, and tilt your ear toward Massachusetts, you’ll hear the sound of Horace Mann rolling over and over and over in his grave. Mann founded Westfield back in 1839.

Dobelle’s claim to employment fame, insofar as Hawaii is concerned, appeared to be a holier-than-thou administrative arrogance marked by a mainland misunderstanding of what it means to be ‘local,’ which he claimed to be, which he certainly wasn’t, isn’t, won’t be, it doesn’t work that way.

Perhaps ‘local’ life is different in Westfield. It must be tough finding someone to run a little college of barely 5,000 students. It must be tougher taking the job after leaving behind the 30,000 or so students, faculty, and friend at UH, though I suppose that almost any kind of employment is better than no employment at all.

Westfield State College has a web page with Directions to the Campus. Those same directions can be read in reverse for anyone who may need to leave the campus, whether they be student, visitor, or outgoing president.

Dr. Dobelle, we’ll be watching.

I think I figured out the solution to Oahu’s landfill problem. It was easy. It was math. Read and learn.

The current landfill is filling up, which, as I understand physics and geography, is what is supposed to happen. You can’t keep piling garbage on the same pile forever. When the pile gets too big, we’ll need another landfill.

That’s the problem. Nobody wants the landfill in their neighborhood. Leeward Oahu folks don’t care where the landfill goes so long as it goes somewhere else besides the leeward coast. That preference is pretty much universal. Anywhere but where I live.

For elected officials it’s a bit different but the sentiment is the same. “Put the landfill anywhere but near my voters.”

Where will Oahu’s next landfill go? It’s an easy solution, really. In a vote among politicians, the landfill will go where there will be the least political damage, the least number of people, the least voter impact, the least fallout (except for the garbage itself).

If you live where there are not many people but there’s plenty of empty land, look out. Garbage is coming your way. It’s math.

If you read Waste Management’s web site about the landfills they operate, you get a perspective of the problem. Garbage is big business. Not including the area around Honolulu Hale and the State Capitol Building, Oahu generates over 1.6-million tons of waste each year.

That’s about one and a half tons of rubbish for each man, woman, and child on Oahu. More if city and state politicians are included. Much more.

Short of some scheme to load the garbage up on a big barge and send it to the mainland (puts an entirely different spin on ‘boat day’ doesn’t it?), the only solution is math.

If there are not many voters who live in your neighborhood, but there’s plenty of empty land, look out.

Pauu Pooi fell into a cesspool in Laie and is presumed dead. There are many ways that a person may leave the living, but dropping into a cesspool is not a good way to go.

News reports indicate that Pooi was a worker on a project to replace cesspools and connect the local area to the city’s sewer system. He was standing on the ground 30 feet above the cesspool when it caved in. He fell into the sludge at the bottom of the cesspool and the ground fell on top of him.

People die of injuries in auto accidents, and the effects of old age and illness. Dying at the bottom of a cesspool is not a good way to go.