Howzit Howard

Why some people don ' t want Roman Polanski jailed

There is a movement in Hollywood to urge prosecutors to back off Roman Polanski, who many years ago drugged, raped and sodomized a 13 year-old girl. I don't understand it. "Don't tell your mother," he said. "This will be our little secret." This isn't going to be a screed against Hollywood. Most people in Hollywood haven't signed the petition that's going around. But I wonder if those who have, read the girl's testimony. Her account, which corresponds with the verifiable facts, makes it clear she was intimidated into an encounter she did not wish to have. Polanski admitted it happened. He fled the country before sentencing because, according to later accounts, he was afraid the judge would fail to honor a plea agreement and lock him up. Some facts that have been brought up by Polanski's defenders - the fact that the girl had a boyfriend with whom she had sex - the fact that Polanski was arrested in public when theoretically he might have been apprehended more discreetly - strike me as irrelevant. How can anyone in Hollywood see Polanski as not being the bad guy? I have a theory about that. In TV shows and movies, the bad guys are nearly always all-bad. Take out those shows and films where the bad guy is portrayed neutrally to create a shock later, and it's hard to recall any dramas where evil is done by an otherwise good person. If you actually think that's how it is in real life, it becomes easy to presume innocence, or at least to presume extenuating circumstances, when evil is attributed to someone you know and like.

American Samoa now faces financial crunch

American Samoa had some financial issues before the earthquake Tuesday and now those problems are going to be a bit worse. The American Samoa legislature had already been grilling Governor Togiola Tulafono on how much money he had taken from a fund that he proposed to tap yet again for $5 million to buy the Chicken of the Sea tuna cannery in Pago Pago. That cannery, which has 2,100 employees, is an instant economic crisis after closing Wednesday. No buyer has stepped forward. Tulafono wants to buy it and hire someone to operate it for the government. His thinking is that $5 million isn't so much when you consider all the social benefits the government will have to pay to those 2,100 people if they're thrown out of work. Indeed, Tulafono wasn't in American Samoa when the tsunami hit Tuesday because he was in Honolulu looking for someone to manage the cannery. At this writing Tulafono was planning to hitch a ride on a Coast Guard C-130 taking relief supplies to Pago Pago and would be back home at first light Wednesday. Commercial aviation isn't so simple at the moment. The Federal Aviation Administration has closed Pago Pago International Airport after damage to the runway. Hawaiian Airlines, whose next department from Honolulu to Pago Pago is scheduled to leave at 5 p.m. Thursday, says it still hopes to be able to make that run. It is not evident to me how much American Samoa government funds have been tapped. Certainly the government has economic challenges not unlike those of the 50 states in this global downturn. Reading Pago Pago news accounts, I see that lawmakers and the governor do not trust each other - even when the governor answers all the questions he's asked, the lawmakers reply that they would now like it in writing - but it's not clear who, if anyone, is right. It may be that there is enough money for disaster relief, but then not enough left over to keep the cannery open.

The Samoan earthquake coverage and the fragility of facts in a breaking story

The Sunrise program had ended at 8 a.m., but Dan and Taizo and I were still in the darkened studio when the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center sent word that there had been an earthquake. Our producer Scott Humber came in to make sure Dan Cooke was ready to break in to the CBS morning show, but Dan was already gathering information for it. Taizo "built a graphic," as these TV people say, positioning a picture of the Pacific with the earthquake symbol in the right place. Dan interrupted regular programming and tannyabed a flawless first report. At that point all we knew was that a Richter 7.9 earthquake had hit somewhere near Samoa and there was a tsunami alert for all of the Hawaiian Islands. I retrieved the laptop that sits before me on the program from its resting place beneath the anchor set and powered it up again, wrote what Dan and Taizo were shouting to each other into a couple coherent sentences, and fed it into the TelePrompTer. By now we knew the location from 110 miles south-southwest of American Samoa, and we knew that the tsunami alerts had extended over much of the southern Pacific, including Tahiti, Tuvalu, Fiji, Kiritbati, Palmyra and New Zealand. The newsroom put the story on the Web. I'm not sure who did what but I heard Anna Gomes working on it and assignment editor Brenda Salgado was already putting out feelers. Malika showed up and pitched in, making phone calls to learn what she could, at least one of them conducted in her fluent French. Back in the studio, I indexed for websites that would have information and found that the U.S. Geological Survey has revised the Richter reading to 8.0 and also posted an 8.3 reading on the moment magnitude scale. One of the cable networks got the story wrong, using the 8.3 number but calling it the Richter reading. Dan immediate began mentioning the moment reading so viewers who monitored multiple sources wouldn't be confused by hearing two different numbers. Charles Richter taught at Caltech. His 1935 scale is logarithmic, so that an 8.0 earthquake has 10 times the magnitude of a 7.0 earthquake. The moment magnitude scale, also developed at Caltech but in 1979 by Tom Hanks - no, not that Tom Hanks - is also logarithmic. The two are almost identical up to Richter 5.0, but after that the moment magnitude number tends to be larger. The newsroom reached a contact in Samoa who said there were no deaths, but later confirmed reports from other sources that said there were. Big waves had moved cars in Pago Pago harbor and wiped out a beach village on the southern short of Western Samoa's most important island. The quake itself was felt all over Samoa. The BBC initially said it was 20 miles down. Later USGS said it was more like six miles. Breaking stories are always like this. People get information wrong, or get it late. Even official Richter readings get revised. One scale is mistaken for another. But it's fascinating to watch it come together.

Things encountered on the way to the car

You couldn't tell it on the air, because she's a trouper, but Ramsay Wharton sprained her ankle Monday morning when she fell while walking to her car. She came in and worked anyway, but now she'll be out for the rest of the week. Someone left an object on the pathway and Ramsay, who had both hands full of stuff, didn't see it. All of us, in radio and television, who give you the news as soon as you get up in the morning, obviously have to get up earlier than that in ordered to be prepared, and we have all encountered some strange things commuting at 0-dark-30. We've tripped over toys, bumped into furniture that has been moved, stubbed our toes on packages, because for the sake of people who have normal hours we try to get out of the house and into the car in the dark. We've gone to work with our feet bleeding from sharp things we walked on before our shoes were on. If we make it to the car safely, we encounter drunk drivers and irate street people. "This is my sidewalk!" a guy told me once. "I'm just passing through," I growled back. "You can have it back now." "Hey, thanks," he said. For years my favorite pre-dawn commuting story stemmed from the fact that when I started working for United Press International in Washington, D.C., its world headquarters was in the same block as a number of strip clubs. It is a true story that I once told a lady in an alley, "No thanks, I work here, too." Several years later, after I had gone to WTOP Newsradio, also in Washington, a less humorous but significantly more wonderful thing was encountered on the way to the car. In the middle of one of the coldest and snowiest nights of the winter, I opened my front door and let myself out, only to find, not 10 feet in front of me, a very large white-tailed deer. He looked at me. I looked at him. After an eternity, or maybe 10 seconds, I said, "Well." He turned and walked away across my front yard. He walked with great dignity, the street light illuminating the snowflakes on his antlers, until he got to the road about 30 feet from me. Then he slipped on the ice and fell, which kind of ruined the effect. He clambered to his feet and trotted away. Commuting in the dark can sometimes have effects after you arrive at work. Suddenly you're in a well-lighted room for the first time since you woke up, and that's when someone notices you have one black sock and one blue one.

Dan Brown and the Mystical Cabal of Inaccurate Novels

Dan Brown, the author of "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels & Demons" and a new novel that I am now reading, has somehow gotten saddled with the impossible claim that he researches his fiction so carefully that all the key details about secret organizations and codes and stuff are all true. The new book, about Freemasonry, makes a similar claim to such verisimilitude, which practically defies careful readers to spot mistakes. I have spotted three already, though I confess none impinge directly on the plot, or on any secret organization's plots, real or imagined by Brown or others. One of the mistakes is a reference to Congress choosing to site the capital on a swamp. Actually, the politicians of the day, knowing that George Washington was a shoo-in to be the first president and that by peacetime profession he was a surveyor, hired him to site the capital, between the headwaters of the Potomac and its confluence with the Anacostia River. Washington chose the southernmost location, though part of it was indeed wetland, because it was the closest site to his home at Mount Vernon. Then, as now, residents of that area want the shortest possible commute. The other two mistakes pertain to Metro, the capital's rail transit system. A "conductor" three cars back from the front of the train is ordered not to open the doors of a train. Metro trains do not have conductors. There is an "operator" in the cab of the first car, who announces stations, overrides the automation if circumstances warrants, and runs the train manually during tests, etc. Federal agents also ask when a train arrives, only to be told by the station attendant that there is no schedule, only 11-minute headways between trains. This is what the public is told in Washington, but there actually is a schedule, and the attendant would have known that and could have provided an arrival time to the feds. In his previous novels Brown was accused of more fundamental errors, as when he referred to a close vote by a convention of clerics deciding whether various gospels were divinely inspired - there are, and this is true, several books that purport to be gospels which do not appear in your Bible because the convention Brown wrote about decided they were apocryphal, but experts on the subject accused Brown of getting the vote wrong. I don't remember the other errors because I read his novels for fun, not enlightenment. Brown is held to a more severe standard, I think, because his publisher insists on asserting that everything is true in his novels except the deliberately made-up bits. Hollywood makes movies that are inaccurate all the time and we sit still for it because Hollywood agrees that it's not true and explains that it creates movies to entertain and changes facts around to support the drama. For example, the musical "1776" and the movie based on the musical, using many of the same cast members, has one cowering member of the Pennsylvania delegation vote with Ben Franklin when he suddenly develops a backbone. That was actually another member of the delegation who isn't portrayed at all in the musical. And Caesar Rodney of Delaware, portrayed as an old man dying of cancer who nonetheless rides to Philadelphia for the crucial vote, was not an old man at the time and did not become that ill until later. The radio commentator Rush Limbaugh understands that you are held to one standard or another depending on how you frame your offering. Limbaugh says he is an entertainer, not a journalist or commentator. The TV series "Law & Order" takes its inspiration from today's headlines but takes care to make sure its stories do not come too close to the truth, making more defensible its assertion that the characters in the show are fictional and are not intended to represent anyone in real life, even though I think they sometimes are. I get the impression that those who criticize Dan Brown are more upset at his portrayal of bad guys some of whom are affiliated with Freemasonry, the Catholic Church, and other organizations that have been known to do good for the world from time to time. As for myself, I have no important bone to pick with the man except that his explanatory passages get a little Brothers Karamazovish (wordy). Postscript: I finished the book Sunday afternoon. The pious who didn't like "The Da Vinci Code" might like this book better. As for me, I guessed both of the key parts of the ending, so it was a little bit of a letdown.

Is Mufi Hannemann too tall?

We have two prominent politicians in Hawaii who do us the honor of letting us see some of their emotion, and even their temper, rather than presenting some icy Stepford Politician stoneface and daring us to figure out what they're really thinking. One of them is the very tall Mufi Hannemann and the other is the very short Neil Abercrombie. And I have begun to notice that we seem to react differently to a flash of temper from the tall one than we do from the short one. I like both men personally and feel each does more good for the state than otherwise, but I don't have any partisan commitments, which allows me the luxury of observing that they get very different reactions when they take a stand on something. When Abercrombie sticks to his guns and is not conciliatory, we call him pugnacious. When Hannemann, who is about 1.7 Abercrombies tall, does the same thing, we call him arrogant. When Abercrombie pushes hard for something, we call him feisty. When Hannemann does the same thing, we call him a bully. My problem with this, I telegraphed in my opening remark. Too many politicians won't let you see what they're thinking. You can easily form the impression that they're with you, then you suddenly learn they never were. These two guys, who may not look very similar but do have similar temperaments, either can't do the poker face bit or choose not to. I suspect that each one decided a long time ago that if they can't win the day by openly arguing their position, they don't deserve to be in office. That's harder to do than it sounds and both deserve a modicum of respect for it. The next time you read that Hannemann has "dismissed" some contrary view, if you check for more information you may find that he actually offered a much more measured and detailed response. He is currently being accused of dismissing the Kamehameha Schools proposal to rethink rail yet again, but the people who did the plan have actually offered detailed, sensible responses to options they already studied themselves - I think they originally wanted surface stations, too, but found it wasn't practical here - and Hannemann, unlike some who attack him, has actually read the plan. I'm not arguing that people need to offer Hannemann, Abercrombie and other politicians any more respect than you would offer a relative or a neighbor - the first time I saw Hannemann I yelled at him to move his double-parked car (it was a joke) - but it strikes me that the cantankerous streak each one betrays from time to time is a sign of honesty and it might be good to have that from public officials from time to time.

Music Post: Why early music is the latest thing

Bach was at work three centuries ago - Josquin Desprez three centuries before that. But modern listeners have come to Renaissance music more recently than music of the Baroque. Like the hero of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," who experiences his life out of order, the modern classical music listener has had the opportunity in recent years to hear good performances of music by composers who, as recently as the 1970s, were rarely mentioned even in books on music. This is nothing new. Bach was forgotten by the general public after his death in 1750 - his scores were still known to Mozart and Beethoven, but not to the public - until Mendelssohn led a Bach revival in the 1800s. The first edition of Bach's complete works was not published until the 20th century. Baroque music came back into public favor in the 1960s and is here to stay. Who, in the 1960s, knowing only Bach, Handel and Vivaldi, would have guessed that radio stations a generation later would routinely play Lully, Telemann and a dozen lesser lights, or that there would be dozens of CDs of Vivaldi that aren't the Four Seasons? Older music - Desprez, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, Tallis and Dowland - has actually followed on the heels of the Baroque revival, bringing to life these composers whom we formerly knew only from books, and not many books for the general public at that. Some of the recordings of these composers are downright exciting. If you would like to explore this era, start with a CD called "Terpsichore" by the Collegium Terpsichore [Deutsche Grammophon 289 469-2]. The performance on this double disc will take you to the 1500s. Saturday on my public radio show, in a fast-moving series of short tracks, I will take you from the Gregorian chants of the 1400s through the age of Bach in the 1700s, including Sting singing John Dowland's "Can She Excuse My Wrongs," Telemann's "Attack on the Windmills" from his Don Quixote Suite, the Mouret piece that became the theme to "Masterpiece Theatre," Wendy Carlos and the Swingle Singers. "Howard's Day Off" runs live 5 a.m.-7 a.m. Saturdays on Hawaii Public Radio, transmitted on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku and KANO Hilo, available on Oceanic Digital cable, and streamed live on www.hawaiipublicradio.org . Facebook members can join the Howard's Day Off Appreciation Society organized by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

Locavores, mocovores and other island eaters

We have several native and migratory varieties of vegetarians in Hawaii, and a large number of large people who can be called mocovores for their loco moco consumption (I resemble that remark) and then there is that new group, locavores, people who prefer to eat food that has been produced locally. I've been doing some reading on this phenomenon, which is not confined to the islands, and have discovered something on the mainland that seems at first to be a backlash, but on closer examination may simply be an effort to make more intelligent choices about where food comes from. The term locavores use is "food miles," when they argue that any food that is transported for a long distance is bad for the environment because of the fuel burned to haul it. You may think of California produce as an import from a distant land, but mainland America gets much of its greens from Latin America. I confess to you that this angle never occurred to me because food from the West Coast hitches a ride on ships that come here anyway. I like local produce because of - is this a term? - food days, the time it takes for the vegetation to get from the ground to the gut. It tastes better and it must have more nutrients. Eating local, for those who can afford the premium prices, also supports the local economy, since local farmers buy the same goods and services the rest of us do. An economy thrives when the same dollar is spent over and over rather than flying away to some other clime. Good for the government, too, since the essence of a general excise tax is to tax that dollar every time it moves. There is a new book that undermines some of the conventional thinking of locavores - "Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly," by James E. McWilliams, a history professor at the San Marcos campus of Texas State University. He argues that some locavores, organic food supporters and other responsible eaters are kidding themselves by making incremental improvements to their diet and the environment while buying commercial-grade ovens for their kitchens that waste energy, and then wasting 14% of total food purchases. Some small households are finally figuring out that there can be a false economy in shopping at Wal-Mart or Costco if you buy big food and let much of it go bad before you can consume it. Couples that buy small portions in expensive supermarkets may eat less and be healthier, which, given the soaring cost of medicine, may be another book, but let that pass, and in any case the most unhealthy food we eat is the drive-through food we buy because we're working longer hours, so that the nation's productivity is improving at the cost of our health, which may be another book... where was I? One more thing from the McWilliams book. He says organic farmers sometimes use "natural" chemicals that are really bad for you, like nicotine sulfate. There is a movement in the Midwest to go back to crop rotation to control pests - the pests that like corn don't multiply as much because the next year you don't grow corn on that land - so farmers don't have to apply ever increasing amounts of pesticides and herbicides. But I heard about this movement a dozen years ago and I don't see it exactly catching on. Vegetarians will tell you, accurately, that there are more health risks in eating commercially-produced meat and chicken than in eating greens, no matter what has been sprayed on them - though to give vegetarians a scare I'll just mention that Alar, the toxic chemical banned from apples in America a generation ago, never went off the market in South America, where we get so much of our "healthy" food these days. Don't give up, just try to keep up!

The world comes alive with news at :55!

As people debate the merger of the KGMB and KHNL news departments, those of us who come from radio, and who remember the days of more detailed regulation of news, recall a time when much of the decision-making in radio programming turned on how to avoid or downplay one's newscasts. In the late 1960s when I was a teenager, and therefore an avid radio listener, but not yet one who worked in the industry, it was an article of faith among rock station programmers that news was a "tuneout," driving listeners to tune to rival stations. Yet regulations of the day required all radio stations to do news. Some stations tried shouting the news. "From every point in the universe!" screamed KBOX, a Texas rocker, while CKLW Windsor, Ontario, did yellow journalism: "He took his genuine Louisville slugger and proceeded to bat out a thousand on his wife's head, she's dead," bellowed one newscaster who later became just another staid anchor on the all-news station across the river in Detroit. Others tried making the news more vibrant by doing lots of interviews and running a whole lot of actuality - sound bites - opening each newscast with an actuality right out of the news theme, then explaining what the story was. WFIL Philadelphia did this, and my second job was at WYRE Annapolis, which emulated that. The news department had three triple-slot ITC cart machines, which meant we could run nine actualities without reloading, and many times I did use one or more of the slots more than once in a five-minute newscast. Rock stations that wanted to play down their news image programmed their news at points of the clock other than the top of the hour, when the adult stations did news. The gimmick of 20-20 news - at :20 and :40 - originated on rock stations - and when ABC parsed itself into four different networks targeted at different radio formats, it was the rock network - American Contemporary Radio - that said, "The world comes alive with news at :55!" By the early 1970s when I was actually working in radio, the hot idea on rock stations was to program 15 minutes of news an hour between midnight and six, and none at all during the news. This was an outright evasion of responsibility, not unlike one Pennsylvania radio station that famously gave timechecks with the phrase "Safe-Driving Time" and then logged it as a minute-long public service announcement. Until then, radio stations were required to commit to some specific amount of news, public service and public affairs programming, with the implicit threat of having one's license assigned to someone else if you didn't do enough for federal regulators. But soon these regulations were eased, as were the restrictions on how many radio and television stations one company could own. When music-oriented stations were no longer required to do news, they didn't, though most quickly realized that they needed to do a little bit during commuting hours or it would cost them listeners. The most interesting side effect of music stations dismantling their news departments was the rise of stations that did only news. This started as early as the late 1960s with XETRA Tijuana, Mexico, serving southern California. Personnel from the station then replicated the format in Washington, D.C., Boston and other cities. WAVA Arlington, Va., the Washington station, discounting Tijuana as not part of America, billed itself as "America's first all-news station" when I anchored there from 1975 to 1977. In 1977 the station went music and the staff was laid off, but by then there were two other all-news stations in Washington, one of which still survives - I worked there from 1997 until I moved to Hawaii at the end of 2000 - and is now the top-rated station in the nation's capital. It's a question whether all-news would have grown into the powerhouse format it is today had music stations not been allowed to drop their news. Television is the career of my new life in Hawaii and until recent years I can discuss it only as a viewer, but it strikes me that when there were three networks doing evening newscasts American public discourse started from a uniform sense of what the facts were, and those three networks had bureaus all over the world. Today we have five networks like that - I'm counting Fox and PBS - plus several all-news networks - CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg and more - and additional alternative sources, the most important of which would be the CSPAN networks, not to mention news programming originated by political and religious organizations with broadcast channels. It is daunting to note that this multiplicity of news sources is nothing compared with the Internet, which has news spun with whatever slant one likes, allowing one to float through life without one's pre-conceived notions of the world ever being challenged. The radio news of my youth was marred by lack of reporting staff. Every station did news but most did it with one or two people, the ones you heard on the air, backed up by no one else. Modern news is the same only worse. The "letter networks" do more news programming today than they did in the 1960s but with fewer actual reporters. Newspapers and local broadcast stations across the country have smaller reporting staffs now than they had a generation ago, except for metropolitan all-news stations, some of which have substantially larger reporting staffs now. This is important and I will return to this theme from time to time. Most stories can be apprehended by a single reporter working for a few minutes but most of the really important issues of the day are more complicated than that and require - not a huge staff of investigative reporters - but a little extra time to actually learn the facts in depth. Any profitable news operation, regardless of medium, needs to consider how it will manage this. More later.

Sweet and sour - Hawaii and its sugar industry

Hawaii's sugar industry is about to be reduced from two companies to one, and what's happening on Kauai is a lesson to people who live on Maui - figure out what goes on that land next, if you don't want it to be townhomes. Gay & Robinson announced Wednesday that by late October it will have sent the last of the sugar cane from its final harvest to the mill. And that will be that, for a company that had grown cane since the 1890s. Dow Agrosciences has leased some of the land to grow seed crops, and has hired some of the Gay & Robinson employees. Pacific Energy wants to grow ethanol on some other Gay & Robinson land, though this does not ensure a continuation of sugar cane - other crops may be more efficient for fuel-growth. The Robinsons, who own the island of Niihau and did so much to rescue Hawaiian culture from extinction, also have some plans for hydroelectric power on some of the land. Gay & Robinson sold sugar on the commodity market and could not compete with sugar plantations in other countries with lower labor costs and favorable currency exchange rates. High energy prices in recent years didn't help. That's the story on Kauai, but circumstances are different on Maui. Alexander & Baldwin, which converted Kauai's other big sugar plantation to coffee years ago and now has America's largest coffee plantation there, owns Hawaii Commercial & Sugar, which grows cane on Maui's central plain and the bottom of Haleakala's western slopes. In a brilliant marketing move, HC&S years ago secured a contract to become sole provider of the turbinado sugar, lightly refined to retain an overtone of molasses, that comes inside packets of "Sugar in the Raw." The California company that makes it now puts a made-in-Maui label on every packet. This makes HC&S sugar the "Kona coffee" of sugars, a special premium brand with a special taste. Yet HC&S often loses money, and has had a rough time of it in recent years due to high energy costs, which have raised the cost of fertilizer - commercial fertilizer is made through a chemical process that requires petrochemicals - and, through fuel surcharges, the cost of shipping. Stock analysts who write about Alexander & Baldwin have been known to write that its agricultural operations are valuable because of the development potential of the land they're on. In other words, they assume that one day Alexander & Baldwin will plow the sugar under and start growing townhomes. If this is not to be inevitable, Maui residents need to start thinking now about what they want in the central plain. It would be foolhardy to simply wait until a future generation of A&B management, or a later owner of the land, submits a proposal for a gazillion homes and then go to a hearing and wave signs. What do you want to see there? If it is green, start agitating for parks in the plains now. By the time you get consensus for it the economy might be improved enough for the state or county to afford it. Selling some land for parks will generate revenue that could ease development pressure, and if done right it could avoid prime agriculture land, so that the move would not force an end to the farming operation. And if sugar cannot be grown profitably, what else can be grown there? What if some of the land were sold to small farmers to grow food for the island? You might find that even Alexander & Baldwin itself will co-conspire with you, especially if a little bit of its land can be held out for development. And of course it goes without saying that any open space, be it farm or park, will be good for the property values of those who live nearby, and who have a view of it.