Last night I saw “Zodiac” and last week “The Departed” won Best Picture. I thought both films were O.K. but long. So I decided to put a list together of my All-Time Top 10 Favorite Gangster/Crime Films. It was tough. There are a lot of good films that didn’t make it. If your favorites didn’t make it feel free to let us know what they were. For one reason or another there were films I didn’t see. Next time someone goes to the video store and nothing new catches their eye they might check out these movies. My Favorite 10 in order of release: 1. 1938 – “Angels With Dirty Faces” 2. 1941 – “The Maltese Falcon” 3. 1949 – “White Heat” 4. 1971 – “The French Connection” 5. 1972 – “The Godfather” 6. 1974 – “The Godfather 2” 7. 1990 – “Goodfellas” 8. 1992 – “Reservoir Dogs” 9. 1995 – “The Usual Suspects” and 10. 1997 – “LA Confidential” For Foreign Language Movie Lovers rhere’s “City Of God” 2003.

Spent yesterday at Kua Bay, where I went from being “the whitest person in Hawai’i” to the “person in Hawai’i with the dorkiest sunburn”. Yep, missed a couple of spots on my chest, so that there are now splotches of pink following no observable pattern against a strikingly white background. I think I’ll stay off the beach today. Just gonna go cruising around, I think. Been taking it pretty mellow. There’s not a whole lot of nightlife here, so I have most of my fun during the day. Hung out with some old work friends last night. It was extremely mellow. They’re all married now, so the party broke up around nine o’ clock. Looks like I’m the only one who’s not growing older (or is it not growing up?)
LOTS MORE PHOTOS!!!

Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny will be showing tonight at the Trocadero. I’ll be back next week for Scarface, which is gonna kick a lot of ass, then we’ve got Spaceballs the week after that. Word.

This is a disgrace!
TAXES – You go outside to smoke. You go inside to drink. Back and fourth. Less Smoking! Less Drinking! Less Taxes! Coupled with the fact people are going to the suburbs to drink and Delaware to buy smokes they’re getting even less taxes. But they’ll spin it and say less taxes means less smokers.
HEALTH – Some politically correct ‘scientific’ studies have been done showing the harm of second-hand smoke…but effects don’t kick in for about 150 years so they’re irrelevant
What is a fact is creating a climate where citizens inform on other citizens is TOTALITARIANISM!
So the only ‘reason’ for a Smoking Ban is … They want you to be as miserable as them.

My buddy Mark (above, in red shirt) and I became friends 1999, shortly after he opened his used bookshop in Kainaliu (Island Books). So I went to visit him the day after I arrived, and we just sat out in front of his store and “talked story” for hours. He’s the type of guy that every used book store owner should be; well read on anything and everything, and yet completely at ease socially. And, of course, unabashedy liberal, with a reasoned argument behind every one of his beliefs. So we went cruising yesterday, and decided to hit up an old road side store shortly after leaving his shop. The owner of the store was a Japanese man named Charlie (below) in his 80s.

His store was a remarkable hodgepodge of completely worthless items: old brooms, garden hoses with mold growing on them, reel to reel tape, a VHS tape about baseball card collecting that was, according to the price tag, $24.95. Vaguely threatening handwritten signs were hung around the store: “You like, you buy. You no like, you no buy. Just kiss off!” Another read, “This is heavenly place where they came to destroy. They’ll be cursed slowly but surely.” He said that, other than snacks, he stopped taking inventory when the US stopped producing goods. Charlie owned the store but not the land, and I quickly came to the conclusion that he was keeping the store open more to talk story and fend off loneliness than to make money. Or perhaps he kept it open out of a sense of duty. His father had opened that very same store in 1919, and his family had been in charge ever since. He had never been married and never had children, so that when he left, the store went with him. Considering the cherry locale, it was not hard to imagine a million dollar home being erected soon after he passes.

Charlie’s course of discussion was every bit the delightful melange as his store was. He went on about his father, about his monthly bills, about watching the White Sox during his brief life as a drifter in Chicago in the 1950s, about putting out a fire at the old auto mechanic’s store across the street, all within about two minutes time. We could have stayed all day, but after a couple of hours, we decided to press on.
UPDATE: More Photos!

Hey peeps, got some good pics and stories coming soon, including my first encounter with a wahine. Here’s a quick tease: it didn’t go well.

Due to all the sincere but misguided people out there I’ll do this one more and last time. Global Warming is not Science! To the Politicians it’s power. To Scientists and Lawyers it’s money. To the Drive-By Media it’s Ideology To it’s followers it’s Blind Faith and to it’s detractors it’s Pure Hokum. But it’s only “Science” in a politically correct cover story kind of way. If it was an ‘indisputable fact’ I wouldn’t be disputing it and there’d be no need for a ‘concensus’. (“Anybody here can prove Global Warming is a fraud? You can? O.K. let’s take a vote”) What are indisputable facts are the bigger the crisis, the bigger the Grants. And the bigger the Grants the better the Life Style. Which brings up two things. 1. The advocates for Global Warming are Very Subjective and 2. If only 60% are getting on this gravy train it must be real bogus. You can question the unwilliness of the 40% who disagree for not speaking out (my guess is pressure from above; they’re getting a piece of the action too) but not their intergrity. In conclusion: 6 out of 10 Scientists choose Global Warming has all the validity of 50 years ago when 4 out of 5 Doctors chose a certain Brand of cigarettes. In a word: NONE!

Have a nice weekend, All my Friends!

The latest scam to come down the pike is a thing called “Global Warming”. It has three objectives: 1. To make you feel guilty about enjoying life. 2. To steal more money from you and 3. To get people who can’t run their own lives trying to run yours. They’ve tried this scam before. They called it “Nuclear Winter”; or “Overpopulation”; or “Acid Rain”; or “The Ozone Layer”; and even, believe it or not, “Global Cooling”. But the M.O. has always been the same: cook up some bogus figures; get the Drive-By Media involved; lay a guilt trip on people; and lie, lie, lie. It failed in the past because they only gave the end of the world blues a 5 or 10 year window. When nothing happened (of course) they started looking like that cartoon of a guy in a toga with a long beard carrying a sign that says “Repent” on one side and “The End Of The World Is Near” on the other. Now they’re saying, what!,100 years, 200, something like that? Now that I agree with. 100 or 200 years from now everyone reading this post will be dead. But the Earth will still be here and so will Mankind. So the next time someone mentions “Global Warming” to you just laugh. Just because they like being miserable don’t mean you can’t enjoy life.