HOTEL WAIKIKI

Friday's Fly ya ing

I'll bet you a kilo of WMD and two Halliburton T-shirts that the Department of Homeland Security will outlaw this new way of flying within the US.  Seriously.

Don't You Just Want to do This too?

zee plane....zee plane... (clocked at a blazing 185mph)

from

Voggy Thursday

A view of Diamond Head crater from base camp at Kapiolani Park as it appears through the veil of Pele (volcano godess).

A mother ship with kids in tow.

Surf wasn't that great on this side of the island.  The upside is that today's layer of vog does protect from sunburn while you're sitting on your surfboard waiting hours on end for that wave that never arrives.

Wednesday's Postcard

Along the Ala Wai canal, it's voggy.  It's not the postcard scene that the Hawaii Visitor Bureau would want publicized, but with a state that sports an active volcano, today's weather is reality.  Yeah, voggy weather only happens when the wind blows from the direction of the volcano on the Big Island.  As always, our trade winds will return from hiatus and the trade winds will disperse the vog out to sea.  This is just another reason why we should vote Barack Obama into the office of the presidency.  A president-elect Obama will insure that Honolulu has no more voggy weather.  Hillary Clinton couldn't do that.

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M&M now offers team insignas on your personalized m&m's.

Tuesday's...."As I look back at the past 15 years, the experience almost feels like a dream."

Tonight's topic: Annika Sorenstram's retirement  However, a brief prologue is in order:  Ever watched an LPGA event on TV?  I have.  About twice a year, if I wasn't preoccupied.  Except for the Majors, the LPGA tour isn't carried live on network television, but instead on cable on the same level as their poker invitationals.  There's more weeks without a lady's tournament on the LPGA schedule than there are dimples on a golf ball.  To say the least, women's golf doesn't draw a huge TV following or attract an over abundance of tournament sponsors, and the LPGA doesn't seem to have the desire or wherewithal to improve things.  The tournament announcers are mediocre.  The LPGA's website is shitty. 

Anyways....if Annika Sorenstram not been hampered by a back injury in 2007, playing in only a few tournaments and winning none, she would have surely amassed more than her current 72 LPGA victories and be in contention to break the 88 total victories LPGA record within the foreseeable future.  Annika had 51 victories during the 2000-06 period alone.  The women's professional golf circuit doesn't have a senior's tour like their men's PGA counterpart, therefore, the ladies can even play well after they're worn out their g spots and any victory on an 18 hole course would count as a full fledged win.  Despite that, Annika Sorenstram has called it quits.  Apparently she has a life, and I don't mean blogging.  It's also a clear indication that she hasn't been on steroids or human growth hormones.  You can bet that every tournament that Annika plays in during the remainder of the year will be a sellout.

P.S., you'll wish you had this kind of comments if you ever retire, well, your blog.

Remember When Gas was $4 a Gallon?

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Tonight, I was stopped behind a pizza delivery car which had that sign they plop onto the top of the car's roof instead of surf racks, and from the back of vehicle I noticed that the driver had installed a color GPS screen onto his dashboard.  What with the escalating price of gasoline, I guess an investment into a GPS system could net a pizza delivery person a savings within a few weeks.  Perhaps, even sooner.  How do countries where gas sells for $7 a gallon at the pump afford to delivery pizzas?

A Friday Flower and Then Some

Happy Aloha Friday if it is, a Happy Aloha Friday if it is still yet to be, because your Friday is a late bloomer.  I saw this hibiscus flower near the Waikiki zoo.  Before that I saw the Super Ferry passing off Waikiki on its second trip of the day to Maui.  I thought to myself, "Suppose I race the Super Ferry to the Diamond Head lookout with my motorbike?"  Don't get me wrong, I don't speed, but traffic was light, and I arrived at the lookout a full 2 seconds before the Super Ferry reached the finish line.

If You May Wednesday

I just noticed that these kiteboarders were standing on something more akin to a snowboarder's board, instead of a larger surfboard.  I dunno which came first, kite-surfing or kite-boarding, in the evolution of the sport in context to less board length and the attendent convenience of lugging the whole kaboodle.  With windboards — a surfboard retrofitted with a sail — surfing superseded sailing, and its boards became more compact bow to stern for better agility on wave faces.

Largely because surf kites require little storage space, I was contemplating the prospects of getting into kiteboarding, then a mayday struck me, that it might not be as easy to navigate as it all appears to be.  Plus, to my dismay after seaching the web, I've found that the kite, itself, is quite expensive, probably because the kite and the parachute strings that attach to the kite are made of silk or out of some type of costly high tech material.  I suspect too that the kite must be sink proof in order to relift easily and quickly from an unscheduled landing.  So I really dunno.

Tuesday's WYSIWYG

I had my camera with me the entire day and here's....today's photo.   It's not often that you get to see cow horns bolted onto the hood of a car around Honolulu.  The caption below the horns reads, "wot chu looken at!"  I take it, done purely in jest.  Otherwise why drive around town with cow horns for a hood ornament on this side of the Rio Grande?  Btw, "why" is a question that can get you some insane answers if you're not extra cautious with it.

* What You See Is What You Get

Friday's Seen Mean Grilling Machine

After stumbling upon this waffle maker on the Web,  I rushed out to purchase one.  Peered into the mailbox, but no stimulus check from Mr. Sun Cho Lee quite yet, temporarily putting the whim on hold. According to the website, the owner of the waffle maker decided to make french toast from some stale brioche instead of being wasteful.  Then had the grand notion to waffle-ize the french toast.  The finished product....a waffled french-toasted brioche caramelized to perfection.  Indeed, there are other possibilities.  For example, toss a manapua on the grill, batten down the hatch, and a few minutes later....a waffled manapua.

Hail to the Chief

In the latest poll, Bush's disapproval rating dropped below Nixon's.  Mission not accomplished.   

Nixon leaving the White House after resigning.  Mission Accomplished.

A nice blustery day to windsurf.  Or fly a kite.

*this post was yesterday's, but disappeared for some odd reason.  Here it is again.

Tuesday's Economics

My bike didn't come factory equipped with a gas gauge, so every so often you have to tap the tank and listen for how much of an empty sound echos back.  And even though it normally amounts to little over a gallon of gasoline, I make it a point to top off my gas tank nearly every day just to play it safe.  Reset the tripometer, then a see you tomorrow Mr. gas pump.  For sure.  I'm fully aware that filling up a bike is not anywhere as expensive as filling up a car, still I was appalled today to discover that the 87% octane gasoline that I buy had risen to $4.00/gal.  That is, today's 1.07 gallons rung up as $4.00.

It's amusing that some people still blame OPEC for high gasoline prices when a hefty 40% of the oil that the US consumes is from domestic production.  Of the remaining 60%, some oil does actually get imported from non-OPEC oil producing countries such as Canada.  So, OPEC oil amounts to less than 60% of the total oil that the US guzzles.  Even with a 40-60 percent ratio though, OPEC would not exert an overwhelming effect on oil prices if not aided and abetted by US oil companies who feign that they are bound and gagged to sell their oil to their own country at the same high prices that OPEC sets as dictated under the rules of some kind of mystical World Oil Consortium which the US oil companies along with OPEC are signatories of, and, and, if the people of our great nation was not the dummies that by all indications they lead the oil companies to think they are then the stupid suckus would get on the program and invest every last copper penny of their life savings into oil stocks and the profits from the oil stocks would subsidize their gasoline tanks.  Of course, if you can't afford to buy but a few shares of big oil stocks than it don't apply.  Inversely, if you were well enough off to afford to buy many shares, high gasoline prices wouldn't be a problem.

Gadget Monday

It's a bottle opener in the mold of Startrek's USS Enterprise.  Actually, rumor has it that the reverse was true, the design of futuristic spaceship on the sci-fi TV series was based on the identical shape of a pre-existing bottle opener those days manufactured in Taiwan instead of China.  Bet you didn't know that.  You do know though that a jellyfish warning has been posted for Waikiki beach today.  Fittingly, on some days there ought to be the Internet equivalent of a jellyfish warning issued for surfing the Web.  Case in point.  This.  At any rate, I might even inaugurate every Monday of the week with a Gadget Day to commemorate the infinite number of gizmos that people have bought on the spur and never used after a week.  After a while they even forget where they buried the comfort item in their backyard.  Begs the question whether these non-essential purchases are a plain waste money?  Absolutely, not.  Period.

via Slashfood

Sunday's Surcharge

Honolulu taxi drivers are alerting the public that they're financially running on fumes because of escalating gasoline prices at the pump.  The solution they honk is for the City to allow them to tack on a fuel surcharge to their fares.  Yeah, right.  I suppose they want fries with that, too.  Taxi drivers already receive an unofficial fuel surcharge in the form of the change that the customer is suppose to receive back after paying the cab fare, but which the taxi drivers pocket.  They hand you back the dollar bills.  However, if the change (coins) that the customer is suppose to get back is 95¢ (.95 US), that's theirs.  This morning the cashier at the grocery checkout stand refused to give me back my change because she drives to work.  She needs the change to subsidize her gasoline bill.  So the kleptomanic cashier kept the change.  To her credit she didn't tack on a surcharge to the receipt.

Saturday's Random

You know they're moving back to the mainland because they're putting their appliances and furniture up for sale.  Generally, you don't associate Waikiki with garage sales or yard sales but there's a few on the sidestreets in the neighborhood every week.  It's actually illegal to use public telephone poles for your own personal classified ads section.  The trick is to adorn your non-legal sign with a few balloons to cheer folks up on what happens to be a very voggy Saturday in Waikiki.  The other week I saw this For Sale sign stenciled on a car's real window with the printing done just as professionally as those on a store's front window.  Btw, how many more days of this voggy weather?  You could mistake Honolulu for LA.

Cirque du Honolulu Council

Let's play City Council.  Meeting is now convened.  Fuckin clowns.  On the very top of the Council's agenda is the question of which particular rail technology is best for Honolulu's Light Rail mass transit project.  I could have sworn that the City Council hired a panel of esteemed mass transit experts whom two months ago reveiwed the technology options and picked steel-on-steel technology over everything from magnetic levitation to rubber-wheels-on-concrete and fibre glass on resin.  Thus the technology issue was settled once and for all and planning could proceed at a faster pace.  Apparently, not.  The snag is that council members whom don't want mass transit to be built at all are determined to scuttle the Light Rail project by filerbustering every phase of the project down the road.  Off topic, but deep down all the City Council members secretly lust to be the next mayor of Honolulu.  Until the next scheduled meeting, *people get ready for the train to Kapolei, all you need is a ½¢ tax increase to get on board. If ewa.

You've seen the Olympic torch being protested every hop skip and jump along it's route.  What it brings to my mind is how an outright US boycott of the Beijing Olympics would effect the career of Hawaii's world class decathlete Bryan Clay.  By all appearances, Clay seems at his prime and stands a fair chance to win the decathlon at the Beijing Olympics.  If anyone asked me, human rights guarantees should have been written into the Olympic Committee's grant for China to host the Olympics at the outset, and not limited to Tibet.  You know what would be appropriate....boycotting the opening day ceremonies in combination with boycotting live worldwide television coverage of the opening day ceremonies, as if that day in China never happened.

Well before the US owed China $500 billion, the US boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics Games in Moscow in reaction to Russia's invasion of Afghanistan.  Thereafter America rescued the mujahadeen from certain annihilation by smuggling shoulder harnessed stinger missiles to the Taliban and the Northern Alliance allowing the freedom fighters to shoot down an average of one Russian helicopter gunship per day.  The Soviet helicopter pilots were afraid to fly only to serve as a skeet shoot for the Afghani tribesmen.  Kicking things off with a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games, the incidental beneficiary in all this became Al Queda.  That's not to insinuate that monks in Tibet will evolve into a future Al Queda, but with the US's track record, the US should be the last nation in the universe to propose righting the world with another boycott.  

Wednesday Being Hump Day

A recent court ruling seeks to portray Lady Justice as a slut.  Exhibit A: a man and a woman having sex.  Not uncommon.  Woman says to man, "Stop," while the act is fully in progress.  Man doesn't stop pumping the woman for a variety of reasons including but not limited to the laws of inertia.  Guess what, within 8 states in the US, the law condemns the man's inaction officially as rape.  Be sure to consult a lawyer before having sex within the jurisdiction of those 8 states.  Inexplicably, even had a woman granted her consent to have consensual sex with her male partner, under no force or threat of force, if the woman rescinds her consent mid-inning during the ball game, so to speak, and you, hypothetically, don't come to a screeching halt and withdraw your ding-a-ling immediately, you're at peril of a legal beartrap clamping down upon your pecker.

Furthermore, the puzzled man isn't alloted a token 5-seconds as a humane grace period to cease and desist under the eyes of the law in those relevant states.  He must halt in his tracks quicker than it takes for blood to return to his brains.  There is thus zero tolerance nay room for mitigating circumstances for the disobedient man, aka, defendant.  Tonight's discussion is not about wishy washy cock teasers, but by all appearances seemingly sane women buck naked spread eagle on the comfort of a mattress whom on a whim change their minds and switch modes for a plethora of cockamamie reasons.  Use to be, we simply wrote them of as strange cunts.  To say the least, the law holds a dissenting opinion.  "Stop" being the operative word, not consummation.  Suppose five minutes later, she taps the man on the shoulder and consents to resume sex again?