HOTEL WAIKIKI

Good Riddance to Aloha Airlines

Thankyou Aloha Airlines for gouging us in the past with your high air fares.  For a 20-minute hop to a neighbor island you charged us $280 round trip.  Thankyou.  Now, that you've closed up shop, your partner in setting monopolistic airfare prices, Hawaiian Air, must be crying crocodile tears over your demise.  Hawaiian Air would also have been out of business today had not Hawaiian Air won their $80 million settlement against Mesa Air last year.  In the past, you and Hawaiian Air colluded to sabotage the survival of every discount airline that attempted to enter the interisland market by dropping your fares to induce perspective passengers to fly on your jets instead of on a discount airliner's planes powered by props or by slower jet engines.  You succeeded in snuffing out these discount airliners.  Now, go! Airlines® (Mesa), did the same to you.   go! Airlines® materialized as a bird of prey that swooped in from the mainland market and plucked bare your financial feathers.  RIP.

Condolences to the 1900 employees of Aloha Airlines who today find themselves out of work through no fault of their own, albeit, with employee discounts, they were not totally in the same boat with the rest of island flyers.  It's still a bad way to start the week.  Realistically, it was not in the power of a lowly employee to oppose the company's inflated airfare price structure despite the hauna.  As everybody already knows, both Aloha Airlines as well as Hawaiian Air were perennially declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcies ad nauseum all the while top company executives endowed themselves with lavish salaries and bonuses.  That kind of irresponsible behavior must have devastated employee morale.  Thankyou Aloha Airlines for denying us all the Leonard's malasadas or Liliha Bakery's coco puffs that we would have taken to relatives and friends on the neighbor islands had it not been for your high airfares that we could not afford.

The Road More Traveled

Every freaking day, I have to weave around this pothole while riding through one of the side streets in Waikiki.  It's been there ever since the bad weather we experienced a few months back at the start of winter.  Originally the City did try filling the cavity with fresh asphalt, but that didn't work.  Soon thereafter people in the neighborhood took it upon themselves to pour sand into the puka.  Undoubtedly they called the pothole hotline again and their request for a second serving of asphalt being denied.  After sand alone failed, the same community minded folks filled the pothole with a composite of coral and sand.  That idea didn't work either in keeping the tarmac sealed as the pics shows.  Kinda wonder what kind stuff people on other parts of the island try using to fix their potholes.  At any rate, somebody someday somewhere is bound to stumble upon just the right ingredients to successfully keep newly filled potholes stay filled permanently.  Unfortunately, by then, we probably won't be driving cars.  Er, oil supplies will have been depleted.

Here's a close-up shot of the same pothole.  It's a foregone conclusion that potholes never stay filled because freshly laid asphalt in the cavity is never allowed to cure completely before traffic is allowed to pass over it.  It takes a day for the aggregates to bind securely to the tar, while it takes a few hours of road closure before people would squawk.  Mind you, if the road crews dug deeper into the road's foundation as any dentist would recommend before topping off the potholes, you'll end up with a more stable fill, yes, but it'll take weeks to cure.  Here's the solution if ever, bake some 2-ft. by 2-ft. squares of asphalt about a foot thick in a 450° oven, dig out a duplicate 2-ft. by 2-ft. square section of road centered around an existing pothole about a foot deep, then lower the baked square of asphalt into the recess.  My guess for what's behind the rash of potholes is that along with the increase in Honolulu's population, there's a corresponding increase in the number of vehicles traveling the roads, with the real culprit being the added number of heavyweight trucks needed to service the larger population mainly responsible for accelerating wear and tear.  For example, the condition of the road at a bus stop where buses had concentrated their weight.

The Road Less Traveled

This past Saturday night, there was a DUI checkpoint set up on Monsarrat Ave. in Waikiki.  Monsarrat Ave. is the street that runs between the Waikiki Zoo and Kapiolani Park, where from the zoo side you hear the monkeys watching the late show, and from the park side you overhear the bums talking to the ironwood trees.  At any rate, perhaps next weekend you should not drive home using the Monsarrat route if you plan to have a few drinks in Waikiki.  I mean they was flagging every car, then re-directing the drivers into the adjacent Waikiki Shell's parking lot, and thereupon other officers would scrutinize the specimens even more closely.  I suppose if a given driver was deemed too inebriated to continue on, then the alleged would be confined to the parking lot like house arrest until he or she regained their sobriety or pissed their pants.

I finally pull up to the front of the line and the policeman gives me a cursory inspection, and then asks me where I'm coming from.  "Oh, I live on the Ala Wai a block away."  Were you drinking?  "I don't drink at all."  (Why you drive here, then?)  That's just for humor.  As I mentioned, the funny thing was that every single vehicle lined up in front of me was directed to make a right turn into the adjoining holding cell.  So when the officer allowed me through, I wasn't quite sure whether I should drive straight or make an obligatory right turn like the rest of the caravan because absolutely no one at all was on the road in front of me that I could have peeled rubber a hundred feet into the night.  I pointed up Monsarrat way to the police officer for directions from my tour guide.  The officer was not pleased at all with what he considered to be an uncalled for hesitation.... "Straight....Straight."  Oh.

Monday's Delivery

the problem with UPS and FedEx delivering your parcels is that they deliver generally between 8am to 4pm.  Who the fuck's home during those hours with the notable exception of Tom Hanks in whatever that movie was where he was stranded on a desert island and some FedEx parcels washed up onto shore.  Indeed, the UPS delivery person showed up twice last week at my apartment building with my package when I wasn't there.  So, I called UPS today at their airport warehouse and asked if they're still holding my parcel.  Which they were.  I explained that I have another package from the same company scheduled to be delivered this week to the same address, so would it be at all possible to redeliver last week's with this week's.  The girl on the other end of the phone reinterated that they already attempted to deliver last week's package twice, thus UPS is not delivering last week's package to me again, even though they'll still have to deliver this week's package.

Without getting into details, I wasn't as nice over the phone with the UPS lady as I should have been after that point in the conversation.  Anyways, I drive over to the UPS warehouse at the airport, and lo and behold, the same person who I talked to over the phone is manning the counter.  I recognized her voice.  Only a half-hour has elapsed between our phone conversation and well you know with me having been Mr. Congeniality.  I have to tell you that the gallop on my motorbike on Nimitz Highway to the airport was so rejuvenating in relatively mild traffic and photons everywhere that it reconstituted me back to the sunny side up.  Perhaps the counter girl didn't recognize me because she acted very pleasant.  Or maybe she did remember me and didn't let on, but inside she was thinking to herself I'll pee on his next package the morning of its delivery.

Alrighty....Kiss my Ass

Around midnight, I see my neighbor who lives on the same floor, sitting on the hallway floor outside her apartment unit.  I say hello to her just like everything's normal.  I didn't ask her why she was sitting on the floor, I really don't have an urge to know those things.  However, she explained that she had locked herself out of her apartment.  So, I asked if she had locked the deadbolt lock above the doorknob lock.  She did.  I said that I could finagle the door open for her, but I would have to drill out the deadbolt lock in the process.  She replies, "something....something....I can handle.  I'll call you if I need you."  You don't get a rain check I'm thinking to myself rather bemused, wtf.

I caught the elevator downstairs to get some tools out of my storage locker to work on my motorbike because minus well be productive during another one of my insomnia episodes.  Like I mentioned it was already around midnight.  When I re-enter the lobby I bump into my neighbor who now belatedly wants me to open her locked door for her.  Apparently it never remotely occured to her that I might have other things to do.  Especially, since she had unceremoniously dismissed a knight in shinning armor who came to her rescue just a few minutes earlier namely me.  Correction, I was a frog.  Rebit.  Now it's, "I don't have a place to sleep."  "I don't have a place to shower."  And I guess you don't have your keys too.  She lives two doors down the hallway from me, and she is one of the nicest persons on our floor.  Albeit, on a planet of her own.

Saturday's Yawns Before Dawn

I'm keeping track of this item on Ebay.  I haven't submitted any bids of my own as of yet, just watching on how high the bidding gets.  Then, maybe.  $7,777 is currently the top bid.  There's this bidder who raised the bidding from $6,500 up to $7,700 upping his very own bids, which raises some questions.

As I couldn't sleep all night, at 5am I rode up to the Kapahulu Safeway store.  More stockpersons on the floor than there were shoppers in the store at that hour.  I think Safeway's expensive, but besides the Food Pantry in Waikiki, it's the closest grocery store.  I'm in the parking lot, and there's this woman walking around a van in a nearby stall.  Trys her key in front door, but for some odd reason she doesn't open the door and get into her van.  She's obviously pissed off about something.  Then she looks around the parking lot and spots the van that really belongs to her.  Mumbles outloud...."looked identical to my van."

Judas

Bill Richardson's endorsement today of Obama reveals just how sad a shape the Democratic Party is in.  After this, I wouldn't blame the country for voting back the Republican Party into the White House for another 4-year term, yeah the same incumbent political Party that brought the world the Iraqi War.  "If it hadn't been for the Clintons, Bill Richardson would be delivering pizzas."  Yet, Bill Richardson has chosen the occasion of Good Friday to endorse Hillary's presidential rival, Barack Obama.  Bill Clinton hand picked Bill Richardson as the nation's UN Ambassador during the Clinton Administration, and later appointed Richardson as his Secretary of Energy on his cabinet.

I'll be voting for Obama because Obama grew up in Hawaii just to make things clear that I'm not anti-Obama.  However, the blatant level of disloyalty that Bill Richardson demonstrated today by endorsing Hillary's Democratic Party opponent should raise questions on just how sleezy the Democratic Party has allowed itself to evolve.  Based upon Richardson's past affiliations with the Bill Clinton Administration, he was regarded to be at the top of the list for Hillary's choice as vice-president, or at the very least, guaranteed a cabinet post in a Hillary Administration.  Plainly, the same credentials did not bode well for Richardson in respect to securing an appointed position in an Obama Administration, immenient now that Obama leads the race.  Richardson wouldn't receive a job delivering pizzas to an Obama White House.  Well, perhaps he will.  What a fucked up Democratic Party.

Thursday's Tidbits

I believe in the Easter bunny, but this?

I finally took some sinus medicine and feel zonked.  As I've mentioned previously, this side effect of antihistamines is why I put off taking sinus medicine until hell freezes over, or running nose and coughing persists to the point of making resorting to antihistamines the lessor of the two evils.  Be only too glad that you're not in my nose or larynx, or shoes.  Something like that.  To make the most of the occasion, I also bought my very first pack of cigarettes of the year today.  I haven't quit smoking.  Just rolling my own cigarettes because you smoke less that way.

I also had to replace my brake pads on my motorbike's disc brakes.  The pads were so worn that they were bruising the disc, itself, that I couldn't even ride the motorbike over to the dealership in pursuit of new pads.  The brand new pads cost $40.  If I had let the dealership install the new brake pads, they'd charged me $200 for labor and parts and thanked me, thanked me immensely.  Anyways, riding home on the Waikiki bus, this girl's sitting by herself across the aisle from me and this guy gets on the bus and sits down right next to her, and starts putting the hit on her.  I'm sure you've seen that same scenario yourself at different venues.

Plainly, there's no overwhelming chemistry between the two, but the guy trys his utmost to extend an already overextended conversation basically between two complete strangers.  The girl explains to Mr. Right that she's from Australia, and that she just hopped off a plane from Maui.  Blah, blah, blah....pause....pant, pant.  Before you jump to conclusions that I was being noisy, passengers on the same bus seated in earshot range of each other, are the equivalent of people who get on the same elevator, you overhear conversations in the sardine can.  We're about in downtown Honolulu on the bus, and Aussie girl asks Cassanova nonchalantly, "do you have any friends?" with connotations to having female friends.  Then a, "do you have any friends, at all?"

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

Just in case you missed it, President Bush reminded the nation today that, "Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision -- and this is a fight America can and must win."  Bush was forced to rely on this rationale for having launched the attack on Iraq because Reason No. 1, WMD's, went out of vogue.  Saddam's connection to Al Quida proved false.  Saddam's connection to 9-11 never existed.  "My bad," would have militated against "stay the course."

That all aside, the most insulting casus belli for US troops continuing to remain in Iraqi, now that we're there, is undisputedly, "we're fighting terrorists in Iraq, so we don't have to fight terrorists in our backyards."  I don't think that the Iraqis, themselves, would be thrilled with being relegated as collateral damage for the better good?  Also, Administration officials who promote a continued occupation of Iraq by citing our 50-year military presense in South Korea, conveniently omit the fact that no one's shooting at troops stationed in South Korea.

Tuesday Already

Hi, the sinus ogre had me floored over the past few days.  Perhaps, it was the flue.  Perhaps, just allergy.  Or, the Ides of March.  Anyways, I prefer not to take sinus medicine because antihistamines have a lag over effect on me, that is, I end up feeling zonked for a day or two even after I've stopped taking any type of allergy medication.  Over the weekend, I felt bona fidely ill on just two occasions for the duration of 60-seconds each, the balance of the days and nights was spent blowing my nose non-stop and helmic coughing.  I struggle with insomina so in all probabilty I would have stayed awake anyway, but this is not the way to stay awake.

Tonight's babble: Presidential candidate Barack Obama found himself on the hot seat because of the racial and anti-American remarks that the pastor of his church made in the past that were recently publicized on UTube videos, and to that end, Obama scheduled a speech today to address the issue of race in this year's presidential election.  Hillary gave her own speech on the race issue the day before, and she came off as presidential in both her tone and tenor.  Obama sounded like he was campaigning, which of course he was.  I didn't purposely tune into CNN to watch Obama, I just happened to be awake at that particular hour.  At any rate, Obama threw in the kitchen sink, noting that he would no more disown his pastor than he would disown his white grandmother who raised him in Hawaii because he had overheard his grandmother make racial remarks.  Secondly, that Thomas Jefferson authored the Constitution, but yet owned slaves, and Obama said that (paraphrasing), "he wouldn't disown neither Jefferson nor the Constitution because of that imperfection."

After Obama's speech, a political pundit who supports Obama, advised that the nation must view the controversial remarks of Obama's pastor in the overall context of the black vocabulary.  Quotations of a black person do not have the identical meaning as those same words used by an individual belonging to another race.  I'll leave Wikipedia to unravel that jive.  What do I know.  Obama walks a thin line brooching the race issue since anything said about how much race plays an actual role in this year's presidential campaign risks jinxing a racial dynamic that favors Obama.  Specifically, had as many blacks voted for Hillary, as there were Whites whom voted for Obama, Obama might not lead the presidential race today.

The benefit of a secret ballot is that a given voter is free to reserve the right to remain prejudice, still at the end of the day cast his or her vote for the candidate of a race that the voter harbors prejudice against, if that makes sense.  Also, while Obama fits to a tee the namesake of an "Afro-American" by virtue that his biological father was from Kenya with his mother from Kansas, Obama can never authentically represent Blacks in America in the sense that the ancestors on Obama's father's side never once lived enslaved in America. The controvery over Obama's pastor's racial statements and anti-Americanism focuses on Obama's inaction, Obama's critics demand that Obama should have objected or just quit the church.  I feel for Obama, Obama lacked the historical credentials to have thrown in his two cents even had the spirit moved him.

Friday's Am I Missing Something?

Happy Aloha Friday.  I have a few more thoughts about Hawaii's 5¢ bottle deposit law.  Well before the bottle deposit law was in place, people use to collect aluminum cans and redeem them by weight for cash.  Now you're able to redeem each aluminum can for a guaranteed 5¢ in Hawaii, but whatever in tarnation happened to the value of the aluminum content of the aluminum can, itself, that the recycle center is thereafter free to sell as scrap aluminum?  It's not included in the 5¢ payout because that 5¢ derived from the bottle deposit initially levied at the grocery checkout.  The recycle center hands over 5¢ for an aluminum can to a customer, and in turn gets reimbursed by the State.  From there, okie dookie, the operator of a recycle center sells the windfall aluminum in bulk directly to the nearest scrap metal exporter.

Wednesday's Signs

On numerous occasions, I've seen safety barricades like this posted in front of parking meters along Kapiolani Park in Waikiki.  Here the City is posting an advance notice that the designated parking stalls will be reserved for an American Diabetes fund raising event scheduled for this Friday and Saturday.  I'm all for charity walks which I suppose that this is for.  However, you would think that a simple men's room sized sign, scotched taped to a parking meter would suffice instead of an overkill safety barricade with a blinking light to boot.  And the barricades extend onto infinitiy.

Natural Earth

I stopped by Down to Earth Natural Foods® store today to buy me a long sleeve shirt because the skin on my forearms was getting chaffed from the wind while riding my motorbike, and I've grown tired of scratching my forearms raw at night.  To my chagrin, there were only a few T-shirts left in the cardboard boxes where they keep the T-shirts whilst the natural foods store is remodeling section by section.  There wasn't anything there that I liked.  On top of that, in the parking lot I remembered that I had left my gloves in the store.  Inside the store again, I said to the salesgirl, "I guess the T-shirts are about sold out."  She was the same salesgirl whom on my previous visit mentioned to me that the store would be discontinuing the vintage design (pictured above) on their T-shirts that we have grown accustomed to for a generation.  Shoulda bought a T-shirt earlier.  Fortunately she replied that in fact she had taken the T-shirts out of the temporary cardboard boxes and had just finished setting them out on the display rack.  Yeah, I did buy two.    

Monday's Data

Waikiki's infamous sewer pipe tower has been stationed at its temporary site for so long now, that it has become a neighborhood fixture of sorts for people like me who live along the Ala Wai canal boundary of Waikiki, as well as people who drive pass it.  Purportedly, the emergency bypass sewer pipeline is not active, in the same sense that Kilauea Volcano has been in an active mode over the past 2 decades, but there's a whole lot of if's, and's and butt's against any assurance that the flapper isn't opened during peak hours of the day should the incumbent sewer system start to bulge approaching critical mass.

Sure as shittin, the emergency bypass sewer pipeline will morph into what was all along its true role as a main kukai (poop) artery in light of all the new development planned in next few years for our visitor Mecca, how dare they subprime out of our Waikiki infrastructure.  For readers not from this neck of the woods, the sewer pipeline does not discharge any effluence directly into Honolulu's glorious Ala Wai canal, itself, as the photo above might mislead.  And as far as I know the people in the photo are not flocking to the latest scenic site, they're just puzzled why the sidewalk they were on ended so abruptly.  The submerged part of the sewer pipeline is actually routed along the bottom of the Ala Wai canal to wherever.  When you really think about it, it's not a bad idea to keep Waikiki's wazoo tower in place as a constant reminder of the kapulu development planning that led to its formation.

Eureka

I stumbled upon this pair of miniature LED lights that I must have stashed away and forgotten all about.  Don't you do that too with things of your own?   They were kinda expensive, too, when I bought them a few years back.  Dear reader, I once used the pair of lights while having the best sex, and in reflection I suspect the wahine I was with purposely hid the lights from me as her idea of a sick joke, or a cure, whatever.  At any rate, you clip the lights onto the visor of your cap allowing you to work hands free in a dimly lit space.  The lights also come with those tiny but powerful rare earth magnets molded into the bottom surface of their clips so you can stick them onto a metal surface.

Since the lights had sat unused for a while, I had to replace the lifeless batteries.  The batteries are the hearing aid type discs, and while in the process of installing new batteries I dropped one of the tiny screws that hold the light's housing together which took about 2-hours to find even factoring in day light savings time.  I turned off the apartment lights and used the second of the two LED lights to try and locate the needle in the haystack on the floor.  Need I even have to mention that all along the missing screw had been stuck on the magnet of the light's clip of all places.

Friday's Ecology

My sister stumbled upon this picture and was nice enough to Email it to me.  Thankx.  It's the thought that counts.  A Happy Aloha Friday to you too.  Yesterday, I happened to call this former co-worker of mines and he told me that the throttle on his moped had caught on something causing him to crash into a construction-size rubbish bin.  Fortunately for him he was wearing his helmet because he slammed head on into the side of the metal rubbish bin.  Broke a few ribs while he was at it.  Normally, he doesn't wear a helmet, but he said that he had a premonition about winning the lottery.  Instead, was but an early 2008 Tax Rebate Stimulus Package.  He enjoys the drip morphine bottle.  Beats X-Box.

Thursday's Architecture

Traditional tatched roof on a modern wood substrate at Kapiolani Park in Waikiki.

In actuality, pine tree needles from the park's Ironwood tree canopy.

Pennies that Don't Make Sense

Today, I would like to talk about Hawaii's bottle deposit, that's the 5¢ that local grocery stores tack onto each bottle you buy.  I was aware of that, but WTF is this additional 1¢ "beverage fee" just below the 5¢ bottle deposit on your grocery receipt?  Essentially, you deposit 6¢ then for each bottle.  At least that's the way I add things up.  When did this all happen?  No, I'm not looking it up on the Internet.

On a high note, I've seen a lot of people digging into trashcans here and there foraging for empty bottles to redeem for cash at bottle redemption centers which is good since it leaves more room in the city dumps.  The interesting thing though is that the bottle collectors aren't all needy individuals.  Plenty of them don't appear financially challenged.  Apparently, those just got addicted to keeping their appointed rounds and they really seem into their new found hobby.

The New Part in the Mail that Wasn't the Right Part

Just for the sake of conversation, guess what these are for.  Hint below.

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You guessed that they're the parts that connect a motorbike's handlebars to the bike's steering assembly?  Wrong....it's for a sled that I'm entering in the Iditarod Great Sled Dog Race.