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.

Just waking up. It’s a few minutes after 9 a.m. here. Not feeling real great, unfortunately. My throat is a little sore. Yesterday was kind of a work day. Got some breakfast at an amazing place called the Aloha Cafe, and ate out in an open air lanai. Then the highlight of the whole trip, coming up with questions for quizzo. After that, I had to get to work on my column for the Metro. Went into town to get some interviews about the new Hooters that opened downtown, officially killing any vestiges of soul this city still had. But it’s hard to do a really deep story in less than 400 words, and what I started to write was too cynical, so I sort scrapped it. Maybe I’ll post the cynical one on this site a little later. Was at a surf spot called the Banyans when I got the sunset photo above. It’s beautiful out today, so I’m gonna finally hit the beach. Aloha!

This morning on KYW there was a poll that said if the election were held today McCain would beat Clinton or Obama. And that Guiliani would win even more handily. I thought how can that be? The Drive-By Media is the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party! They spin the questions till they get the results they want! Ex: They ask if candidate A was a junkie would you vote for him? But they say 98% won’t vote for candidate A! So I looked at the local Propaganda leaflet aka the Inquirer to see what the percentages were AND IT WASN’T IN THERE! So if they can’t distort the polls to get the results they want they bury it. Of course if the poll was in favor of the Democrat Party it would be on the front page. Why people continue to be hoodwinked by these propagandists is beyond me but hopefully this will help enlighten them.

Ever since Andy Reid said Quit with 1:59 left in the season I’m been dreading more and more this coming season. From personal problems off the field to personnel decisions in the Front Office. this team seems to be heading in the wrong direction at full steam ahead. We have a Quaterback who’s one good hit away permanent retirement (or worse); a second-string Quarterback who did a good job for us years ago but that was with a better team; and a third-string quarterback whose main claim to fame is he can hadle a snap better than Tony Romo. Now I know a lot of people on this website know more about Football than me. Is it as bad as I think it is? I’m thinking a 6-10; or 7-9 record. Help me out here! Cheer me up!
It has come to my attention Andy Reid said Punt; not Quit. But to paraphrase my old friend Bill Shakespeare, Quit by any other name is still giving up.