Tuesday's Day in the Life

I bumped into Prince Kuhio while I was strolling along the beach, about 5 o'clock, on a late wet Tuesday afternoon. If it's anything note worthy, Prince Kuhio bequeated Waikiki Beach to the general public. 

....60¢ for a can of Pepsi at a soda machine for hotel employees. Even took a picture of it as proof of purchase. A can of soda is usually at least 75¢ just about everywhere else that I'm personally aware of. Yeh, I go around checking prices on soda machines that are tucked in nooks and crannies islandwide. Almost started a blog on the very subject, and I still may. Say I'm on a date, take her to my secret soda machine, and while we're at it, "Honey, Long's Drugs has a sale on potato sticks." Soda and potato sticks, who could desire anything more for a night out on the town. I'll stress that candle light and wine are so overated. Even if it includes a dinner that isn't presented on a paper plate with plastic utensils wrapped in a paper napkin. Joking. I repeat, "I was just joking." Anyways, I remember, or simply can't forget, this restaurant review written about the restaurant that's located on the top of the EiffelTower, Maxim's (?), where the reviewer noted something along the lines, "....to dine at Maxim's will stand as the biggest thrill of your life....until presented with the bill."

Monday Musings

You want sheets with the room, then reserve the presidential suite....

The thing that I noticed right off was the gas tank. Sorta resembles a gas tank on a motorbike.

Photograph Your Tea Cup Day

It took me 2500-hours to photograph my tea cup on the lanai railing to commemorate Fall. Today's winds were bustling. The top surface of the railing is beveled. The bottom of the tea cup is shimmed up on its lower side. Definitely next year's Nobel prize for physics. (more later)

Grooming Wagon

I passed this van on Kahala Ave. on my way to Makapu Pt/SeaLife Park today. On my way back it was still parked in the same spot and I decided to take a photo of it. Beyond that, I probably wouldn't be able to afford their services. Should the occasion ever arise that you want to pamper your dog with a shampoo and a manicure, LOL. Apparently, the outfit drives over to your neighborhood, and they might even accept walk-ins by pooches whose owners just happened to notice the doogie van parked down the street from them.

Thursday's Memo

....it keeps slipping my mind to pick up some bay leaves while at the grocery store on numerous occasions. I'm out of bay leaves. Still out of bay leaves. The crux of tonight's story is that this forgetfulness always happens when I find myself out of bay leaves. Takes a week. Occasionally, several weeks, before I eventually remember to replenish the stock. Dunno. The strange thing is that it doesn't happen with other herbs and spices after I've run out of those kitchen essentials, yet, since I use bay leaves with just about everything and anything that you can fry, kalua, sautee or scorch on a gas stove, perhaps it's the product of a mental mechanism to ration my intake of bay leaves, this forgetfulness.

Balloon Boy

What are little boys made of?
"Snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails
That's what little boys are made of !"

What are little girls made of?
"Sugar and spice and all things nice
That's what little girls are made of!"

That having been said, I bet that Falcon Heene hadn't the faintest idea that he was the center of attention in today's biggest news story about a runaway helium balloon and a missing boy .... being that while the search was under way, Falcon was hiding in a cardboard box in the attic watching TV or something supposedly fearing for his fanny. They said that even Al-Jazeera followed the drama live. Use to be kids flew kites. I guess kites are so yesterday. At any rate, entrepreneurs are already busy cashing in on the phenomenon.

Wednesday Less

....this is how the weather's been throughout most part of the day, kinda iffy. Not even a single drop of rain yet, but seemingly about to pour buckets at any moment.

There's this mime that's existed on the blogosphere for several years already, titled "Wordless Wednesday," whereupon participating bloggers simply paste a photo or two for their Wednesday's post and caption it with a few words, or as the original WW formula dictated, with no words at all, and over the years, the mime has developed into a popular theme. Obviously, for WW participants, writers block does not exist on Wednesdays in perpetuity. So, if you've ever found yourself at a lost for words for a post and it also happens to be on a Wednesday, then that's the solution. Upload a picture, done. However, photos are the norm on posts everyday of the week in this era of the blogging. That is, it's arguably more worthy of a task to have instead a "Photo-less Wednesday." Or, "Picture-less Wednesday." That'll screw things up. I happened upon a post today by Diane Ako, KHNL morning news anchor, that didn't have any pics accompanying it, but nonetheless, the irony is that it simply leaves the reader instead of the writer "wordless," and gave an entire different meaning to Wordless Wednesdays, yikes.  At least it did me. Here.

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As all of my 5 loyal readers already know, I've been making my very own cigarettes at home. In the box above, there are 200 empty cigarette tubes which is the same number of cigarettes that there are in a carton of cigarettes. *"Quit smoking" .... I heard that. FYI, I'm contemplating switching to smokeless cigarettes, but I've found that there are many models of smokeless cigarettes available on the market today by different manufacturers all anxious to cash in on the new trend.  I haven't decided on which particular smokeless cigarette is the best, starter kits cost $70 on sale, $100 regular price, so taste-tasting the various brands gets expensive. Plus, I still have a stash of raw tobacco leftover, and I minus well use that up. I ran out of empty tubes, so I had to buy some more in order to use up the tobacco. And that's all for the evening news. Well, a little more.

Here's a closeup shot of an empty tube ready to be filled with tobacco. Being that a pack of cigarettes sell for $7 locally, it's well worth the effort to make your own which breaks down to 11.7674¢ per individual cigarette. Every fraction of a penny counts in today's down economy. Talk about a down economy, there's this entrepreneur doing body and fender work on a van parked on the Ala Wai below my apartment. You can hear him pounding out the dings and dents. The van just happens to belong to a person who lives in our apartment building. The owner usually parks his van in the basement garage in a parking stall nearby my motorbike. The other day, I overheard him bartering with the body and fender man on the price while I was polishing my bike. To say the least, it's getting kinda noisy, all that pounding out the dents on the van.

Another close-up shot of an empty tube.

No Motorized Watercrafts Allowed

....they had another sewage spill into the Ala Wai and obviously, "The public is advised to stay out of the area until further notice." The operators of these motorized boats, that shouldn't be where they are, they make like they're some kind commodore plying the seven seas. Or, Humphrey Bogart on the African Queen. Not exaggerating. I'm not sure on the official reason behind why the Ala Wai canal is off limits to motorized watercrafts, whether it's because the wakes from a passing boat would disrupt the lives of the municipal ducks, causing the ducks to bob up and down like corks. Or, whether it's just to prevent collisions with kayaks and canoes using Honolulu's grand canal on non-sewage spill days. It might be because the wakes of motorized boats would accelerate the errosion of the shoreline. That might be it.

Thursday's Melt

I don't know what part of the island you live on, but on this side it was very humid today. Tonight is humid too. Might last all week. How do you spell relief? One of my remedies is to munch on a bag of frozen peas and carrots straight out of the freezer. You might prefer soy beans. Meanwhile, the air conditoner doesn't work as well as it should. And why should it? Insofar as our building the rule is that air conditioners must be installed on the bottom, not the top of an exterior wall like the way most every other building that I know of has it. In the process, hot air from the air conditioner's exhaust pipes rises from near floor level and while it's rising, hugging the picture window and jalousies, a volume of radiant heat seeps back into the apartment. Then the air conditioner has to work even harder to cool the regenerated heat. Obviously, this would not be so if the air conditioners were placed at a higher room elevation. Imbeciles. As we speak, there's nothing left to do but to drink hot tea. To open up the pores and release heat. Not to get too techical, tonight's post might be interpreted as a rant. There's nothing on the radar to rave about.  However, in the midst of the humidity, ranting opens up the pores more than raving. What sustains my spirits is the lingering memory of last year's cold winter, when the temperatures decended into lower 70° for days on end. I'll take high humidity any day over cold weather.

Red Wings

I had to buy new shoes because the soles on the bottom of my old shoes were just about worn out. Much of it is from dragging my shoes to brake when slowing to a stop at a traffic light while on my bike. If I had continued to wear my old shoes, than I won't be able to re-sole the shoes because there wouldn't be enough left on the bottom of the shoe to glue on a new sole. Boy, this is getting exciting. Wanna hear what I had for breakfast, too? At any rate, the top of the old shoe was in dire shape as well from the shifter pedal, one down, four up. The up motion eventually results in this....

kinda matches my puka pants. Hey, those are work pants.

Tsunami advisory issued for Hawaii

what's with all these earthquakes recently, at least, the larger than normal ones in the Pacific? " If a tsunami was generated the first waves would not reach Hawaii until 6:50 p.m."

*Tsunami watch for Hawaii canceled

however, when's the next earthquake that might trigger a tidal wave? The reason that I pose the question is that I happen to park my 2 motorbikes in my apartment building's basement garage and at the moment they're not hermetically sealed off against severe flooding resulting from a sustained rise in the ocean level, and other seemingly unrelated things like these that a tsunami watch brings to mind. The Ala Wai canal that I live adjacent to, which empties into the ocean nearby, would overflow it's banks too after a slight delay, so I'll get hit by rising tides from both sides. Yeah, I could simply plug the exhaust pipes and carburetor ports on my bikes, batten down the hatches, so to speak. However, should I keep them plugged under the trepidation that the "next" earthquake might occur with more frequency? Meanwhile, hotels in Waikiki, on beach front property, and within the outline of a tsunami's inundation zone, are built on stilts to allow a tidal surge to flow through their basements as opposed to weathering the brunt of a giant wave like an inadvertant break water. That said, most storefronts and Jack-in-the-Box's in Waikiki town ply their trade on ground level, and they musta been holding their okoles with the latest tsunami warning.

Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of the Afghanistan war.

....in Washington, DC. President Obama is being besieged with advice and warnings. At a bipartisan meeting on Tuesday at the White House with Congressional leaders, Obama seemed to indicate that he’s punting on whether or not to send another 40,000 troops that General Stanley McChrystal is demanding .... in addition to the 60,000 already based in Afghanistan.

Even if some Democrats want to bail out of Afghanistan and some Republicans think success can be earned with crushing force, the sad fact is that there will likely be many more anniversaries of the Afghanistan war before America can extricate itself.

Jacob Heilbrunn, senior editor at The National Interest.

Obama is in a damned if he do, damned if he don't, conundrum on whether to escalate the Afghanistan War. Know what's incredible, without even a single fighter jet or attack helicopter, the Taliban has managed to gain ground against the world's most well trained army. Like most people, I'm confused over "Taliban" and "al Queda" as far as who the enemy is that the US military is trying to eliminate in Afghanistan. Last I heard, al Queda has a different zip code. Still, you would think that half of the 40,000 more troops the General McChrystal requested would come from US allies. But I suspect that other nations won't contribute more troops to the Afghanistan War under a similar rationale that was used to promote the Iraqi War. "We fight terrorists in Iraq, so that we won't have to fight them at home." Instead, if the US is left to fight the "terrorists" alone in Afghanistan, then in the future, terrorists will plan retaliatory attacks against the US homeland, instead of launching terrorist attacks in Europe. And who would want that.

Tuesday on the Ala Wai

Food Bloggers Have Killed off Gourmet Magazine

With the millions of food bloggers reviewing restaurants and lunch trucks, or exulting about the masterpieces they roasted and baked in the home oven, Gourmet Magazine has gone the way of dinosaurs. Do foodies have the least amount of remorse?

Without Border and With Border

Hawaiian Eye

In the interest of saving people's eyesight, I've enlarged the size of the text on my posts. Problem was the spacing between the lines also increased proportionally, to a distance, at least to me, too much was read between the lines. Naturally, the next step was to reduce the line spacing from 1.6em to 1.4em, nevermind. I also decided to eliminate the irritating default border that Blogger frames around photos. If a need ever arises for a border around a photo, adding .... "border: 1px solid black;".... to a photo's image-code will give the photo its desired border, and sway the Olympic Committee to hold the next Olympics in the US.

Iron Horse on a Friday

T'was a nice Happy Aloha Friday to take Iron Horse around Makapu, spin around at Sea Life Park, return back to town via the same route, making the most of the winding road along the rugged shoreline. The photo is at Sandy Beach. If you weren't already aware, I author a blog. Thus, it's imperative that I take a picture of Iron Horse in full repose or whatever professional photographers term it, I'll look it up later, to paste on my webpage. All the people passing on the highway were thinking out loud, "Hey isn't that RONW?" Almost famous, if you may. Just kidding. Seriously. Nobody waved.

....as things would have it, a two-wheeler, with Koko Head crater's caldera as a backdrop. If you're ever seen bikers give abbreviated waves to other passing bikers, that's the international sign language for "ride safe." Not, "how are you?" It's a highly regarded ritual with a warning and friendly reminder.... otherwise, you crash and die. You only die once.  

Koko Head crater from last week's post. I'll get there someday.

Koko Head crater from this week's post. There.

Messenger of

I imagine that text-er's would prefer it termed driving while texting, with driving the ancilliary action. That is, they're always texting some person or the other. They just also happened to be driving at that given moment. Fortunately or unfortunately, its the deed, not the words that matter. Myself, I do feel significantly safer in traffic ever since the State banned handheld cellphone use along with text messaging while operating a vehicle. Minus well share a ride, then? Not even. So, this driver hears his phone ring. Must be important. Picks up. "This is your Sprint provider with an urgent message.... you are pass due on your bill." Also, I'm way behind everbody in designating different ring tones to ID known parties. How advanced are those software that use to translate your voice into text? They're able to recognize brain waves by now?