Only to Find that ....

I started off the holiday early yesterday by stopping in at an 24-hour grocery store at 2am in the morning only to find nothing special on sale in celebration of the 4th. Oh well, back to watching Wimbledon on tv from of all places from England on our Independence Day. They're 11 hours ahead of us in Hawaii. I like watching the French Open on tv better because the French are 12-hours ahead of Hawaii and you just switch a.m. (Hawaii) for p.m. (Paris). Anyways, the big controversy at Wimbledon revolves on when is it okay to close the roof on the Centre Court stadium. All the other minor stadiums at the Wimbledon complex are open courts with no retractable roofs which means if there's a heavy enough drizzle, the matches in progress  come to a halt at the digressions of the players. I believe that England has been experiencing its wettest eary-Summer on record. In that regards, a retractable roof would be something real handy. Yet the tournament officials want to preserve the tournament's tradition as an outdoor event and the officials just can't seem to get their act together and make up their mind on how bad the rain has to be before making the call and that's putting it as an understatement. More like Parliament.

It takes only 10-minutes to actually close the roof but another half-hour to fill the stadium with air conditioning, so 40-minutes. This is at Centre Court and  thus it involves marque matches. Unbeknownst to the numbskull officials, people are watching the matches live from all over the world. To me, if the forecast predicts even a hint of drizzle just close the $125 million roof ahead of schedule and be done with their indecision. If you have to open the roof while the match is underway, it takes only 10-minutes flat to re-open the roof, meanwhile the players still can play with the roof closed, on the other hand, grass courts are slippery even after a slight drizzle, and an open roof risk delays. This kind of mentality is probably why the British lost the Revolutionary War. Otherwise we wouldn't be celebrating the 4th as it is.

Last night, went to the beach to watch the fireworks display only to find that the aerial fireworks were shot up in the sky too close to the shore or not far enough offshore to be seen in full view from Waikiki beach. The fireworks are set off at Magic Island a mile-and-a-half as the the crow flies from Waikiki beach. From that point, the Waikiki shoreline curves inland, so about half of the fireworks' red glare and bombs bursting in air were hidden behind the hotels that you see in my blog's banner. I haven't watched the fireworks for two years so I have no idea when all this happened. I do remember that I could watch it from the stairwell of my apartment building and it was better a view from the stairwell than the beach tonight.

RimPac is currently underway off Hawaii waters. Some 25,000 sailors from different Pacific rim nations, plus England and France navies. Every year, every 2 years, or something like that. New Zealand isn't allowed to dock their 2 ships at Pearl Harbor. That's because New Zealand doesn't allow the US to dock our ships at New Zealand harbors because New Zealanders are anti-nukes. The thing about it is that while New Zealand indeed have to dock their 2 ships at Honolulu Harbor, it's on the downtown Honolulu side of the harbor, which works out well for the sailors on leave, instead of being docked at Pearl Harbor which is far and away from Honolulu and Waikiki which takes 2-hours to get back to base by bus and too far to walk. Whereas the New Zealand ships are docked in the middle of Honolulu.

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Some Pics of Today's Parade (6:00pm)

Dog Nights of Summer

Last night, for a few hours period, the trade winds stopped, went on vacation or whatever, and the air became dead still and it was way too warm for my liking. The Weather Station had forecast 72-74 degree temperatures overnight with 0-percent of precipitation but they was wrong because there was light drizzles, off and on, which means of course humidity. So I guess when the trade winds took a break, the humidity unleashed it's full presense upon my part and parcel of the island. This was last night. I have a ceiling fan but it only works if the lights are on, in a sorta cruel tandem. That is, in order to have the fan on, recirculating the same stale stiffling air, I would have to try to sleep with the lights on, or use a blind fold. Naturally the ceiling fan stayed off. Grrrr, with a pant, pant.

Rielle Hunter was on 20/20 (ABC) last Friday night and all I can say is that John Edwords (misspelling mines) might be a hot shot trial lawyer, but Rielle made John Edwords look like a amateur in the court of public opinion after Rielle got through defending her reputation on national tv. They both could be considered the most reviled people in America, one more than the other perhaps, or in a partnership sharing the honors like in tennis doubles. This though was until Rielle hit the interview circuit last Friday night coiciding with the launch of her new book, and ditto this morning on Good Morning America, and now John Edwords is portrayed as a ding-a-ling. The "uglest dog in America" would be too high a compliment. Rielle's new book depicting the affair is titled "What Really Happened." John Edword's title would hypothethically be "If I Did It." Up to this point I had never seen a photo of Rielle Hunter. Rielle either has ice flowing in her veins, or at least seems to judging by her stellar performances on her live interviews. Or she could be just being truthful. Meanwhile, John Edwords is a lawyer and a politician, aka, a trained liar, and he could have met his match in the negative sense of the term. If some author wrote the same story it would be a good story understandably fiction in the Harlequin genre just a bad romance.

Saturday, Already

I had sticker shock after discovering how much a can of corned beef cost nowadays. $5-6.00!!. When, while no one was looking, did canned corned beef get to be so sky high? Btw, as to how this all began, for no particular reason, the mood struck me for a plate of corn beef & cabbage. Quick and easy. Fresh corned beef takes too long to prepare, and now apparently the canned stuff is beyond my means. If a can of corned beef had a prize in it like CrackerJack, I still wouldn't buy it. $5-$6.00 for 12 oz!!

Is Impulse Buying Bad for the Mind

I don't mean splurging for big items like yachts or Lamborginis on a whim, but instead impulsely buying those inconsequential items grocery stores typically display strategically within easy reach at the checkout line next to the tabloid newspapers. I bought this oatmeal health food bar. Should have took a pic of it. Okay, I'll do that later. Anyways, usually when you bite into the oatmeal bar it crumbles apart. The latest and greatest oatmeal bar that I bought, at the checkout line, 60¢ oh what a deal, didn't crumble apart much to my sheer delight which struck me as odd. In fact it would take a chisel and a mallet to break it apart though chewing works too. Some lackey factory assembly line worker must have used epoxy instead of food glue to bond the individual oat meal flakes together. Or they mis-wrappered something meant as a dog bone. Several days later my teeth started to ache. I recognize a toothache when I feel one, and this, believe me, was the start of a toothache no question about it. For me, the problem with toothaches is that they subside for a while, but, then, whenever you drink something hot or cold, the toothache hits the nerve again for the next 20-minutes or more. This went on for several days and nights. If there is a moral to the story, do not bite into anything hard. Your teeth will thank you.

Pan-Pacific Festival Parade

Another day, another parade in Waikiki town.





Same guy in yesterday's post, da mayor.


 What's wrong with having geishas in a parade?


 .... Too many people want their picture taken with them and then the parade momentarily comes to a halt.


These mascots were stationed on both sides of the street.


Gulp.














Kids along the parade route trying their hand at taiko drumming. Early in the parade they were handing out candy too.

King Kamehameha Celebration Floral Parade

I took a lot of pictures of today's parade but I must have messed up the camera settings and to my chagrin most of the pics came out dark. But here are a few photos that didn't.

Pan-Pacific Festival Ho'olaule'a

Happy Aloha Friday, if it is, and as always, a Happy Aloha Friday, if it isn't. The tents for the food booths for tonight's Ho'olaule'a on Kalakaua Ave, the main drag in Waikiki town, are set up in the morning, many hours in advance of tonight's annual block party.


They place the empty tents on the sidewalks then around 4pm start moving the tents onto the street itself for the vendors to fill with the fold-up tables and stoves and bbq grills and fuud. What this means is that at the 4 o'clock hour traffic starts getting gridlock. Don't even believe that "Kalakaua Ave closed at 5pm" mobile sign that the city stations on the street. The vendors don't bring their own tents or canopies. Either they aren't allowed to or it's better for them to collectively contract out the setting up the tents to a single tent company. Also, although the participants of the Pan-Pacific Festival (June 8-10) are either pacific islanders or from pacific rim countries, the food vendors for tonight's block party are all local food establishments, restaurants, lunch trucks, etc., so the annual block party has been a windfall to the local food entrepreneurs. The Pan-Pacific-ers themselves aren't part of the conversation in regards to the menu items irregardless of the 'Pan-Pacific' ethnicity aspect of the festival's theme. It's far from Tonight is an enjoy the taste of different Pacific cultures, pan nor pot. Oh well, do the French serve french fries, or the Italians, chef boyardee. That is, the vendors sell and showcase the very specialties that are popular at their island restaurants which resembles nothing authentic to Pan-Pacific recipes irregardless of the occasion. That being that, judging by the usual sell-outs at many food booths it's not a bad thing.



This is as near to tonight's ho'olaule'a that I'll get. Too many people packed together for my comfort level.

BIOS and Code Red

I've been leery of blogging over the past week becuz I got back a Code Red diagnosis (below) alerting me that me computer was infected by Malware after running a test at the DNS Working Group website. The background on the same image should be Green if the Estonian malware isn't detected on your computer. I downloaded an 'eraser' software but didn't get anywhere implementing it. The glitch was that you have to download and store the eraser software on and reboot your computer from a DVD or USB drive which translates in layman's terms that you have to reset your BIOS, usually the computer starts up from your manufacturer's hard drive when you turn the computer on. I prioritized the BIOS to restart from the eraser DVD instead of the hard drive, but after clicking the viola Enter Key, the computer nevertheless still rebooted from the hard drive. Tried and tried the same steps for about 4 hours last night like one of those hamsters.

Finally, it was 4 o'clock in the morning, that it dawned upon me, that perhaps the malware had disabled the function. So, whadda we do now. The Estonian malware bozos have already been apprehended by the FBI and Interpol but they've left their mess and legacy for others to clean up. I bet they plea bargained for reduce sentences if they handed over the antidote. If they were to serve a day in penitentary for every computer and router their malware infected, that would have amounted to hundred-of-thousands of days in the slammer. That doesn't even account for or address or approach the hours people took to erase the malware. I finally tried AVIRA and it worked instantly like a charm. No downloading their eraser to a sterile DVD, since I'm unable to reboot from an alternative DVD anyways, just download the eraser software, and hit the RUN button to implelement the fix. And yes, I realize there are other ways to resolve the issue, if not have prevented it to begin with, or perhaps old news by now too, however.

Is Pack Ratism Bad for the Mind

This past week I've been on a mission tossing things out. Metal tool boxes that had rusted piano hinges that prevented them from opening. Actually when you pried them open, the hinges and the sides of the toolbox warped. I then had to use a hammer to pound the hinge straight enough so I was able to shut the tool box close again. Then a cordless circular saw that had a lethargic lithium battery that ceased recharging up to the voltage level required to make it saw anything a little harder than a stick of butter. And, no, a replacement battery would cost more than the cordless saw was worth, or was worth it to me. It had a 14-volt lithium. Today, practically all cordless tools use 18-volt rechargeable batteries. I still have the battery itself until I find a deposal site to despose of it properly. And a few choice items that you accumulate over the years. These are far from memorabilia, so there wasn't a preponderance of logic behind keeping them. Just room. Or perhaps like Facebook stock, next week it'll go up. Another example, two old wheels for my handtruck. The original wheels had tubless tires in them and air always leaked out and in order to refill the tubeless I had to take them to the service station. So I went and bought replacement tires the kind with tubes in them. Over $20 a piece. $40 for two wheels/tires, for a hand truck that cost me $50 new about seven years ago from Home Depot. The same handtruck sells for $70 today. I just couldn't bring myself to part with the old wheels until now. Space junk.

Replenished Beach

They removed the orange fence, those temporary plastic barrier things, and the beach is again populated. Sparsely at this noon hour when I took the pic I surmise most of the visitors are out on a tour or still in their air conditioned hotel rooms zonked out with a hangover.

The lifeguard towers are elevated up on concrete columns to give the lifeguards a better vantage point. The cabin itself might be the standard design nationwide, and it figures prominently in my blog's banner above. The older towers were perched up on metal pipe stilts but the salt rusted the metal.

This tower was smack dab where they dumped the huge dune of sand that they pumped from offshore and had to be temporarily removed. They installed the lifeguard tower back where it use to be, but it sits flat on the sand until they find where they misplaced the concrete column. These things take a while around here.

The lifeguard cabin could be mistaken for a porta potty. For example, these visitors are looking for the sign.

Sunny Today

If this statute of Neptune was installed on the newly sand replenished beach at Waikiki, it would befit and crown the occasion, but instead, Neptune along with another 20 or more marble statutes are on the front yard of a nearby beach front property. I tunk it's Neptune. For all I know it may be Poseidon instead. Neptune is Roman, Poseidon, Greek. Poseidon is usually portrayed weilding a pitchfork (trident) at unwary mariners, while Neptune prefers romancing sea nymphs. And it's cumbersome to grasp sea nymphs if you have to hold on to a pitchfork.

The promontory of Diamond Head crater at the far end of Kapiolani Park. Da Duomo of Waikiki .... namely, "in the shadow of the duomo." Quiet around that area too. I don't get too much 'quiet' living along the Ala Wai with the steady drone of traffic. Sound travels up. You have to be at least 25 stories vertical to get beyond the trajectory and range of the up noise. Dunno the junk science of it, but the Waikiki library is less than 40-feet from the Ala Wai Blvd and you barely hear the traffic in the horizontal direction in their outdoor section.

An Empty Bottle of Bay Leaves

I use a fair amount of bay leaves, and unfortunately it's $8-$9 a bottle. At .14 oz net weight, that's what, a billion dollars per pound for bay leaves? Or, more. Okay, this way, at 20 leaves in a bottle, that's 40¢ per leaf! Money grows on trees almost. I couldn't find bay leaves on sale so as a last resort I went to Walmart. And there it was. The very last bottle of bay leaves on the rack at $5.60. I guess at $5.60 it goes fast. No wonder it's the last remaining bottle on the rack. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind, that kind of moment, and realized to my chagrin, somebody musta mistakenly put the bottle of bay leaves back on the wrong rack. Walmart has bar code stickers plastered on the front of the rack without room for the names of the individual spices next to the bar code. A worker was nice enough to price check it for me and sure enough bay leaves were $8 and something per bottle. Happy Aloha Friday the same. How, you?

Sands

Freshly replenished with brand new sand, I wonder whether with the remake if da Beach is re-eligible to be listed on Dr. Beach's Top 10 Beaches of 2012. I believe the rule is that once a given beach makes the list, it can't be on it again, or perhaps after so many years later or something like that. If you haven't noticed, today's pics are a fraction larger. They're 425 pixels wide. My standardized size was 400 pixel wide with no enlarged view. Does the extra 25 pixels wider make a huge difference? That's left to eagle eye of the beholder on the other side of the monitor screen, and on that note, "What, you hadn't noticed." If nobody is around to hear a tree fall in the middle of a forest, than it follows it wouldn't make a difference either with the historical inauguration of 425 pixels, here. I personally don't see the need for posting super large size pics. Well, if somebody is searching on the Internet for a photo for a screen saver. The way that I see it is that readers only look at a featured pic once, then mostly forget about it. There're always be new pics in the next post.

The Ala Wai Serpent

What goes down must come up, just like the economy, ha ha. That was a joke. Or maybe not, this incident will create jobs. Anyways, a few years ago they assembled the emergency sewer bypass pipe, kukai pipe, on the surface of the Ala Wai canal, then once all the individual sections were connected into a contiguous giant sewer line they broke the ceremonial bottle of champagne and submerged the pipe to the bottom of the canal where it lay peacefully until this past Saturday upon which a section of it (photo above) rose up and breached the surface. The way I understood it, is that, the pipe was empty and basically filled with air as there hasn't been a sewer emergency for a while and the volume of air inside the emergency bypass pipe caused the bouyancy and up she went.

Thank You for Visiting Amazon

I received the Email below from Amazon informing me that I had cancelled an order. No, I didn't. I didn't even place the order that the Email purports that I cancelled. I notified Amazon pronto about this discrepency inquiring if they might find the alias who did place the order under fictitious identity. Or did the Email itself originate from Nigeria? That kinda thing. To begin with, Amazon does not begin a purchase notification with a "Dear Customer" salutation. They address the customer by his or her name. Secondly, the Email's time stamp showed it was sent on the 6th. An Email sent on the 6th notifying me that I cancelled an order on the 7th is genius. There's a thin line between genius and the other extreme. Out of caution I did not click the link (underlined text, below). You can click on the underlined link yourself but I've disabled it .... it's just colored text with underline. I also examined the Email's 'details', and it shows that the Email, if replied to, the Return-Path is, "chanfbpwbokvpt (at) flashmail (dot) com," nought Amazon. Doesn't the lowly moron have better things to do? For some reason, I don't think the aforementioned link conceals a malicious virus. Instead, the link probably shanghai's you to a webpage for more traffic. Then there are clubs that people like these belong to where they compete for points for bragging rights or whatever. The person who accumulates the most points at the end of the month gets to be supreme leader. Prestige? Yea, prestige.

Dear Customer,

Your order has been successfully canceled. For your reference, here's a summary of your order:

You just canceled order 129-925-731 placed on May 7, 2012.

Status: CANCELED

___________________________________________

"Disingenuous" (2008), Second Edition
By: Lorraine Morgan

Sold by: Amazon.com LLC

___________________________________________

Thank you for visiting Amazon.com!

-----------------------------------------------------------

Amazon.com Earth's Biggest Selection http://www.amazon.com

Kentucky Derby and NASCAR

As you already know, about the only tv that I watch is 24/7 news channels and the local evening news. And Hawaii Five-O and the semi-finals and the finals rounds in major professional sports. It's debatable whether the Kentucky Derby is a sport. However with all the hype surrounding the Kentuck Derby, it influences you to tune in to watch yesterday's live broadcast of the Running of the Roses as it's known. The only problem with the 'live' thing, is that it's an hour of pomp and circumstances with further ado, and much more further ado, before they actually after 50 mint julips finally get around to broadcasting the main race. Oh, well. Oh, well, not. I switched channels and NASCAR happened to be on another channel. Yea, the car race that goes round-and-round in circles. Ovals I guess is its geometric term somebody look it up.

I liked watching Formula 1 which is raced on road tracks which is better to my eyes. Well, NASCAR, or the promotion department, has coregraphed the race so that it's much more enjoyable to watch on the tv screen. Along with the cameras set up around the oval track, they've incorporated onboard cameras within the race cars' cages themselves which puts you in the drivers' seat in real time. It use to be that only a few race cars were equiped with cameras, but nowadays just about all cars have onboard cameras. There's even a separate camera that's devoted to showing the driver shifting gears from the passenger sideview angle while the picture vibrates. At 190mph things vibrate. There's also a camera that faces to the rear window so you can see what's happening behind the selected car. While the majority of the race is still covered the regular way from cameras stationed around the track, the broadcast switches back and forth to the onboard cameras to track the action as seen from drivers' seat.

I don't know whether NASCAR got the idea of switching back and forth to the drivers' eyeview cams from NASCAR video games. Parts of the coverage seems orchestrated, if that's the right word. When there's a yellow flag, caution flag, the drivers take the occassion en masse to make a pit stop to refuel or get new tires, etc. That's when the tv screen shows mulitple pics of different car teams working on the cars that have just pitted all on the same screen. But you can hear the whirl of the air guns and other associated mechanical noises. But none of the muliple cameras are that close enough in proximity to pit row within range to record the sound. Or they're patching in the sound from a camera that stationed in pit row just for the sound effects. Heck, the audio could have been dubbed from a sound archive for all I know. But it makes the race more well like you're watching a race in a movie.

Then Danica, she was in the lead group once in the race, but then she fade behind the pelethon like she was peddling a bike. The eventual winner pulled away in what seemed like the last 100 yards and won by a half a car hood if that. At that point all the chasing cars floor board it to the finish line and after passing the finish line make a full circle of the track in reduced speed to whine down. While this was happening a car behind Danica nudges her rear fender and she almost hits the wall. She chases up to what she perceives as a hit-and-run driver and bumps that driver's rear fender on purpose sending the driver into the wall and his car ends up limping the rest of the way back to pit row. Remember this is just the obligatory post race lap and supposedly all the elbowing is over until the next race. They interviewed Danica and she said that the driver apologized, alledgedly. On the other hand, they also interviewed Danica's sparring mate and he said that his front wheel locked up and his bump wasn't on purpose, but questioned if retaliating by sending him to the wall was all that necessary especially on a post race lap when the race is already over.

Not even a Canadian penny's worth of usable silicone

The old tube of silicone felt hard and barely anything squeezed out, but since all I needed was just a few dabs of silicone, I decided to peel off the metal skin of the tube, it's thin metal, and probe for any usable pockets of gel to avoid buying a brand new tube of silicone. None.

May Day at Kapiolani Park

Fast the year, May 1st already. The days went by in an eye blink. It seems like winter was just last week. Anyways, here's some random pics from the May Day celebration at Kapiolani Park in Waikiki. This was at 9am so the flora wasn't on display quite yet, but had plenty food.