“Dude! C’mon! We gotta see this!”

“See what, dude?”

“The surf on the North Shore, dude! Fifty footers!“

“And how are you going to get to see them?”

“Drive out to the beach. How else?“

“And how are you going to do that, when the beach is closed?“

“Whaddaya mean, closed?“

“Pollution, dude. Even if those fifty feet are clean, the smell will …”

“Will you get in the car already?!?“

“OK, dude, but the traffic’s going to be horrendous. And if we can’t get there ’cause the road’s been blocked, don’t blame me.”

“Get real, dude. What could block the roads?”

“Water and rocks, dude. You do know what you call a really big wave when it clobbers the shoreline, don’t you?”

“What?”

“SIR-f.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

For the second time in three years, the football gridiron program of the University of Hawai‘i has been exposed as a fraud by a professional sports franchise major university’s team.

Commentators on last night’s (5 December 2009) 51-10 shellacking of Hawai‘i by the University of Wisconsin had fun early on with the walk-on status of the UH quarterback. Who promptly demonstrated why he was a walk-on (leaving aside the matter of “academic transcripts”, which in this world doesn’t matter anyway until one is caught) by ending his team’s first two possessions with interceptions.

(For those of you who don’t follow American college gridiron, a “walk-on” is a student who joins a team without having been invited, and therefore has to pay for his education rather than receiving wages and perks a full scholarship as do the invited players. So – among other things – while his teammates were chowing down at the training table, this young man, who by rule may not partake of the training table’s goodies, was driving around town delivering pizza.)

When it became apparent that the Hawai‘i team defense was going to provide no more of an impediment to the Wisconsin running game than a thin layer of mud on a pavement would to a herd of stampeding elephants, it was obvious that the Aloha State’s gridiron fans were in for a long night. Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba made it a short one.

I am sure that if I were to waste any time with the paid shill that is “the voice of University of Hawai‘i sports”, I would discover that the failings of the UH gridiron squad were all linked to money.

The facilities are lousy. (Tell it to the Psychology Department.)

The recruiting budget is miniscule. (Most university departments have had their budget for graduate student stipends slashed, often by as much as two-thirds of 2008 levels).

Salaries for coaches are noncompetitive. (The current UH head coach makes $1.1 million, merely tenfold what full professors make in most academic departments – but his Wisconsin opposite number makes $1.5 million, in a city where the cost of living is about half that of Honolulu, and coaches in the really big schools make, like, $3.5 million. Not counting endorsement income, support from “boosters”, etc. etc. …)

I reckon it’s time for Hawai‘i to smell the same coffee as Hofstra and Northeastern universities, and close the gridiron program in favor of other pursuits. Like, finding a building to house the Psychology Department.

Of course, any such move would probably close the University of Hawai‘i, or at least the flagship campus at Mânoa. But We the People of the Great Nation State of Hawai‘i are doing that anyway, by slow strangulation. May as well come right out and get it over with.

I mean, the people of the Mânoa Valley never wanted the campus in their backyards anyway. And most of the worst-in-the-nation rush-hour traffic congestion that plagues Honolulu has been tracked to people getting to and leaving UH Mânoa. Close the campus? Problem solved!

Hey. Do this, and the city won’t even need a rail line.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

As Quilly has already related, we spent much of today (1 December 2009) at the beach.

Yes, yes, we know, we know. If it’s any consolation, in another month or so we’ll be in hats and mittens just like so many of the rest of you.

It was a work trip for me. Yes it was. I was collecting seaweed species that may be new to science for identification and laboratory cultivation.

It was a photo shoot for her. One of the photos was of a green caterpillar, inching its way up a dead stick.

“Oh, look. An inchworm. How cute!”

We’re lucky it didn’t bite us.

Really.

Y’see, in most of the world, inchworms are harmless little things, going around measuring marigolds (prior to devouring them) and inspiring Hollywood crooners, not to mention Muppets, to promote the idea that aesthetics are superior to mathematics. (Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba could say something about “teacher furloughs” at this point, but as this has been a consistent refrain on this blog lately, he will refrain.)

In Hawai‘i, the Land of Aloha? They’re killers. The insect equivalent of a bunny rabbit with fangs. In the language of the entomologist, the Hawaiian inchworm is an “ambush” or “sit-and-wait” predator. They lounge around on the botanical equivalent of a streetcorner, whistling nonchalantly and trying to look inconspicuous. Until a fly or moth or similar variation on the theme of Meals on Wings comes within reach, and then … WHAM!!

You don’t believe me?

Shame on you.

Of course, the marigolds are all for this. They’ve got advertisements on all the major websites of the Inchwormnet, showing posies with crude hand-lettered signs:

EAT MOR BEETALS

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

In his post for yesterday (23 November 2009), O‘ahu blogger Ian Lind, among other things, relates a story about how reporters who used to work for a newspaper in Seattle are having a tough time finding paying jobs in journalism.

Lind is himself a ‘former’ journalist who used to do reporting for one of Honolulu’s two major newspapers. Well, they used to be major newspapers. One of them is now a tabloid, while the other, though it’s folded like a traditional newspaper, is about half as big and is printed on toilet tissue. So it’s no surprise that the travails of career journalists, and indeed of journalism as a career, have gotten his attention.

But it’s not like these travails come as a surprise to Quilly and me.

Y’see, both of us, had interest in, even dreams of, careers as reporters, once upon a time.

Quilly’s tale is hers to tell, if and as she should choose to tell it. Suffice to say here that an editor sent Quilly out for an interview, and when that interview didn’t yield gossip that would allow the editor to crucify the interviewee on his paper’s pages, facts be damned, he sacked Quilly, and a dream ended.

Oh – did I mention that this took place in the context of a university course in journalism?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba’s dream was broadcast journalism, specifically radio – television requiring that one’s appearance doesn’t instantly turn viewers to stone, thus depriving the station of advertising revenue. It was not a serious enough dream to displace the prime directive – an academic career in the sciences – but it was an itch to be scratched in the music, news, and sports departments of campus radio stations. On occasion, it even provided some minimum-wage, graveyard-shift income.

And it came to pass that the campus radio station of a Division I university in a major market chose (and obtained permission) to broadcast home basketball games, live. For one glorious season, an amoeba provided color commentary on men’s games – including one contest with Wooden U. where the crowd was so loud, it was impossible to hear oneself think, never mind speak.

That same amoeba was also the play-by-play “voice” of women’s basketball. I studied charts and stats, interviewed coaches and players, and was having a blast.

Then, at the end of the year, the team collapsed, embroiled in catfights between players and coaches, with (if I remember correctly) intimations of physical wrongdoing on the part of at least one coach.

And I was blindsided. Heard exactly nothing about it until the story broke on “real” media.

Unlike in Quilly’s case, no program director descended on me, irate that I didn’t ‘get the dirt’. None had to: I sacked myself. It dawned on me, finally, that I wasn’t doing any kind of job as a reporter (though in my defense, this was campus radio, essentially a club, and I was at the time supposed to be 100% engaged in getting my Ph.D.), and that I wasn’t getting any pay for being a shill. Another dream ended.

Six months later, I left that major-market city. And, except for occasional interviews in my capacity as a working scientist, I never again stepped in front of a microphone.

Both of us, Quilly and I, had run afoul of the ‘dirty laundry syndrome’. Journalism died for us because neither was willing to chase after the gossip, the racier the better, that is the only stuff for which most readers/listeners/viewers will pay. (Oh – did I mention that both of our stories took place 25-30 years ago?)

One of the laid-off journalists quoted by Ian Lind wrote:

There are very few opportunities to do the sort of important work that the old [newspaper] invested in, because it is expensive and unsexy. The point that it is important to society has become irrelevant.

On reading this, I could only think that here is a baby boomer, one of the aging children who grew up thinking the media is the message and are only now figuring out that media and message are not about what the messenger wishes to say, but about what the customer wishes to buy.

As you most likely know, Quilly’s blog is partially for hire. The sponsored posts she writes bring in a few pennies here and there. Not long ago, she was presented with an offer that would pay her more than usual. She investigated – and discovered that the opportunity was linked to a full-time blogger who runs nearly 30 sites.

All of them pornography.

When challenged on this, the blogger responded (I paraphrase):

These sites make money. If you’re serious about making a living writing online, this is where you need to be.

One begins to understand how societies throughout history have moved to ban activities such as this.

Such bans provide journalists something profitable to write about that isn’t T&A.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“So, dude, how’s the house hunting?”

“How should I know, dude? I ain’t never seen a house in camouflage going after big game, and I’m not sure I’d want to.”

“No, dude. The big game’s in the house, on the big screen in the living room. Or it would be, if we had a house to put it in.”

“Riiight, dude. And just how many decades of Payperblaug do you reckon it’ll take you to make the $570 grand you need to buy a doll house in Honolulu?“

“Doll house, schmal house, dude. Luxury box for me, thanks. Hell, I’ll take the whole stadium. Speaking of big screens. Gnarly!“

“Dude. I hate to admit this, but I’m impressed. When you go off the deep end, you don’t just jump, you tie weights to your ankles. A stadium?!?“

“Same money as your doll house, dude. Even has a roof. Here. Read.“

“‘Pontiac Silverdome sells for $583,000 …’ But, dude, the yearly electric bill for that place is probably bigger than that!”

“Well, we’d probably have to be a little careful, that’s all. Turn off the lights when we left a room, no watching soap operas on the Jumbotron, stuff like that. At least until we got the solar panels installed.”

“Man. I’d heard that Michigan was in tough shape, but I never reckoned it was this bad.”

“Well, dude, that’s what happens when you have one money-maker in your economy, and it goes belly up.”

“Like cars, dude?”

“Yeah. Or tourists.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

I had escaped my university office/lab for a breath of fresh air, and was walking through McCarthy Mall, when I saw, on the normally-barren walls of a vending kiosk, a small, photocopied poster.

Sign the Petition!

“Gasp!“, I gasped. “Student activism!” I could hardly believe my eyes; I had thought the species to be extinct in Hawai‘i. I scanned the poster for the cause. Global warming? Corporate bailouts? Afghanistan? The slashing of education budgets?

SAVE THE TREE!

Right. An impassioned outpouring, complete with website, on behalf of a single misshapen pile of live haole lumber that can’t even be used for bird perches. Standing next to a termite mound prefab building of ancient vintage (euphemistically called an “annex”, and housing … well, the university’s so ashamed of it, I can’t find out which academic unit they’ve stuck in there), which, I reckon, the tree is tearing up by the roots. Literally.

Yes, the tree’s old. So old, in fact, that it was planted just about at the time when the haoles of Hawai‘i decided that the native government of Hawai‘i wasn’t good enough for them. Planted by a haole professor of botany who figured that the native flora wasn’t good enough for them either. (Funny how nobody has mentioned this.)

And it’s this history that makes this tree worth saving until it topples of its own weight (perhaps mercifully taking that annex along with it), rather than chopping it down to make way for the planned recreation center …

The what?!?

Academic department budgets in this year of woe have been slashed by 30%. Academic buildings have been condemned and then quietly reoccupied – until they threatened to collapse. Academic programs have lost teaching staff and course offerings, in the face of record-high student enrollments – and the entire institution faces the prospect of early shutdown (lockout) unless faculty accept wage cuts that will forever dissuade any economically-knowledgeable American from undertaking a career in academia, while the rest of the world aggressively sponsors its intelligentsia.

And this institution is building a recreation center? What is this, a university or a spa?

And the strongest response to this revelation, by the student body, is a one-man campaign to save a tree?!?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba never thought he’d see the day when he’d say, in public, “I miss the sixties.” The turbulent, not to mention violent, sixties, when the issues of the day, some of them less momentous than those now confronting university communities, led to debates and demonstrations, arguments and protests, even bricks and tear gas. There was strife and disillusion, and not all motives were selfless. But the world did change.

Now?

A university is on the brink of collapse, and a lone voice in the wilderness posts pieces of paper in a feeble effort to preserve a tottering fig. Surely we can do better …

I have it. We’ll get somebody to sucker the Obama Administration into reinstating the draft …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

In the center of the Upper Campus of the University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa, there is a green space. A quadrangle of pedestrian walkways canopied by rain trees, known as McCarthy Mall.
Every hour on the hour, when classes are in session, a human tide washes over the footpaths, a tide of students passing from lecture to lecture, of faculty passing from meeting to meeting. For ten, for fifteen minutes, the tide is at the full, then it abates, leaving the mall empty but for its trees, and in peace.

Not even the wrack of the human waves is visible during these ebbs. Not too long ago, as budget cuts threatened to cancel classes and terminate faculty, chalk scrawlings mussed the rigid order of the pavement, calling the partisans to arms. Now, however, though the finances are no better and none of the arguments has been resolved, the chalk is gone, and the only messages on McCarthy Mall advertise the reggae bands performing at the weekend campus concert.

As the noon hour approaches, a solitary woman appears at the Koko Head (east) end of the mall, near the library and the cafeteria, major traffic points. She plants a sandwich board in the middle of the principal walkway, and takes her station next to it. She is short, slender, slightly stooped, very gray, a woman likely nearer 70 years of age than 60.

The papers and posters on her sandwich board proclaim socialism. Socialism as it was when it galvanized entire student bodies on campuses throughout the United States, students who vigorously debated the ills of their own political system and the benefits of systems not their own, and often were sufficiently convinced that they knew better than their elders that they would drop in on the administrators of the universities that they were attending and commandeer their offices for awhile.

Students who were young when this woman was young.

She will speak with you if you show an interest in her or her message. Every once in awhile, a person will stop. An old friend, judging from the clothes and graying baldness, or a first-year student, judging from her clothes and the trapped! expression on her face.

But most of the time she spends alone in the noontime tide. Practically everyone rushes on past, ignoring her melodies or perhaps not hearing them, her folk tunes on vinyl drowned out by the ska and techno-pop on their iPods.

I watch her from the library veranda, and as I watch, I hear songs for aging children.

This is one.

Lyrics

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Hey dude! Get a load of this!“

“What?”

“President Obama’s coming back to Hawai‘i! And he’s bringing a pack of his friends!”

“I should think he’s got friends, the way he’s been throwing money around …”

“Not those friends. These are real economic summit-type friends. From 21 countries, no less. Says he wants to show that Hawai‘i is a place to do business. And …”

“He gonna muzzle all the dudes who’ve gone bust over crippling taxes and strangling regulations before they get here?”

” … he says he’s looking forward to seeing them all in flowered shirts and …”

“Flowered shirts, dude? He said flowered shirts? Not aloha shirts? In the Aloha State? He tryin’ not to mention aloha ’cause he knows damned well there ain’t any around here any more? And what about the chicks, dude?”

“Grass skirts, dude.”

“Grass skirts?!? He said he wanted to see these high-powered executive-type chicks in grass skirts?? That’s going to go over well. Not. When are we supposed to receive this beneficence, huh?”

“Waitaminute, let me check … says here, sometime in 2011.”

“Right. Two years from now. Wonderful. Way the economy’s going, Obama’s going to be entertaining them business people in grass shacks, on account of because there won’t be anything else open by then. I can hardly wait, dude.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

OK, out there, hands up? How many of you hear “Hawai‘i” and think “pineapples”?

Think again.

For the best part of a century, pineapples and sugar cane were the cash crops of the Hawai‘ian Islands. At one point, the entire island of Lana‘i was one large pineapple plantation. Many (most?) of the peoples of Hawai‘i who are not of Polynesian or European descent (in particular the Japanese and the Filipinos) came to the islands to harvest the cane or the pineapples.

Those days are done. With today’s announcement that the Maui Land Company is ending pineapple operations, only one plantation remains, on the island of O‘ahu. And that plantation exists primarily for the tourists. The Honolulu building that used to house the principal cannery for Hawai‘ian pineapple is now a commercial complex with some museum-like displays recounting its past.

That more-or-less fresh pineapple in your supermarket fruit-and-vegetables section probably came from Thailand, or the Philippines, or Brazil, not Hawai‘i.

Why?

Why else?

Brazil, Thailand, and the Philippines all produce pineapples far more cheaply than Hawai‘i can.

In fact, the Hawai‘ian Islands now have very little agriculture. It simply costs too much for labor, fertilizer, feed. Far cheaper to bring in the finished products from places that don’t have (or ignore) minimum wage laws.

In the current economic downturn, which has affected Hawai‘i less than most of the rest of the Untied States of America (its current 7.2% unemployment rate would be gratefully accepted as a world-changing improvement by Michigan, California, Oregon and most of the Southeast), folk are wrangling over furloughs, pay cuts, and other things that may impact their standard of living a few points. Not realizing, perhaps, that if the cargo planes were ever to stop flying, Hawai‘ians would, almost immediately, have something truly substantial to worry about.

Starvation.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t get it.”

“You called me over for that? I thought you wanted to talk about something new.”

“I don’t get it, dude, but I can pass it on to you. Here. Let me sneeze in your face … ah …”

“Nice try, dude. Y’wanna talk about somethin’, or can I go back to what I was doin’?”

“It’s about these furloughs.”

“What about ‘em?”

“Well, the teachers negotiated ‘em more than a month ago now. And it wasn’t exactly a secret that they were coming. But nobody said or did anything about ‘em until they actually happened. And now everybody’s in a uproar. How come?”

“Because, dude, being graduates of the public schools themselves, people didn’t figure out the high cost of babysitting until they actually had to pay it. Now, of course, they’re all chanting “education” when all they really want is to get their kids out of their kitchens.”

“And now it says here that the state’s Republican party wants to end them by renegotiating the teacher’s contract.”

“So they can fire some people instead of giving them all short time. Which just happens to be what they wanted to do in the first place. Lovely negotiating tactics.”

“But in the meantime, the rest of the state’s workers got contracts with furloughs too. So if the teachers go back to school on Fridays, they won’t have any schools to go to ’cause all the other workers are out on furlough.”

“Same answer, dude. They renegotiate that contract so they can fire people like they wanted to in the first place. Bottom line remains the same. Except that state employees will join the parents who got sacked from their jobs because they had to stay home with their kids.”

“But, dude! The money guys are saying that the recession’s over. Couldn’t they just raise taxes just a little bit to keep these folk working?”

“Republicans raise taxes to keep a pack of Democrats in jobs? Dude, are you getting enough sleep?“

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of its characters to persons living or dead is for satirical purposes, or is coincidental. Apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre.

===================================

Alan Baldwin: “OK, so where’s the torturer?”

Seizen Shigeta: “Shut up! You bring him in here, I’ll wring your neck.”

Kimo Kalakaua (to Shigeta): “Be still, brah. You forget where we stay?”

Shigeta: “A locked room in hell. In this heat, how could I forget?“

Kalakaua: “So you wring da haole’s neck. Where he wen go?“

Baldwin: “I never dreamed that hell would be a room in a huge Waikiki hotel, but one without even a city view. I suppose that minor amenities like toilets and bar fridges are superfluous in our condition, and A/C is too much to hope for.”

Kalakaua (to Baldwin): “What fo you stay dis place?”

Baldwin: “Damned if I … oh, shit. You?”

Kalakaua: “Dunno.”

Shigeta: “Me either. One minute, I’m leading a crucial meeting of the Hawai‘i Teachers Association, and the next …”

Kalakaua: “You one teacher union guy den!”

Shigeta: “Yeah …?”

Kalakaua: “You how come my keiki no can read!“

Shigeta: “Well, maybe if you parents actually sent us kids who were ready to learn to read, instead of spending all of their time disrupting classroom order …”

Kalakaua: “But that your job, to teach, not to be bumboss! An not fo go surf Wednesdays, neither. Teach is fo why we pay you da big bucks!“

Shigeta: “Big bucks?!? Hell made you lolo already? What’re you calling ‘big bucks’?”

Kalakaua: “You no stay in tent in Nanakuli, you make da big bucks.”

Shigeta: “Well, maybe if you people would get off the damned ice, you could get out of those tents. For your information, brah, teachers make less than just about any other field that requires a bachelor’s degree for entry. In Hawai‘i, teachers make maybe half of what they make anywhere else, when you factor in the cost of living on this rockpile. And that was before the damned furloughs. Teachers are hard to get. And if we didn’t have these little perks here and there for our members, and protect them against the likes of you, we wouldn’t have the teachers we have now!“

Baldwin (to Shigeta): “Do those ‘little perks’ include the bloated teaching bureaucracy?“

Shigeta: “Look, none of us asked to have reams of paperwork jammed down our throats! If we gotta have it, then we gotta have someone to do it!”

Baldwin: “Maybe if you did your jobs right, we wouldn’t have to have those reams of data to keep tabs on you.”

Shigeta: “And maybe if we had some resources with which to do our jobs, instead of trying to teach classes in science with chewing gum and baling wire, we’d have a chance to do those jobs and get out from under the paper pile!”

Baldwin: “And just where do you think we’re going to get those resources?”

Shigeta: “Taxes, of course.”

Baldwin: “‘Taxes, of course’. Get in line! You and everyone else on these bumps in the middle of the Pacific. Who’s going to pay them? The tax burden’s already sky-high. Between high taxes, high prices, and strangling regulations, just about every business in this state has gone broke except tourism, and the tourists are sick of getting gouged.”

Shigeta: “And how do you know this, haole? You a Baldwin, or something?”

Baldwin: “As a matter of fact …”

Kalakaua: “A Big Five bumboss?!?”

Shigeta: “Running working people into the ground for the sake of your swollen profits?!? How’s your buddy Bernie Madoff doing?”

Baldwin: “Listen up, commie. Like it or not, profits are what make it possible for society to pay teachers to surf on Wednesdays. If businesses aren’t allowed to make the kinds of money that will keep both their executives and their stockholders happy, they’re going to move or fold. And when they do, there won’t be anything left in Hawai‘i but coconuts and government. And you don’t want the government running things.”

Shigeta: “Damned right. All they do is tie us up with rules and threaten to fire us if we don’t dance to their tune.”

Kalakaua: “Government don’t do nothin’ fo us ‘cept rip up our tents and throw us in shelters. An it no even is ours!“

Baldwin: “And it taxes us to death for nothing! How come we don’t have anyone from government in here?”

Valet: (opening door) “None of them are in this hotel. The Adversary – the one you call (ptui) God – took one look at how they had to try to meet the mutually-impossible demands of the people they were supposed to govern, and decided they’d had their hell on earth. So they’re in that other place.

“Speaking of demands. The other cells are sick and tired of your bickering. If you don’t shut up and learn to get along, all hell’s going to break loose in here. Your only warning.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“So, Reg, I’ve been thinking.”

“Ah. That explains it, Syd.”

“Explains what?”

“Why all these salesmen have been wandering around looking like they’ve just been furloughed. They couldn’t get you to stop thinking, so they couldn’t sell you anything.”

“Actually, it’s furloughs that I’ve been thinking about. You know that story that’s been making the rounds about the couple who couldn’t work out the price of avocados?”

“Yes, I know the one.”

“And how that’s used as a reason why we can’t afford to be losing teaching days out of the school year here in Honolulu?”

“That does seem to be the popular opinion.”

“Well, riddle me this, then. Our avocado-buying hero graduated from a public high school, right?”

“Presumably, yes.”

“Twelve years in the classroom at our expense.”

“Surely, by now, …”

“Let’s say the public’s expense, then. Twelve years, and he still doesn’t get simple arithmetic. How much more time in school does he need?“

“Syd, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you understand this. Ever read The Hobbit?“

“Ages ago. I like to think I’ve outgrown the need for hobgoblins. Except when they come to the door at Hallowe’en. That’s this weekend, isn’t it?”

“It is. Then you won’t be surprised when I tell you for what age group Tolkien wrote the book.”

“What age group was that?”

“The British equivalent of American fifth grade.”

“Fifth grade?? You’re joking, Reg! My son was telling me that it was on the reading list for a literature course in college. And many of the students found it too tough.”

“Exactly, Syd. We keep getting told we have to keep kids in school, get them more days in school, get them into college. The rest of the world is doing it so we have to as well, to keep up. But what good does it do if all that the bachelor’s degree certifies is the ability to do grade school work?“

“Maybe.”

“Oh, right, you once hired a college football player. Didn’t work out well, did it?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Your son doing better in the job?”

“He gets by. I only intervene when I have to.”

“Which is just about every day. Like me and my daughter. They’ll learn.”

“I hope so. But what can anybody do about this education thing? We can’t keep throwing good money after bad.”

“The whole system has to get more efficient. Set the standards and stick to them. No more excuses, no more court cases, no more 9-to-5. Everybody has to buy in, teachers, parents, kids, the lot. You have to meet the need of the nation with this much time and this much money. And if you don’t make the grade, you’re out.”

“The private schools can do that, of course. But the public schools?”

“Why not? Look, there are some people who are never going to learn algebra no matter how hard they try. Why force it on them? Design programs that get them to do what they can do the best they can, and let them go do it. Wait tables, if that’s what they prefer. How much time do you have to spend in school to wait tables?”

“There are people who prefer to wait tables?”

“There sure are. ‘Dependent natures’ and all that.”

“Who said that?”

“Abraham Lincoln, no less. And who am I to argue with a god?”

“Speaking of gods, the accountants aren’t going to be very happy with this scenario. Not those who’re selling college courses to students, for sure, however useless you think those courses are.”

“The accountants get it. They’ll cope. They’re the only ones I know of who do college right. ‘Cause they worked out long ago that their path to riches is by keeping us happy and their labor scarce. So you’d best believe that they have standards, and you, student, will meet them or else. The biologists keep complaining that nobody pays them what they’re worth. Well, dammit, if they had a guild that set strict standards of admission and performance like the accountants have, there’d be fewer biologists, but they’d all be millionaires.

“And you know as well as I do; somebody who tries to cheat the system and run his business with a non-certified accountant usually gets what he deserves.”

“Chapter eleven?”

“Chapter seven. Really, Syd. You sound like somebody who needs more wine.”

“I have to admit, that Château Mouton Rothschild was a nice drop. But the bottle’s empty.”

“Indeed it is. I’ll order another. Boy! Boy!! Shiftless lazy white coon! Git your ass over here!”

“Yes, massuh.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

She: “Another hot day in Paradise!”

He: “Yeah. But don’t yell it out too loud, ok? People in hats and mittens might not take too kindly to it.”

She: “It’s a lot easier to get warm than it is to get cool.”

He: “It is. Assuming you can pay for the clothes or the heat. Still. The trade winds can come back any time now.”

She: “Pour you some ice water?”

He: “Yes please. The ultimate power beverage.”

She: “What?”

He: “Exactly.”

She: “What exactly?”

He: “Exactly right.”

She: “Will you tell me what you’re talking about?!?“

He: “Watt.”

She: “No fair. I asked you first.”

He: “You didn’t ask me anything. I was agreeing with you. Why are you hassling me?”

She: “So I can get an explanation. Before I pour this water down your neck.”

He: “I said, ‘the ultimate power beverage’. You said ‘watt’. I agreed with you. But it’s not just ‘watt’, it’s ‘watter‘. I told you, it’s really powerful stuff. Not to be spilt by pouring down people’s necks.”

She: “Why not? It would energize you. But I suppose, if it’s a power aid, that’s how come they sell it in the vending machines at $2 a pop.”

He: “Well, you’re correct, they do sell it alongside the soft drinks. But the stuff in the bottles is properly called ‘wattest‘. ‘Cause nothing’s more powerful than profits.”

She: “La la la, I can’t hear you …”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

We were making spaghetti sauce, and had gotten to the point of adding the seasonings when we discovered that we didn’t have all the herbs we needed. It was late and the stores were closed, so I went next door to try and borrow some …

Well, no.

What I’m really borrowing is the time since around 9 HST on the morning of 26 October, when Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba came within inches of becoming a somewhat large and rather messy hood ornament. That car pretty much had me dead to rights. And I don’t mean the 300-pages-and-a-book-deal, Kim Harrison / Charlaine Harris kind of dead, either.

If you live in southeast O‘ahu and wish to get to Chaminade University or the University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa by bicycle, you have a choice of routes.

You can take Waialae Avenue. Or …

You can take Waialae Avenue.

That’s because, between the mountains of southeastern O‘ahu and the deep blue sea, there is room for exactly one east-west road, the Kalaniana‘ole Highway. Which is almost as wide as its name. That one road morphs abruptly into the eastern end of O‘ahu’s (ahem) Interstate Highway System, from which bicycles are verboten. From this trap, there is but a single escape.

Waialae Avenue.

Which passes through a shopping mall, then rises 160 feet in two stages to the crest of a hill, which marks the beginning of a mile-long business district, at the end of which are the Chaminade and UH-Mânoa campuses along with two private high schools.

City planners, of course, recognized the needs of the bike riders who had no choice but to take this route to some of the busiest places in town, and designed the road with wide berms for the required riding lanes. Right?

Silly malihini.

The berms, where they exist at all, are narrow and full of potholes, drains, and other obstacles. Bicycles are, according to the rules of the road, vehicles just like buses, semis, and Hummers, so the sidewalks are legally off-limits. Not that it matters, because, at several places along Waialae Avenue, there are no sidewalks. Including one location, with neither berm nor sidewalk, in which traffic coming from the left (me) must merge with traffic coming from the right – at 60 mph straight off the (ahem) Interstate. All of this at a 10% grade going uphill.

The sidewalks that are in place are frequently narrow, even rougher than the street pavement (sometimes, they are mere dirt tracks) and are full of pedestrians and cyclists who either have never heard of the road rules or choose to ignore them. Pedestrians have died from being run over by bicyclists on sidewalks. Crede expertum: I lost a scientific colleague in precisely this way.

I am told that, in the vicinity of the UH-Mânoa campus, special road rules legalize bicycle operation on the sidewalks. See “pedestrians have died”, supra. My bike remains on the street, riding with the flow of traffic, like the vehicle it is in law and in fact. And where I am safer among the cars than among the heedless riders and wanderers on the sidewalks.

At least, that’s what I thought I was.

Have I mentioned yet that Honolulu is officially acknowledged to have the worst rush-hour traffic in the United States?

Which probably made the driver of the car Koko Head (east)-bound late for class. He – I know it was a ‘he’, I saw the whites of his eyes – saw a tiny gap in ‘Ewa (west)-bound car traffic, and gunned his blue sedan into a left turn across that traffic, into the Chaminade University access road.

And straight at Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba, who had already entered the intersection and was legally entitled to the right of way.

I believe the ‘defensive driving’ program instructors call this kind of thing “dead right”.

I still don’t know how we avoided contact. Some combination of me pedaling for dear life (duh) and his fancy wheel turning. Whatever it was, he’s not having to defend himself against a charge of vehicular homicide.

And I’m writing this blog entry on borrowed time.

I suppose somebody will ask what I’m doing on a bicycle at all, never mind on such a hazardous route as Waialae Avenue. Can’t I afford to drive?

Well, no, I can’t. On a practical level or a philosophical one. You may remember, I once figured out it would cost me around US$14 a day to own a car if it never left the driveway. Last I knew, Hawai‘i was in a recession so bad, the state has had to close the public schools. So how is it that all these people can afford to drive?

And I have written that all efforts to thwart anthropogenic global warming are futile unless we start by slashing our use of resources, not by some token Hopen Hagen handwaving amount, but by three-fourths of present-day levels. I wonder if my blue sedan driver is one of those young people who enthusiastically attends “save the planet” rallies, then gets into his car – by himself – and drives home.

Besides. We keep hearing about how fat and unfit We the People are. It has always bothered me that people of a certain lifestyle – including many folk with whom I have worked – drive themselves back and forth from their jobs and then go off to some fancy gym or club “for exercise”. If I need exercise, I get as much of it as possible as part of the job or the commute. Anything else is rubbing it into the faces of those who have no choice about the “exercise” bit; they do it if they wish to eat.

So, in the morning, I will be back on the bicycle, back on Waialae Avenue. If I’m going to be on borrowed time anyway, I may as well see how much my credit will stand.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Hey, dude! How come everybody’s so grumpy today?”

“A lot of ‘em got the day off, dude.”

“They do? And this is bad how?“

“Without pay, dude. Kinda wipes the aloha right off of ‘aloha friday’. And a lot of people who should be workin’ can’t.”

“Why not?“

“Because they have to stay home with their kids. The furloughs have closed the schools.”

“Not. That one’s open.”

“Private school, dude. You think the captains of industry are going to stand for their kids sitting at home on a school day? Hell no. It’s only the public schools that have furloughed the teachers and sent the kids home to get their parents fired for for not being able to be in two places at once.”

“But, dude, it says here that the State Legislature has lined up plenty of places for kids to go and do stuff during the furlough!”

“Government offices open today?”

“Yeah.”

“They can dish it out but they can’t take it, right? Why am I not surprised? Hell, they’re even hiring for themselves while they’re screwing teachers and ripping up the lives of kids whose only sin is they can’t afford Punahou. I love it. You wanna show me that list?”

“Sure, dude. Here.”

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“I thought you said this was a government site.”

“Hawai‘i State House is where it’s announced.”

“But this page comes from the Chamber of Commerce, dude! And you know what the Chamber of Commerce does, don’t you, dude?”

“What, dude?”

“They sell stuff, dude!! Every last one of these goddam ‘resources’ has got a whackin’ huge fee attached to it! This flippin’ list is a service, all right. Frickin’ self-service!!“

“Jeez, dude, chill, willya? You’re turning red …”

“Look, dude. Let’s say I’m a parent, right? I’m payin’ taxes on schools that aren’t open, which means I’m staying home with the kids, sweatin’ bullets over the job that if I lose it I won’t have a home to stay with the kids in. And then my government tells me about a list of stuff that’s supposed to help me through this, and all they want to do is soak me some more!“

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go surfing.”

“Right, dude. You know, don’t you, that, in Old Hawai‘i, if the nobles caught a commoner surfing, they’d kill him?”

“Oh …”

LATER …

“Dude! Look at this. Demonstrations, petitions, even a walk-in! Whaddaya think of that?“

“Mmmffrrmmf.”

“But, dude, I thought you’d be happy! These people are supporting education!“

“Education, smeducation, dude. All they’ve managed to figure out is the high cost of babysitting. And it took them a month to manage that.”

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“Go back to bed …”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.