My, so much discord around here lately.
The Legislature is taking a cruise day before the finale of its session, so let’s do the same. Let’s revel in the sunshine. Let’s be happy. Let’s dance.
To help you along, I give you this video forwarded to me by my friend Buck Donham in Arkansas. Watch it and I guarantee you’ll spend the rest of the day happily humming and tapping your toes.
I’ve been dragging for the past week from the triple curse of a bad cold, hot humidity and vog, which combine to leave me gasping and glued to my recliner by lethargy and perspiration.
All that gets me through the days is the hope that the weather will change and bring some relief.
Every night since last Friday, the weather guys on the TV newscasts have been promising a return of the tradewinds. But every morning upon waking, I look out the window expecting to see some rustle in the leaves of my stately ti plants — and NO MORE NOTHING!
I fully sympathize with Guy Hagi when he laments about the demands of viewers who expect him to tell him the exact hour it will rain at their house.
I certainly don’t demand that, but when they say the tradewinds are returning to the islands, I do assume that my house falls within the general classification of “the islands.”
The raised expectations are their own fault with all the hype over flashy meteorological graphics that need three weather segments in each half-hour newscast to be properly shown off.
But all those fancy graphics really tell us with any accuracy is what happened today, which we already know if we bothered to look out the window.
The art of predicting what will happen next hasn’t improved all that much and is often little more than a coin flip. We’re a tiny island chain in the middle of the ocean and a shift of just a few degrees can cause a weather system to hit us more full on than expected — or miss us altogether, like the elusive trades.
It’s still hot and humid as I write this late at night, but the few ti leaves I can see in the darkness are showing a hint of rustle.
Maybe tomorrow …
***
There was question in the comments earlier this week about the status of U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa’s campaign promise to move into the First Congressional District she represents. KITV had an update last night.
My work flow lately has been rudely interrupted by a colonoscopy, which is quite a traumatic series of events when you include the unpleasant preparation and sweating out the pathology results in the aftermath (which thankfully resulted in good news in my case).
This is one of those medical procedures that when I younger, I always said I’d rather die from what they were looking for than submit to the exam.
But perspective and the urgency of the survival instinct change as you get older — not to mention that I’ve sadly seen friends and family members die from what the colonoscopy is looking for, and it’s not a pretty way to go at all.
So I lay on the exam table accepting my fate and waiting for the anesthesia to kick in as two doctors and three or four nurses stared at my posterior until they could have their way with me.
Before I drifted off, it occurred to me that some of the public officials I write about might have enjoyed a chance to do the inserting. (Oh, did I forget the lubricant? Oops.) I could have auctioned off the rights and cleared a little of the state debt.
I hate missed opportunities, but if I live that long, I’ve been warned I’ll be doing it all over again in about five years.
I had a lovely time last night at my grandkids’ school Christmas show, which was actually called Winter Fest because you can’t say Christmas in public anymore without getting the PC police all up in your business.
Talk about a contrast; one of my girls played an elephant and the other played a kolea (which had a much more pleasant singing voice than I expected after some of the riffs I’ve heard around here).
It was very nicely done, with hula, Hawaiian legends and segments taken from “The Lion King” and “Rent,” but scarcely a mention of the 800-pound holiday in the room.
The sanitization has gone too far, and I can understand why it ticks Christians off. Nobody would blink at a slipped mention of Hannukah or Kwanzaa, and you can invoke the Dalai Lama until the cows come home. Putting a lot of religious dogma in these shows would be inappropriate, but the avoidance of mentioning Christmas at all is ridiculous.
I’m not a Christian myself, but I enjoyed it a lot when my grandson was at the school six or seven years ago and the shows ended with a UH music professor coming out to play Christmas carols on the piano while the audience sang along. Beautiful songs, beautiful moments.
And to my knowledge, nobody complained.
I’ve earned the right to be a little bit amused by the national uproar over airport body scans and pat downs by security officers.
As a wheelchair passenger who can’t go through metal detectors or x-ray scanners, I’ve been subjected to extreme pat downs ever since 9/11.
I won’t go into the sordid details, but let’s just say it’s always ended with some hairy guy assuring me that he’ll be touching my private parts with only the back of his hands — as if that makes all the difference.
(I know, the TSA guy probably goes home and tells his wife, “You should have seen the hairy guy in a wheelchair I had to feel up today.”)
Anyway, the TSA folks are now in a snit because many travelers are opting for pat downs to avoid going through new full-body scanners that essentially take naked pictures of them.
To discourage people from insisting on the more time-consuming procedure, TSA agents doing pat downs now have authorization to touch private parts with — GASP! — the FRONT of their hands.
As I pondered the implications, I received an e-mail offering me an interview with Trends Journal publisher Gerald Celente, who sees a way to a “happy ending” in all of this.
I’m going to pass on the interview, but here’s what the press release said:
The “Celente Solution”
Just as the Government invariably gets everything else wrong, its grope-the-public strategy is upside-down and inside-out, contends Celente.
“As a strictly heterosexual, if I’m going to get groped in an airport – be it in public or private – I want to be groped by a gal. Period! And, ideally, I would like to choose my groper. Does the TSA have a ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy,” he asks? “What twisted TSA/government bureaucrat put in place this guy-gropes-guy policy?” . . .
Celente readily acknowledges that his “solution” is male-oriented. “I’m speaking only for myself and on behalf my guy friends,” said Celente, “not for women. They’ll have to find their own solution.”
I’m tired after parrying with commenters yesterday when I was supposed to be working on my flashbacks column, so I’m going to buckle down on that and avoid writing anything provocative today.
Let’s just say, Go ‘Bows! … er, Warriors!
Volcanic Ash 
Recent Comments