Mitt Who?

Mitt Romney is in Poland, after visiting olympic London, Israel, etc. Why does he do this now before the November presidential elections? Free publicity back in the US, but also if he loses to Obama, Romney won't be receiving the same red carpet treatment from the host countries if he visited them later. Remember Obama had 200,000 people in Berlin cheering him when Obama was a presidential candidate demonstrating how he could walk on water on a pond in a park. Europeans must be getting irritated since their own political candidates challenging the incumbent prime minister, premier, etc. don't make it a point to visit Washington DC right before their elections. At any rate, Romney has everything to gain even if he does end up losing to Obama in November. His 2012 campaign would work out as a warm up lap for a more favorable presidential run in 2016 since Vice President Joe Biden nor any other notable Democrat aren't planning to run for president.

The Sound of Their Own Voice

I've never had the urge to 'tweet' or even 'text message', is there a difference(?) asides the 140 character limit in a tweet. To begin with, I lack the agility to hit the right alphabets on the miniature keypad on a pda. I'm not too bad typing on the larger computer keyboard. Terrible with the keys on a cell phone, though some people are able to touch type on their cell phones without looking. Dunno how they do that. If I had a choice, I would prefer emails to phone calls especially if there's a voice message that requires a return call and than the other party isn't home when you call or have their cell phone turned off, as opposed, to Email which is always ON. But between a tweet/text message versus a voice message, well, let's just say that I'd return a tweet/text message with a phone call instead of struggling to type a return tweet or a text message. You might be wondering what's the point or if there is a point to all of this? Well, let me explain. I was in Barnes & Nobles and this older guy was walking around in the aisles talking aloud on his cellphone oblivous to the presence of the rest of us quiet people in the makeshift audience and from the conversation I overheard it wasn't important or urgent talk just the usual generic nonsense. He probably didn't know how to tweet or text message. So there are situations where it would be more polite and appropriate to tweet/text message than conduct a phone conversation because a tweet/text message doesn't disturb and irritate nearby people.

Then there is this guy in the pic below, supreme commodore of the Ala Wai canal, aka, canoe practice coach for teenage girl paddlers. Da s.o.b. uses a megaphone to bark instructions.

One Among Many Bright Ideas

If you don't take these little halogen bulbs for desktop lamps with you to the store, you'd never get the right size. That's what I did. That's what I didn't. I didn't take the burnout halogen bulb with me to the store. The two pins on the bottom of the bulb are spaced a few millimeters apart on different wattage bulbs and they won't fit. It's not as simple for example as the bulb in the olympic torch. So I left the store empty handed knowing that it'll entail a second trip to the store later. Done it before too. However, as things would have it, while I was pulling the old halogen bulb out of the desktop lamp, the bulb lit up. So I guess it wasn't plugged in snug enough.

Scenic Drive, Sort Of

I saw this car in-gulfed with flames just outside the entrance to the tunnel on the Pali Highway, townbound. I say "in-gulfed" because while the interior was enfurled with orange flames, the outside of the car was perfectly visible and unharmed. The driver wasn't around either. But apparently the driver had pulled the car off to the right shoulder and the car wasn't impeding traffic. For all I know the driver might have been inside. The flames were that thick. I dunno. This is the part of the highway where there's a thousand feet scenic drop on the side and anybody standing or walking on the shoulder is hard to miss. At any rate, there was no signs of a collision with debris scattered all around and all that. Two cars infront of me, the driver pulls off to the left shoulder and stopped. The car immediately infront of me decides in the spirit of the moment to stop too, but in the middle of the highway to check things out. It's humanly impossible to render assistance in this situation hypothetically if the driver or passengers were unconscious inside the flaming vehicle. Fortunately at this portion of the two lane wide townbound highway, people decrease their speed. They're about to enter the tunnel and there's a change of direction curve before the entrance. The grade is also uphill so it's easier to slow in this particular situation to avoid the driver infront me stopped smack dab in the middle of the road. So I started beeping my horn because this is gonna cause a chain reaction crash real soon if we don't keep things moving along. About a hundred yards behind us there's an S-turn and people generally are speeding through that chicane. We were so close to the flaming car that you could feel the heat. I didn't think about it until later, but isn't there a possibility of the gas tank exploding? This was about 4pm in the afternoon. I didn't see it on tonight's news.

A Place in the Sun

There are few pleasures in the world that surpass nailing together plywood forms for concrete foundations all the while working in 85° weather under the blazing sun. If that sounds delirious perhaps there were a few solar bursts during the course of the work day that enhanced the over all euphoria back on Earth, as in, 85° but feels like 90°, also, I drink a gallon of water, but don't even pee once on the job. Than at home, another gallon of water. This time of year, there's always 2 pitchers of water ready in the frig. I wouldn't call it sun stroke but things do get overbaked.

Those 'Save Now' Stickers

As you can see for yourself, the cashier at Longs Drugs (CVS) neglected to remove the 50¢ stickers and of course I did not receive the manufacturer's discount off the Ziploc bags. I've already accumulated a huge collection of these unremoved instant saving stickers throughout the years to know better that you have to keep a watchful eye on the cashier at the checkout, but on this occasion I was preoccupied punching in my pin on the credit card machine. I assume cashiers are trained to spot instant saving stickers. But than, it's not their money. I even placed the Ziploc boxes side-by-side to each other on the conveyor belt with the stickers facing up to no avail to the eye of the beholder so to speak. Oddly, on the shelves that the boxes of plastic bags were stocked, not all the Ziploc boxes had instant saver stickers on them so I had to dig through the lot. And still, after all that effort, the stickers were not redeemed. I wonder whether enterprising shoppers remove the stickers on some of the Ziploc boxes on the shelves to use elsewhere or later. It's not if an alarm will sound. In reality, I already have enough Ziploc bags in the pantry, but they just happened to be on sale and when you run out and need to buy Ziploc bags they're on the expensive side. So I took the entire shopping bag, didn't buy too much stuff, and my receipt back to Longs Drugs and received back a dollar for the 2 stickers. As the stickers say, "Save Now!"

.... thee to a Summer's Day

Diamond Head Crater from Kapiolani Park

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?