Howzit Howard

UH regents: is this your final answer?

[Note: The finalist from Michigan has now withdrawn from consideration. HMD] The finalists to succeed David McClain as UH president have proven so underwhelming that a cabal of state senators is pleading that local candidates be more carefully considered and editorial writers are suggesting that the UH regents start over. The finalists are Robert Jones, who has spent more than three decades at the University of Minnesota, and M.R.C. Greenwood, who resigned from a senior post with the University of California after promoting a friend. Neither knows Hawaii well. Honolulu Advertiser Editor Mark Platte wrote last weekend that "there is little excitement in the community over the two choices" though they were chosen from hundreds of possible candidates. Pacific Business News on Friday editorialized "do-over needed" and urged the search committee to look through the stack of resumes again. In a sense, this wariness about Jones and Greenwood is more of the legacy of Evan Dobelle, who rode in on a white horse but galloped back to the mainland leaving a trail of steed poop. Dobelle delivered on so little of what he promised, and so glibly blamed it on everyone but himself, that we now seem to be suspicious of mainlanders generally, inverting the previous mistake of assuming that mainlanders know more than we do. Greenwood unwittingly echoed Dobelle with her alternative explanation of her resignation as UH provost, in which it was all about disagreements with her boss and none of it was her fault, while Jones made some of us think of Dobelle simply by going on about how UH could be a great university. UH is already a better university than most kama'aina realize, with very strong programs in a number of disciplines, including business, law and astronomy. Hawaii's collective inferiority complex about UH stems in part from an idealized view of mainland universities that are reputed to be great but have their own problems in spades. I see that some people, criticizing the search committee, are upset that the finalists don't have experience as a president of a university somewhere. Ah, but Dobelle had that experience, and what did it do for us? It brought us a guy who thought he was going to keep his promises by assigning the help to do it. The growing sentiment that we will be better off with a president who is local is, I think, not without merit. The best prospects for raising funds, apart from pursuing grants, is with the local community. A local president might liaise with the regents, the governor and the legislature better. She or he would understand both the pitfalls and the unique strengths of our multi-cultural community. The semifinal choices of the search committee are, in fact, so mystifying that I assume there must be some behind-the-scenes facts which, if only we knew them, would make this easier to understand. But there are some fine people involved in the process and maybe they can fix this on a second pass.

Is the peacock basher being bashed?

Her friends say we're all being unfair to Sandra Maloney, who two weeks ago beat a peacock to death with a baseball bat. "Sandra is not a violent person," said one friend in a statement published by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on Saturday. Maloney herself declined to speak with reporters Friday. "I was convinced by somebody that they were going to present my side, and they just smeared me," she said. She's talking about my brothers and sisters at another TV station, who did not in fact smear, but merely presented her side. This is her side: she beat a peacock to death to shut it up. Maloney repeated her unrepentant confession to both police and neighbors. They report she also said she intended to kill more of the obtrusive birds. She may not be the only one who desires the silence of the peacocks. Will Hoover reports in the Honolulu Advertiser that 11 have been killed in the Makaha area in a few weeks. The others were shot or poisoned, perhaps someone else's M.O. I will leave others to debate whether the noise peacocks make is tolerable or not. I simply wish to point out that far from being smeared, Maloney voluntarily made a statement to a reporter who had just told her that her side would be put on television. And they did. The problem is not that the reporter did anything wrong but that Maloney did something wrong -- and then, feeling it was justified, crowed about it. And, generally speaking, I would argue that it is inaccurate to describe someone as not a violent person who by her own account has beaten a peacock to death with a baseball bat because it's noisy. If I were the judge, the first thing I would say at her next hearing is, "Silence in the courtroom!" Just to be on the safe side.

Music Post: More great inner symphonic movements

Most symphonies offer two possible samples for the theme, "The Inner Game of Symphony," which means that even the most exclusive list of core repertory symphonies would offer more than 400 choices. So it's really no surprise that I decided to do a second consecutive week on theme. And what is on the agenda for this weekend's HPR program? One of the most interesting of all symphonic slow movements is the middle movement of Cesar Franck's only symphony, with its English horn solo and the suspenseful trudge of a beat, lightened by being played by the harp. It appears in the 5am half hour, bracketed by some Vaughan Williams and some Mahler. Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony has two finished movements -- there is an incomplete third movement and nobody can find a finale -- so the second movement will appear in the 5:30 a.m. half hour, with a lead-up of Haydn and Beethoven, and an obscure Russian piece to follow. Prokofiev and Glazunov set the stage for the scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth in the 6am half hour. Then the final half hour will have Shostakovich, Hindemith, Mendelssohn, and a mystery movement in the Trick Question segment. Howard Dicus broadcasts "Howard's Day Off" live every Saturday, 5am-7am, on Hawaii Public Radio.

Why zero growth is really a negative number

The Council on Revenues, which once expected half-percent growth in state tax revenues for the coming fiscal year, changed its mind Thursday and said it now expects zero growth in the 12 months starting July 1. Zero growth. Hmmm. That also means zero decline, right? That's a good thing. Isn't it? To know the answer to the question, you need to ask, zero growth from where? Because the council didn't just cut its growth estimate for the coming fiscal year to zero. It also nearly doubled its estimate for tax revenue shrinkage in the current fiscal year running through the end of June. In March the council said, for every 100 dollars in tax revenues the state collected in the prior fiscal year, it would collect five dollars less this time. Now it says, make that nine dollars less. Shrinking tax revenues of 9%, rather than 5%, in the current fiscal year, means the zero that becomes operative on July 1 will be a lower level of tax revenue than what we officially thought we were taking in until Thursday. July 1, after all, is a manmade dividing point. The only reason tax revenues won't shrink to the right of it is that the last of the shrinkage turns out to have come to the left of it. That, of course, is assuming the Council on Revenues is right. The economists who sit on the council are far from convinced that they are, even now. Paul Brewbaker, consulting economist to Bank of Hawaii, has been telling people for months, "We keep chasing this thing downward," while Carl Bonham of the UH Economic Research Organization has been arguing for months that the economy is worse than the economists say it is. Brewbaker is an optimist at heart, while Bonham seems more comfortable wearing the hairshirt and waving the sign, but both men love Hawaii deeply and have been hoping against hope that they are too pessimistic. So far, no. On the mainland, where economists get television airplay for their ability to speak in sound bites rather than their ability to forecast accurately, we've seen a variety of economic indicators touted as recovery signs, but often I find that even a cursory look at the numbers shows nothing of the sort. Home sales are resurgent on falling prices, yes, but that's because speculators are snapping up foreclosure homes. It hardly speaks to the real world of people getting mortgages to buy homes they will live in. Factory orders rose in April by the greatest amount in 16 months, but if you dial out military contracts, then orders actually took another dive. An order is an order, but sometimes an order is not a bellwether. The significance of tax revenues, of course, is that the state constitution requires a balanced budget. You will be pleased to know that both the governor and the legislature, though they agreed on little else, cut more than the minimum necessary from the upcoming state budget in case the Council on Revenues did a negative revision. Good for them. But the downward revision is bigger than the extra credit cutting, so more spending cuts still need to be found.

A spell of excitement for Talmage Nakamoto

In elementary school, I finished second in a spelling bee, tripped up by forgetting the D in the word "handkerchief." Getting it wrong produced a combination of frustration at not remembering the silent consonant and relief that the stress of the moment was over. Talmage Nakamoto operates at a whole different level. He can spell words he never heard before, by making calculated guesses based on the derivation of a word. "Is it French?"" he asked, when confronted with "passerelle." The judge whimsically replied that it was English, but came from the French. Talmage probably wanted to bop the man repeatedly with the little bell, but gamely attempted the spelling -- and got it right. Passerelle, for those of you following at home, is a small bridge. The French use it for hotel skywalks, the bridges of ships, and telecommunications gateways. What felled Talmage, on the cusp of the final championship round, was another word neither he nor I has ever heard of before, "caliche," an agglomeration of gravel, rock and soil that sounds close to what U.S. builders call "aggregate." It's pronounced like it is spelled "calicchi," which is how Talmage spelled it. Caliche is not to be confused with kolache, an Eastern European pastry that my wife excels in baking, which actually is sometimes spelled kolacchi if you're in the sticks.

The price of gas, and the future of Chevron

As I write this, AAA puts the average price of Honolulu self-serve regular unleaded gasoline at about $2.66 a gallon. Prices have risen 27 cents in just one month, which sounds bad until you hear that mainland prices have risen 40 cents in the same time. I did warn you this could happen. A number of residents of my condo in Wild West Waikiki bought gas-guzzling SUVs during the decline of gasoline prices several months back. I've got silver Mercedes SUV land yachts on either side of me. In a mainland review of the newest Winnebago recreation vehicle, a Winnebago flack made the misleading comment that the model "is capable of" something like 20 mpg. The reviewer drove it on the highway and got less than half that. Thelma and Louise could get excellent mileage for a few hundred feet. While we're talking about the fresh run-up in energy prices -- benchmark crude oil was $62 a barrel Thursday as I wrote this -- let's talk about the rumors about Chevron shutting down its oil refinery in Kapolei, one of two refineries in Hawaii. I'm getting daily emails from people who want to know if Chevron will close and lay everybody off. Here's what's going on with that. Chevron does a cost accounting of its Hawaii refinery every few years, costing out what it costs to ship crude here and refine it, versus what it would cost to refine the crude on the mainland and ship it here as gasoline and jet fuel. If they didn't do this, and it was cheaper to simply buy gasoline and jet fuel from someone else and ship it here, they would still find this out, but they would find out when someone else did it and muscled them out of business. The last time the accountants reviewed this, they decided it made more sense to keep the refinery. They're probably going to come to the same conclusion this time. If they do ever decide it makes more sense to ship oil here after it has already been refined into gasoline and jet fuel (and other products) Chevron would still need property and equipment for its distribution network and people to run it. Not as many people, though. Does soaring crude mean higher profits? It depends on whether an oil company is pumping its own crude or buying it from someone else. Tesoro, owner of the other West Oahu refinery, went into the red during the last oil price run-up because Tesoro has no crude oil in the ground itself. Some of the emails I've gotten hypothesize, not that the Chevron refinery will shut down, but merely that it will be sold. This is always a possibility but it wouldn't make sense unless (a) Chevron really needed cash, and (b) another oil company had so much cash lying around that it didn't need to mess with stuck credit markets.

Millions for tourism marketing -- is it enough?

Wheezing from the vog, budget committee members at the Hawaii Tourism Authority offices inside the Hawaii Convention Center voted for a $71 million budget, with $3 million extra in case of emergency. The budget, which goes to a vote by the full tourism board in June, is roughly flat from the current fiscal year. It devotes more than two thirds of the money to tourism marketing, but slightly less than in the current budget. Gov. Lingle's tourism liaison Marsha Wienert, who was in the room for this, questioned the wisdom of flat marketing in a down economy. David Uchiyama, the HTA marketing guru, says the agency has learned smarter ways to deploy funds. Here are some points worth making as we consider the matter:

• More money does not automatically equal more marketing. This assumes everybody in government spends money with equal wisdom, and nobody believes that, not even people in government.
• There is objective evidence HTA is using its money wisely -- like the idea of flying bloggers over to experience Hawaii and then blog about it -- and targeting cities with direct air connections.
• HTA marketing spending does not equal total marketing spending. That motorcoach that pulled into Costco parking lots on the West Coast disgorging hula dancers? Marriott paid for that.
• It's not clear that spending more is a practical option -- hotel tax revenue is down sharply and the budget is ultimately based on a guess, which could be wrong, about how much revenue will be forthcoming from that tax.
• Rival destinations spent heavily last fall and winter and have, in most cases, more serious money problems than we do.

But there is one more factor that may be more important than any of the others. There is a level of concern about finances, X, at which a consumer cannot be talked into a Hawaii vacation at any price. If a large number of Californians have gotten to X, you could spend eleventy zillion dollars and get zilch results. I don't know how many Californias are at X -- nobody does -- because people who have lost their jobs constitute only a subset of X. Most people at X got there simply by watching too much CNBC. You've got to assume that economic panic is widespread in California, where everyone is assaulted with daily reports on foreclosures, layoffs, and the "Pit and the Pendulem" fix the state government is in. Nevertheless, there are probably a number of people in San Francisco and Los Angeles who meet these criteria:

1. They still have good jobs and do not expect to lose them.
2. They can afford Hawaii even in normal times.
3. They already know they like Hawaii.

These are people who have means, motive and opportunity to come to Hawaii, who are deterred by nothing more than reports about other people's problems. They are, in brief, fraidycats. Radio and television commercials or free vacation contests might generate interest, especially since prices really are low right now.

Is WestJet the next ATA?

Southwest Airlines this week has reaffirmed its intention to do a codeshare alliance with the Canadian discount airline WestJet, raising the intriguing possibility that we could have discount seats from California to Hawaii again. The alliance was first announced last December, but with no reference to Hawaii, and no one made the connection. The announcement this week was actually that the alliance is being delayed, but Southwest made such a point of restating its commitment to the deal that I started wondering why it cared so much, and that's when the dime dropped and I realized the possibilities this could open up. To explain this, I need to begin by reminding you that you can't launch air service to Hawaii with just any aircraft. The FAA permits long flights over water only when it has approved both the airline and the planes it will use, and to qualify for this you have to spend a great deal of money on extra training and equipment. Southwest, the nation's biggest discount airline, whose business model is heavily reliant on flying just a couple kinds of jets to control its maintenance, parts storage and training expenses, does not have the authority to fly extended travel over open water. To make up for this, it had a codeshare alliance with ATA Airlines, selling tickets to Hawaii over ATA flights out of Oakland. ATA was its semi-official Hawaii arm. But ATA closed last year, just three days after Aloha Airlines did. That ended virtually all discount airlift from the U.S. mainland to Hawaii. WestJet is the only discount carrier now flying to Hawaii, and it obviously has the FAA authority that Southwest lacks. Its current schedule links to Hawaii from Vancouver. Its flights from there fan out to Kona, Kahului and Honolulu. This is what you watch for: any announcement that WestJet will fly here from Oakland, SFO, LAX or anywhere else from California. That will be the sign that Southwest Airlines has found a new Hawaii arm, and it will be very good news indeed for Hawaii tourism. A Southwest executive said the codeshare alliance might happen as soon as late this year. P.S. If you don't normally read responses to blog posts, I call your attention to two points raised by readers. One, who may or may not have inside information, says there are some IT issues between Southwest and WestJet that would best be sorted out before the alliance is launched. Certainly it wouldn't be the first time two companies found their plans to work together were confounded by computers that can't talk to each other. CVS and Longs are going through that right now and computer problems were one of the big reasons for the failure of PennCentral, created in the 1960s from the merger of the two largest rail systems of the Northeast. Other viewers and readers have suggested that U.S. cabotage law extends to airlines and would raise difficulties for a non-U.S. airline that wants to fly between two U.S. cities. While I think something could probably be worked out, given the current power of the Hawaii Congressional delegation, a WestJet spokesman tells me it is their understanding that U.S. law would not currently permit them to fly here from Oakland. The issue of U.S. versus foreign airlines is a hot issue in Washington, D.C., because major international carriers want to merge, blurring the ownership. United has wanted to merge with Lufthansa for years and there has been more recent discussion of a closer corporate relationship between Delta and Air France-KLM.

Movie Post: Angels, Demons and Weekends

It has bothered me for some time that I don't see as many movies in theaters as I used to, and it was inevitable that some new film would be the beneficiary of my building desire to rectify this. That beneficiary turned out to be "Angels and Demons" starring Tom Hanks. I read both "Angels and Demons" and its sequel "The Da Vinci Code," enjoying both, though I am prevented from having a high opinion of the author because Dan Brown made a big deal of researching his books carefully but actually made all kinds of careless mistakes. He is as much of a researcher as Robert Ludlum was. The movie "Angels and Demons" actually corrects one of the novel's biggest mistakes, sort of, in quite a clever way. The McGuffin of the plot, to use Alfred Hitchcock's term for a suspense story's driving force, is a cannister of weapons grade antimatter. But no one has produced, or can currently produce, that much of it. The movie makes it a little easier to suspend disbelief by postulating that the antimatter was produced in an atom smasher built beneath the Franco-Swiss border by CERN, the same think tank that gave us the World Wide Web. It didn't exist when Brown wrote his novel. The movie is ripped from tomorrow's headlines. Director Ron Howard made an interesting decision -- since "Angels and Demons" was being shot after "The Da Vinci Code," and fewer people had read it, he would very slightly alter the story to make it a sequel rather than a prequel. This allowed Tom Hanks' character, a Harvard symbologist, to be more of an action hero, having gotten used to such stuff in the "earlier" adventure. He also changed a character played by Ewan McGregor from Italian to Irish so his Scottish accent would be less obstrusive. Some other subtle alterations improve on the unfoldment of the truth in the final scenes. Several other things in the film had pleasant associations for me. The actor who played Captain Richter is one of the highlights of the excellent Robert DeNiro suspense thriller "Ronin." The assassin, who has the opportunity to kill the hero and heroine, declines to, explaining that it is not part of his contract, an homage to the single spookiest scene from an even better Robert Redford suspense thriller, "Three Days of the Condor." Finally, key scenes in the story take place in the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican catacombs. I have been in both places. I was impressed with how realistic they look in the movie, since the Vatican enjoyed "The Da Vinci Code" so heartily that it banned Ron Howard from shooting in any Catholic church. Seeing this exciting movie was part of a much-needed three-day weekend, which also featured a pleasant drive up the Windward Coast and along the North Shore on Saturday.

Internet data is interplanetary

We don't just count data sent through space as part of the Internet -- the amount of data on the Internet is now great enough that if expressed in binary code and bound into books it would stretch to Pluto -- 10 times. The consulting firm IDC said so this past week. In the early days of widespread Internet use, in the early 1990s, when most of us were still on telephone modem connections and using search engines like Excite and Lycos, we thought it was a brave new world, in which our personal computer had more power than NASA used to put a man on the moon. Yet these were, we now know, primitive days. In the early 90s my browser was still Netscape and my word processing program was still Word Perfect. By 1995, two separate studies counted nearly 5 million Internet domains, almost a third of them hosted in Europe. There were signs of Europe catching up and then some, including the fact that both Finland and the Netherlands had twice as many website hosts per capita as the United States did. Soon after, Coca-Cola made drops of condensation drip down the bottle on its home page, and suddenly the colorful little moving graphics that had formerly impressed us seemed old-hat. I had my own epiphany then, however, while visiting my daughter at college. I watched her and her friends websurf and realized that no matter how much they talked about the new graphics, the bells and whistles didn't stop them from clicking away to read Slashdot, which was still wonderfully retro. Even for college kids, it was still all about content. "You've Surfed a Long Way, Baby," I wrote in 2000, when Cyveillance reported that the number of unique, publicly-available pages on the Internet had surpassed 2 billion. Cyveillance estimated at the time that 85% of webpages were hosted in the United States. By now many of us were on high-speed connections and if we weren't we understood we were no longer cutting edge. Yet MySpace and Facebook were still to come. Comscore reported a year ago that total global Internet audience, age 15 or older from home and work computers, surpassed 1 billion visitors in December 2008. Only 18% of these people were in North America -- 28% were in Europe and 41% in the Asia Pacific region. The number of Internet users in North America has doubled since 2000 but it has tripled in Europe and grown 500% in the Asia Pacific region.