Howzit Howard

An oasis in the city

Behind downtown Honolulu on Vineyard Drive there is an oasis in the urban desert, quiet, sweet-smelling and beautiful, and admission is only $3. I'm talking about Foster Botanical Garden. I've been going to Foster Garden since 1978 when I first saw the cannonball tree. Back then there was even a garden of poison plants! There is a still a grove of "food trees" -- orange, lemon, cocao, vanilla, coffee -- and loads of orchids. The Friends of Honolulu Botanical Gardens and the Honolulu Botanical Gardens this weekend present "The Nutcracker Sweet Festival 2007," including food, music, silent auctions of art, and sales of plants some of which have never before been offered. It starts Saturday at 9:30 a.m. with free balloons for keiki, and at 11:15 a.m. the actor Jason Scott Leigh will give a talk on natural farming. Bonsai classes are also scheduled. Garden tours will be given at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. For more information: 537-1708.

Where will Hawaiian fly?

Hawaii's tourism industry has been stunned, in a good way, by the decision of Hawaiian Airlines to commit $4.4 billion over a decade to buying two dozen new jetliners. Hawaiian, which already had a newer fleet than Aloha, has decided to buy long-range jetliners from Airbus rather than Boeing, extending its potential range on nonstop flights. With Airbus A300-200s, the first arriving in 2012, Hawaiian can fly to Paris or London, or deeper into Asia. It can easily fly nonstop to East Coast airports with no nonstop service to Hawaii, such as Logan, JFK, or BWI. If you were told that Hawaiian wouldn't disclose its destination choices, that's wrong -- Hawaiian has no idea what cities it will fly to, for the very sensible reason that by 2012 so much can change that any decision made today would have to be rethought then. But London, Paris, or Rome all sound good if the euro stays as strong as its current record high, since that makes Hawaii a really good deal for Europeans.

Kids who make a difference

Thousands of Hawaii schoolchildren entered this year's "Make a Difference" poster contest, and more than 100 schools were represented. Some of the winners appeared Wednesday morning on "Sunrise" before heading to an award ceremony at the State Capitol, and we put some of the winning posters on TV. Castle & Cooke sponsored the contest, which produced 6,866 entries from 101 schools, and funded cash prizes of $100 to $150 to the winners, and additional cash gifts to their chosen charities and to schools with the most participation. Christopher Valdespino, a kindergarten student at Shafter Elementary, won the K-2 category. He's the boy who stonewalled me in the interview! Roxy Gonzalez, a fifth grader at Mililani Mauka Elementary, won the Grades 3-5 category. Her brother Ramil won last year, and this year he got an honorable mention. Kiana Ringuette, a seventh grader at Kailua Intermediate, and Jan Takamatsu, a senior at Campbell High, won in their categories. Students chose the Hawaii Children's Cancer Foundation, the Hawaii Audubon Society, the St. John Apostle & Episcopal Church Angel Network, and Aloha United Way, as their designated charities. Castle & Cooke publishes a calendar with the winning posters and several other worthy submissions, and distributes it to every full-time public school teacher in the state. Full disclosure: when I was a child I won a poster contest sponsored by the Anne Arundel County, Md., public school system. I have no recollection of what the topic was or what I drew but I do remember there was a cash prize. I don't remember spending it. Hmm... is my father still holding that dough for me?

Next-generation generation

Nothing changes your perception of your position in the space-time continuum like becoming a grandfather for the first time. It is a milestone on the road, not to aging, which is its own road, but on the acceptance of aging. More about that in a moment. My son Sean and his wife Michelle, as suited to parenthood as any people I know, have named their firstborn Jack, and promise to send photos of him soon. He's healthy and his parents are ecstatic. They live in Hollywood -- the zip code, not the state of mind -- and I will fly to L.A. for a quick visit in two weeks to get a look at the next-generation family member. It's big news for their big circle of friends who knew how much they wanted a family, and for my daughter Leina'ala, who can't wait to fly out to L.A. from her own home in the Washington, D.C., area to meet her new nephew. It also expands the already expanded family for my wife Bernadette's three children Lauren, Vanessa and David, who already feel kinship to Sean and Leina'ala. I'm sorry my first wife Marilyn didn't live long enough to meet Jack -- she used to joke to Sean and Michelle that she was tired of just having grandcats, but we all assumed that behind the joke was a genuine desire to experience being a grandmother. If you think about it, being a grandparent is one of the first milestones of aging that we do look forward to. In my early years in radio, working in the same county I grew up in, I covered a lot of high school news, and often returned to the high school I attended. This provided my early milestones of aging -- the first time you go to a high school and the students look like children instead of people you would befriend or date -- and the first time you go to a high school and see people who look to you like students but turn out to be teachers. Eventually I interviewed principals who were younger than I, and at last there was a school superintendent who was younger. There is something stressful about a doctor who is younger than you are, but it works the other way when a police officer is younger. In my youth, the main signs of aging were weight gain and wrinkles. Really old people had dentures. Men who fought in World War II sometimes had tattoes. And their hair was really short. In time, of course, everything changed. Tattoes came to represent women who were too young to be interested. Dental care has improved so everybody has his own teeth unless they grew up without fluorodated water. Kids can get fatter in their teens than I have in 54 years. Even wrinkles are on the decline, and now we realize that smoking was exacerbating that particular sign of the passing time. Jack will grow up in a time that knows very little smoking and very good dental care. He won't be into tattoes because the pendulum will have swung the other way again. Pollution is likely to be less of a problem because so many solutions now in the pipeline will have been made workable. Medical care will be much, much better, because aging babyboomers will be the single greatest political force in America and they'll care more deeply about that than anything else. We will devote an increasing amount of the nation's wealth and ingenuity into solving health problems. There will be a couple of major epidemics, though, because modern transportation facilitates the spread of disease. One day cancer will be vanquished and superbugs will be the biggest medical fear. War? Impossible to predict. The biggest threat in this area is the miniaturization of war. So long as war required whole nations to conduct, the process was to some extent predictable. Then war required only a conspiracy, but that's still a lot of people and group behavior can be anticipated. The greatest danger will come when a nuclear attack can be mounted by a single person, because no one can say for sure what a single person will do. Barring that, the single biggest problem will be the sheer size of the population. Our nation's infrastructure isn't as bad as some people say but neither is it equipped to handle a doubling of the nation's population, and that will happen during Jack's childhood. If you were born before 1970, you've seen the population double once already. And how did we handle all that growth? Badly. Imagine the same situation but worse. More highways, more congestions, relieved by only a few mass transit lines because of opposition from the auto industry, truckers, NIMBY types and the like. The problem may be worse on the mainland than in Hawaii, btw, because in Hawaii it's easier to envision the consequences, while on the mainland it's easier to delude oneself into thinking that development will expand into great open areas you don't especially care about. If we want Jack and others of his generation to have good lives, we need to get a lot more serious about land use, especially the preservation of vital or beautiful land and the concentration of high-density housing and employment centers along mass transit corridors. And what about Jack? Based on Sean and Michelle, I can confidently predict he will be good-looking, smart, funny, and warm-hearted. I wonder if he'll be left-handed... like his granddad.

The 12 Days Consumer Price Index

PNC Wealth Management, which does an annual survey of the cost of your true love's shopping list for "The Twelve Days of Christmas," reports that the cost of the list this year tops $78,000 if you buy each item as often as it is mentioned. If you buy each item once, on the assumption that the repeated references are to the same single purchase, then the cost is still almost $20,000. The single-item tally is up more than 3% from last year and the higher number is up 4%. Figure half again more to order all this stuff online. A major factor is the price of gold (remember the five golden rings?), driving this factor alone up 21.5% over the past year. But an increase in the minimum wage is cited in the 13.6% increase in the cost of "eight maids a-milking."  Higher food costs pushed the six geese a-laying from $300 to $360. And reflecting higher gold prices, those five gold rings will cost $395, up 21.5 percent from last year's $325. Prices were flat for doves and swans, but geese prices rose 20%. 

Ten years of helping visitors

Herman Scholtz and his wife were at the beach and she was swimming in the ocean and had trouble getting back to land. Herman swam out and got her, but on the way back in he had a heart attack and died. I left out two things. This was their honeymoon. And it was in Central America. Imagine his bride, not just beset by grief but alone in an unfamiliar place with emergency arrangements to make. This situation was not lost on Scholtz's daughter, Jessica Lani Rich. Today she is head of the Visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii, which this year marked its first decade of service to Hawaii visitors in distress. The society was founded by the Honolulu Rotary Club, the one that meets in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Rich became its executive director about three years ago. The society is funded to the tune of a nearly quarter million dollars a year by the Hawaii Tourism Authority and gets in-kind assistance of many local businesses. More than 100 people a month are helped by the society, which finds lodgings for visitors who've been robbed, and helps them with emergency arrangements when someone dies or becomes ill while far away from home. Most of the people who work for the society are volunteers. There are offices on four islands.

The truth about Black Friday

"When Black Friday comes/I'll stand down by the door/And catch the grey men when they/Dive from the fourteenth floor." --"Black Friday," Steely Dan, from "Katy Lied." The most frequently mentioned Black Friday, because it comes around every year, is the day after Thanksgiving, which is often erroneously referred to as "the official start of Christmas shopping season" and "the busiest retail sales day of the year." As you can see above, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker weren't referring to that Black Friday in their 1975 album, but to the Black Thursday stock market crash of 1929, which they may have been confusing with the Black Friday Wall Street panic of 1869 caused by two guys' attempts to corner the gold market. Another Steely Dan song is slightly more appropriate: "You'll need the tools for survival/And the medicine for the blues/Sweet treats and surprises/For the little buckaroos." --"The Last Mall," from "Everything Must Go," Steely Dan. That song seems to actually be about some apocalyse, but never mind that. Black Friday is indeed an important day in the retail calendar, but that importance used to be exaggerated by the media, and by doing that for decades we in the media seem to be turning Black Friday into what we said it was all along. In the 1960s, Christmas decorations in most cities did not appear until the day after Thanksgiving (and people wrote columns complaining that this rushed the season) when most people have a day off but nothing to do except eat leftovers. By the 1970s we had gotten used to it -- the "rushing the season" columns were confined to the first stores to put the seasonal decorations even earlier -- and television stations gave heavy coverage because it was an interesting, telegenic story on a really slow news day. I don't know if this is true everywhere, but in the Baltimore-Washington area where I grew up the original meaning of Black Friday in the context of the day after Thanksgiving was negative, referring to the traffic jams at shopping centers. But after awhile the term was co-opted by retailers who said it meant the juncture at which they stopping operating "in the red" and began running "in the black," a reference to the fact that most retailers do at least a third of their annual business between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The International Conference of Shopping Centers provides retail sales and traffic data for the seasonal season starting from Black Friday, which is often wrongly treated as an official gospel of total retail sales. Until recent years, even the ICSC was careful to tell anyone willing to listen that Black Friday, while a busy day for foot traffic, was never the biggest sales day -- that was always the last Saturday before Christmas. But in 2003 and 2005, Black Friday came in first, and it was second in 2004. Truth has come into alignment with news reports. If you parse the shopping season by calendar weeks, measuring Sunday-to-Saturday cycles the way Hospitality Advisors does for hotels, then the three weeks from Thanksgiving each account for 14% or 15% of seasonal sales, the next week gets 18% and the last week before Christmas accounts for 23% of sales. Thanksgiving weekend by itself accounts for roughly 10% of seasonal sales. So, yes, it's a big deal.

I ' m an L-tripto fan

Most Americans know more big words in the medical field than in any other arena of human endeavor -- because it's personal, about their own bodies. Talk to someone who ain't got no good grammar about his health and suddenly he's discussing endocardiograms and platelets and swellings of the bursa. He knows about what ails him. When we talk turkey, we all talk about L-triptophan, the mysterious substance that we all seem to know about which turkey contains, and which makes us drowsy. But does it? In recent years I have heard that most nutritionists think what really makes us drowsy is carbo overload, or the simple diversion of blood flow from the brain to the digestive system because we ate a meal that was twice as big as usual. So I looked it up. I googled for triptophan, and read sources from kiddie nutrition sites to Wikipedia to specialized medical journals, filtering out the bits that weren't mention in the more detailed articles. L-triptophan is the most common kind of triptophan in human food and you might as well leave the 'L' off, so I will. Triptophan may sound like a former Soviet republic but that's okay since turkey sounds like a country, too. Turkey, in this instance, is my favorite food (really) and triptophan is one of its chemical ingredients, one of 20 standard amino acids. It trips off a sequence of chemical reactions in your brain's neurotransmitters, creating a feeling of relaxation. Turkey is not the only food that is rich in triptophan. You can find more per bite in both pork and cheese. Triptophan is also in milk, bread and pasta, and peanut butter and chocolate. Despite the very real effect, the more learned sites I checked confirmed that the Thanksgiving effect is very probably associated more with overeating than with what you're eating. But a meal of pork and cheese, finished off with sweetened milk, probably will give you a mild sense of pleasant relaxation. (I said sweetened because sugar interferes with competing chemicals, thus facilitating the effect.) Happy Thanksgiving!

The straight truth about advertising

Oceanic Time Warner Cable next month will begin offering MTV's Logo network, on digital channel 542.Logo is a gay and lesbian channel. As an analog cable customer, my first reaction was, "They have more than 500 channels?"  I can remember when even in a major metropolitan area there were only four channels. And one of them was running "Three Stooges" movies. My second reaction was, "What could possibly be offered to gay and lesbian viewers that can't already be found on the other 400 channels, or even on the 70 channels I get?" I have basic cable. I don't even get HBO. But this didn't stop me from having access to "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," "Will & Grace," "Brokeback Mountain," and that grayhair guy in the suit who does the makeover show and folds his hands across his chest a lot. So what are we talking about here? "CSI Key West"? "Desperate Houseboys"? Let me put it another way, by making this about me instead of about gays and lesbians: why would I watch a network that was all about rumpled middle-aged guys with beards that need reading glasses? I can understand why advertisers, regardless of their own companionship preferences, would like a for-gays network -- another way of defining gays is, "single people who, as a result of being single, have more disposable income." But really, one assumes this target demographic is already watching mainstream television. Even there, it seems silly to assume that gays only watch shows with gay themes. Larry King is heterosexual and Jewish -- but watched nightly by gays and goys. His appeal has nothing to do with those two particular descriptions of him. I'm guessing the suspenders don't make much difference, either. The gay cable network is actually but an extreme example of something interesting about broadcast programming and advertising targets. Advertisers target people of certain age groups, or sexes, or marital status. Oxygen is aimed at female viewers. ESPN is aimed at males. I asked a friend of mine who programs a sports talk station why his hosts often talk about subjects other than sports, and he said, "The thing you need to understand, Howard, is that this isn't sports radio. This is guy radio. We can talk about anything that sells radial tires and beer." Advertisers like it a lot when a show reaches ONLY their target, say, guys who drink beer, because that means they're not wasting money buying access to other audiences that won't drink beer no matter how good the commercial is. By the way, if you're my age (I'm 54) you will be interested to know that some advertisers have no interest in reaching you because they believe that most people, by the age of 50, have formed opinions about their favorite brands, and don't readily change their minds.

Lawsuit or no, fare war persists

The go! interisland service posted more $19 dollar tickets this week. Both Hawaiian Airlines and Aloha Airlines matched the offer on the same number of seats... which as usual is selected seats on selected flights. That answers the question of whether go! parent Mesa Air Group would pursue the fare war after Hawaiian Airlines won its suit against Mesa in federal bankruptcy court. Based on a Mesa presentation to prospective investors and an internal email, both Hawaiian and Aloha believe Mesa intended to use aggressive money-losing fares to drain the legacy carriers' cash reserves. Mesa CEO Jonathan Ornstein says the email was a joke. He asserts that Mesa quickly abandoned the idea that it could survive only by muscling one of the legacy carriers to the sidelines. He says the subsequent business plan was to fly go! at a loss but drive website traffic to other sites selling other goods and services, collecting commissions on the referrals. Hawaiian and Aloha executives don't believe it is possible to make enough money from website referrals to justify a money-losing airline, so they're sticking to their belief that Mesa is using its larger cash reserves to pursue a predatory pricing war. The idea of predatory prices is to offer services below cost, leaving competitors whose pockets are less deep with two options, neither good: (1) match the price, hold onto market share, but lose money, until there is no longer any money left to lose; or (2) don't match the price, and lose business right away to the other guy. Whatever the actual motivation for its money-losing fares, go! has been selling $49 tickets, sometimes $39, occasionally (as this week) $19. A cab ride to the airport often costs more than that. Sources close to all three airlines say the actual cost of providing interisland service is closer to $60 a ticket, and much more when you add allocated costs such as shares of advertising, customer services, and the cost of the company headquarters. Aloha Airlines has older jets and higher fuel costs; Hawaiian has newer jets that are more fuel efficient, but it has higher labor costs; go! has lower costs but only 50 seats it can sell per flight. Sources says go! actually has the highest per-seat costs. Take advantage of the money-losing fares now; several third-party interisland carriers have been founded in the past and not one of them has survived for more than a few years. Demand for interisland seats is actually lower now than in the past due to the increase in direct mainland flights to Lihue, Kahului, Kona and Hilo.