HOTEL WAIKIKI

Dream a Little Dream of....

Standard Valkyrie

I've been shopping online for a Valkyrie motorbike on Ebay.  A disadvantage of living in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is that it cost between $2,000 to $2,500 to ship a bike from the Mainland to Hawaii on top of a winning bid.  That's a huge limitation.  However, the overall higher cost hasn't diminished my enthusiasm for the item, itself, whilst it impedes a knightly quest.  There are two Valkyrie models that I have an eye for, either the Standard or the Tourer.  Valkyries are not manufactured anymore, so there's no brand new models to buy.  Thereof, odometer mileage becomes a prime consideration in a buy, and whether it's an honest mileage read out at that.  If you like, mouse over the pics and they enlarge.

Valkyrie Tourer

Monday's Soap

Tomorrow, Clift, who lives in my apartment building has to make a court appearance to fight a writ of eviction.  There are minor details in the story that Clift has been relating to me on the events that led up to him and his family being served the eviction notice that aren't kosher.  He won't win an oscar.  Not even a plastic one.  The fibs however don't outweigh five people living here for two years, plus the family dog, from being boothed out onto the streets.  During the past two years, Clift has been frequently late on rent, but has always managed to get caught up.  He's late with his rent again, but then different circumstances have intervened.

Our lazy-ass building manager who acts as the rental agent to the owner of Clift's apartment unit has been extorting "envelopes" from prostitues who operate in the apartment unit right next door to Clift's unit.  The building manger doesn't live in the building, so the prostitutes have been dropping off the envelopes nightly through the mail slot on the manager's office's door.  Apparently, it has dawned on said lazy-ass building manager that moving the prositutes into Clift's unit would reap him higher returns, since the manager can verbally double the rent and pocket monies above of what he turns into the owner of the apartment unit which he oversees.  The manager even went so far as to offer Clift $2000 if Clift would have moved out by last week, which lapsed, resulting in the eviction action.  On another occasion, the prostitutes approached Clift and asked him why he never move out yet?

Obama, the Accidental Black

I watched the Democratic Party debate and I was delighted that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama went off script and started arguing with each other.  It's all good.  It beats the usual rehash, if elected, of doing dis, doing dat, to improve the lives of the average voter.  The warranty is extra.  That said, tonight's focus is on bruddah Obama from Hawaii.  I know that his cellphone number doesn't have an 808 prefix because he lives on the mainland, has for years, but the relevant point is that he grew up locally.

A political pundit remarked that while Hillary is able to run for president as a "woman," in sharp contrast, Obama is barred from campaining as a "black," at peril of a political backlash.  However, there's a more down home reason why Obama cannot run as a black asides genetically Obama being only half-black.  When Obama went school at Punahou High School, there probably wasn't another black student on the campus at the private institution.  In all likelihood, Obama wouldn't be able to claim a single black person even in an extended circle of friends while growing up in Hawaii because those years about the only blacks in Hawaii, notwithstanding Famous Amos, were here on sports scholarships at UH.

2008 State of the Blog

I'm bringing back an earlier regular feature of Hotel Waikiki, that of political cartoons.  The links can be found on my sidebar, and they look like the buttons below.  Just click on a button and a selected political cartoon will appear.  Newer cartoons bump older cartoons off the buttom of the list.  At any rate, updates will depend on whatever catch is found in the net.

Peaceful Friday

(above) Aloha Friday traffic on Ala Wai Blvd. at 5 o'clock.  Backed up all the way to the end of the Ala Wai canal (pic below).  Yesterday, we had the same thing.  However, yesterday's traffic jam on the Ala Wai started at 2pm in the afternoon, caused by a mentally insane person tossing a toddler off a pedestrian overpass onto the freeway near downtown Honolulu.  As you could imagine, people on the island are still in a state of shock and disbelief.

The freeway closure backed up traffic all the way to Waikiki for hours.  Understandably, because of the horrific nature of the crime, the question of why they have to shutdown the freeway for 4 hours was barely brought up.  A neighbor of mines said it was probably due in respect for the departing spirit of the infant.  Yeah, so they let the deceased infant bake for hours on the freeway's asphalt, covered with a blanket, but still.  The people in charge of the case have done this kind of prolonged closures before with main roads when there was an accident involving vehicles.  With yesterday's incident, there wasn't any mangled cars or spilled oil to document and mop up, so why the necessity to keep a major stretch of freeway closed for an entire afternoon?

Thursday

As things would have it, just as I was setting forth to explore Planet Earth, traffic was backed up to the wazoo on the Ala Wai Blvd.  Thus, your humble correspondent took the opportunity to drive his motorbike on the sidewalk to the nearest cross street and continued on his merry way.  The only other option was to drive on the clogged Ala Wai Blvd., itself, to reach another cross street which would have taken a half-hour at the rate the traffic was backed up on the asphalt.  A minor detail was that I had to gallop my motorbike against the traffic on the one-way Ala Wai Blvd., on the sidewalk mind you, to access the closer cross street.  The drivers stalled bumper to bumper on the road just didn't believe their eyes.  I accepted their bravos.

Wednesday Online

Today the local telephone company finally restored my Internet service after two weeks of disconnect.  To rehash, unbeknownst I had been listed with two Internet accounts with the phone company.  The active Internet account was shut down for non-payment.  My second Internet account with the phone company was paid up but existed as an inactive connection, so the phone company simply transferred payment from my non-active Internet account to my active Internet account, in the process, designating me a "new" subscriber in their effort to correct their own error, which meant they would require two full weeks to re-active my service, and who would mind that?

Why I don't just quit the phone company?  Because I would then have to sign up with the local cable company to get Internet service and that would only amount to fat-ening a monopoly.  Cable companies ought to be restricted to just carrying television programs, providing Internet service allots them too broad a license.  An established abuse is that I have free cable with the building I rent in, but if I signed up with the cable company for Internet, the cable company would charge me for television-cable again on top of Internet cable charges, because I'm not individually listed as a paying television-cable customer, our apartment building is.  The local phone company now allows me Internet through its land line plugged into a modem, without extra charging me for phone service, itself, that is, I can't call or receive phone calls through the phone's land line, strictly Internet.  As far as I know, this is not true with the cable company.  If I didn't want TV but only Internet, the cable company bulks on this tossing in the con that it's digitally impossible to separate TV from Internet signals in the science of what you know anyway about fibre optics, despite the obvious that the cable company's pay-per-view programs are transmitted ala carte.

Saturday's Puh-leeze Don't be the Devil's Advocate

Beginning paddlers on the Ala Wai.

Tonight's topic is about an invasive species intent on wreaking the aloha of the islands.  The invasive species is the "microdots," scientifically speaking, the Micronesians.  The microdots have been described as anti-social, and few disagree to this assessment.  The punks walk around with a chip on their shouders, a stack of cow pies.

The microdots' penchant for their-shit-don't-stink attitude stems from a belief that it was the Micronesians who discovered Hawaii and were the original people on the aina, predating the Hawaiians.  As legend has it, when Hawaiians migrated to the islands of Hawaii, they found the Menehunes already living here.  The microdots are claiming that the Menehune people were from Micronesia.  You can connect the dots for yourself. 

Even if our Menehunes were from Micronesia, Micronesia, itself, covers a huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean.  Does a Frenchman claim that the French discovered America by the logic that since Columbus was a European, and the French being also Europeans, it was then the French whom discovered America?  However, like that analogy, the microdots reason that they are indeed related to the original Menehune inhabitants of Hawaii, despite if today's microdots might have lived on islands located thousands of miles from the set of islands on which the particular Micronesians who became known locally as the Menehunes set sail from.  Anyways, Europeans outlined the borders of Micronesia, not culture. 

Where ever from originally, the Menehunes paddled their way to Hawaii.  They didn't catch an airplane over, and receive free housing and score the rest of the freebies.  Before I forget to mention, Hawaiians ate the ancient Menehunes into extinction.  As legend has it.

Things You Might Find at the Sony Open

My subscription to an audio/video hosting service cost me $5 a month, so I thought it might make dollars and cents to use the service every once in a while.  I'm gazing at the Ala Wai golf course across the Ala Wai canal from my apartment, and I see this golf bag cart moving down the fairway all by itself.  The owner of the golf bag cart is following the gizmo yards behind.  I shot some video of the group near the green.  I used my 4-megapixel camera, so at that distance the resolution of the video clip is sub par.  Also, I can't seem to shut off the camera while in video mode, as a result, after the 27-second mark, there's some excess frames.  There actually is such a thing as a remote controlled golf bag cart, I looked it up on the Internet.

a Tuesday

Quick post because I'm blogging from an Internet cafe and I don't want to run up the charges.  Here's some pics of how the day looked like around the neighborhood.  It's a Kona wind day with some vog being blown in from the direction of the volcano on the Big Island.  Not muggy weather, yet, at least.  Balmy kind weather.  Balmy because the Kona winds are light.  When the Kona winds howl, Kona winds usually live up to its reputation as the "sick wind," hah choo.  That said, this girl on the next computer is sniffling intermittently.  Another thing, and is it only me, but I happened to realize that being without an operating Internet service at home, the net effect is that I'm actually gaining about 5 hours each day.

Pic taken at 11am on the Ala Wai canal. These high school paddlers actually receive credits for paddling during school hours just like they would for any academic course. Click on the pic if you like to enlarge it, I don't know why for today my TypePad software is causing the reduced image to appear so grainy.

Do me a favor and enlarge this photo, too.  Photo taken at the Diamondhead Lighthouse.

At the Internet Cafe

Happy First Aloha Friday.  With oil hitting $100 a barrel thing's are already looking up for 2008.  Anyways, as a follow-up to Wednesday's post, I get my Internet through the local phone company.  Apparently and unbeknownst to me, I've listed with "two" accounts with the phone company.  The main account is an inactive account.  That's all current as far as charges.  However, my second or phantom Internet account which does the actual connect with the Internet, hasn't been paid for months, understandably, because I wasn't even aware that it existed until I called the phone company's billing department and they barely could figure it out, themselves.  So the beancounters transferred the credit accumulated from the "inactive" account over to my unpaid "active" account.  The un-simple thing about the seemingly simple transaction is that the phone company has to restart my Internet service, as a new customer, and my connection won't be up and running until the 16th of this month.  The lone benefit is that now I won't be charged for the land line, itself, but for a "stand alone" Internet service, the phone doesn't work, just the Internet connect.  I was paying $70 a month, now it's $34 a month.

Here's a picture of a sticker I ran across.