Howzit Howard

Music post: " Nature Boy " and " Flow My Tears "

I've been looking forward to this Saturday's edition of Howard's Day Off for weeks, because it shows the thematic similarities between the song "Nature Boy" and the slow movement of Dvorak's Piano Quintet in A major. The 5:30 a.m. half hour of the show will feature three versions of "Nature Boy," featuring James Galway, Aaron Neville and David Bowie (from the "Moulin Rouge" movie) before presenting the entire Dvorak movement, and at the end there will be just enough time to add a version of "Nature Boy" by a string quartet. I have presented multiple versions of John Dowland's song "Flow My Tears" before, but found another nice one, by the Kronos Quartet, so in the 6 a.m. half hour I'll present that after the Sting version of the song, which dates from the 1500s but still sounds like Sting himself could have written it. At 6:30 a.m. I'll play three pieces in a row in which one famous composer has rearranged the music of another: Handel arranged by Schoenberg, Bach arranged by Elgar, and Schumann arranged by Mahler. Frank Zappa will close the show with "American Drinks and Goes Home" following "Drinking Music" by Charlie Haden & His Liberation Orchestra. Or is it Libation? Howard's Day Off airs 5am-7am Saturdays HST on Hawaii Public Radio and can be heard via streaming audio on www.hawaiipublicradio.org . Join the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook. The page was founded by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

Sugar, pineapple and sandalwood

The past decade has seen plantation pineapple leave Oahu - Dole now grows just enough for visitors to its tourist attraction - and the twilight of commodity sugar on Kauai - Gay & Robinson lost money for years. Alexander & Baldwin still grows sugar on Maui, and announced this week it will plant at least one more crop, but cautioned that it will be a different story if water use battles on Maui end in denial of water to A&B's farming division Hawaii Commercial & Sugar. HC&S is sole source of the turbinado sugar in packets of "Sugar in the Raw." Maui Land & Pineapple notified the SEC this week its debts exceed its assets by tens of millions of dollars, raising doubts about its ability to survive, though this is a boilerplate announcement triggered by specific financial conditions and not by any means a guarantee of oblivion. (The original version of this post said MLP was in Chapter 11, but it is not. HMD) Ulapalakua Ranch, upcountry from the MLP plantation, has formed a new company that has contracted to take over some of the MLP operation. I think most people who watch Hawaii agriculture can see that sugar and pineapple are, or soon will be, history as large plantation crops, but will survive as specialty crops grown by several players in small amounts for premium prices. The new plantation crop is corn seed, and soon will be crop seeds in general. Three different companies have large operations on Oahu, Kauai and Molokai. Most Midwestern corn is grown from Hawaii seed, which is now being marketed around the world. Is there anything else we should grow? How about sandalwood? Yes, Hawaiian sandalwood, the dominant crop of Hawaii from 1790 to 1825 until we (oops!) cut it all down. Sandalwood essence sells for $1,000 to $1,500 per kilogram. It's a hard crop to mass produce or speed up because the entire tree is uprooted. I don't know if it's possible to do it another way. As a specialty crop it would find local customers. The Moana Surfrider, which used to give away sandalwood fans at high tea, is thinking about bringing the fans back, but for sale. I'd buy one: the ones that were given to me smelled wonderful years later.

Why Duke Aiona can ' t twirl his moustache

Bernadette and I were watching the TV news and Duke Aiona came on. I forget what he was saying, but I remember what Bernadette said: "Did he shave his moustache?" I squinted at the TV. Like most color blind men, I'm pretty good as discerning detail not related to color. "No," I said. "He just trimmed it close." Today the lieutenant governor was on "Sunrise" and Steve Uyehara asked him about the new spare moustache. (Can I just mention that I'm listening to some TV show in my ear, waiting to broadcast on the 5 p.m. news while I write, and some guy is chatting buoyantly about cancerous colon polyps. This is not conducive to writing a light-hearted column about facial hair.) Aiona smiled but hastened to tell Steve it was something he decided with his wife, no big deal, not something a political handler recommended or anything like that. Did someone accuse him of trimming his moustache on a handler's orders? I can well believe it. You know me. I'm the guy who lets his hair grow until you remember I grew up in the psychedelic era, then get it cut so short I look like a military man gone to seed. I just don't think about it much, and my hair grows fast. And the beard? I trim it every other weekend. I don't edge it at all. That's where it stops. Well, obviously someone with so little interest in sartorial splendor can't help but be amused by society focusing on stuff like this like it matters. I grew my low maintenance moustache at 19 because it was 1972 and everyone had them. Some of you middle-aged guys will remember that. I've seen the old photos of Michael W. Perry. Relax, Mike, I, too, once owned bell-bottoms. I destroyed the photos but I once owned them. The beard came later, around 21, when I walked to work at a radio station at 3 a.m. and part of the walk was on a bridge across the Potomac River, where the winter winds left me looking like an extra in "Dr. Zhivago." The beard was for warmth. Seriously. In recent years I have very briefly considered taking it off, but my daughter Leina'ala emphatically vetoed it on the grounds she would not recognize me. I offered to wear a name tag but it was no use. Well, that's fine. Who wants to shave at 3 a.m.? One day Duke will tire of being careful about his moustache and let it grow into a great scraggly handlebar like that guy in the old Warner Brothers cartoons. The guy who said, "Officer, officer, arrest that man! What he does to me in next week's show is a crime!"

State of the State deja vu on CSPAN

I surfed to CSPAN and came across the State of the State address. The governor said the state needs to attract more high-tech jobs, bring more Hollywood movie projects to the state, focus on renewable energies, especially solar power, and fix education. Linda Lingle? No, Bill Richardson. The governor of New Mexico. And I'm just giving you some highlights. Almost everything he said, we have heard Linda Lingle say, and Ben Cayetano before her. It was quite a reminder that many states have the same problems we do, and see the same opportunities. Heck, he was even talking about tax credits for business. But then so is Linda Lingle. She may be suspicious of tech tax credits but this week she proposed credits to be claimed by companies creating new positions and filling them with people who are currently on the unemployment rolls. Got no problem with that: it's a low cost idea that might help a little. Seeing Richardson speak was simply a reminder that things are tough all over and if there is anything wrong with any plan to attract business to the state it is that we're probably not the only ones to think of it. That's okay as long as you bear it in mind.

Kindle killer? I don ' t think so

Before its unveiling, the tech writers were calling the iPad a Kindle killer. The day after, they said it wasn't, and the stock of Apple plunged, while the stock of Amazon rebounded. Scott Adams, who draws Dilbert, blogged that Steve Jobs may have been focused on his health because the iPad struck him as the product of a committee. Maybe my own view is skewed by the fact that I'm rereading the complete Sherlock Holmes - 56 stories and four novels - on a Kindle I got for Christmas and am really enjoying it. (I think the screenwriters of the Sherlock Holmes movie did most of their research by reading the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, the last of the short story collections, which contain a couple of occult themes and a physical attack on Holmes as well as some other touches played up in the film.) The positive way to view the iPad is that it does more than Kindle and is more portable than a laptop. The negative way is that a Kindle is all you need to read anything, and when you want to do more, a laptop is better than an iPad. My original complaint about the Kindle was that it wasn't backlit so you couldn't read it in the dark without a booklight. But I have since found that it's easier on the eyes, a booklight fits on it better than it fits on a book, and the eInk it uses - drawing power only to draw a page, which then sits there for you until you're ready to draw the next one - allows it to go untethered on a single power charge for many days. I actually read one dismissive review of the iPad which listed its backlighting as one of its drawbacks because of eye fatigue. I don't think iPad is a Kindle killer but I don't think Kindle is an iPad pounder. Both seem like decent new products with utility for large numbers of consumers.

President Obama ' s rail initiative

Any questions Honolulu rail supporters had about the Obama administration's willingness to support the expensive project should be dispelled by his massive proposed push to build high-speed passenger rail on the mainland. There have been individual attempts to do this for decades, but this is the first time a sitting president has endorsed creating bullet trains between U.S. population centers. As you know, Japan, Germany and France have had bullet trains since the 1960s. Perhaps you've ridden the Shinkansen, which has gone over 200 mph since 1964. I've ridden the French TGV (Train a Grand Vitesse, or "train of great speed," or "really fast train") which since 1981 has traded speed records with the Japanese. The Japanese and the French built new roadbeds with easy curves and special banking for high-speeds, and built special train sets. The Germans developed their own high-speed technology, called maglev, using magnetic levitation; magnets pushing the train skyward reduce friction by putting a teensy bit of air between the wheels and rails. America sat on the sidelines for all this. Its railroads, bankrupted by slow trains no one would ride, handed off passenger service to the government. Amtrak lost money on long-haul routes but made a profit on the Metroliners, conventional electric trains that go only slightly faster than cars on the Interstate but still can get you from downtown Washington, D.C., to downtown Manhattan in less than three hours. The knock on high-speed rail as a solution for American passenger transportation needs has always been that the cities are too far apart. European railways run full because cities are so close, it's actually faster to take a train from city center to city center than to fly and ride taxis downtown from the airport. But some U.S. are actually the right distance apart for fast trains to work well:

• Tampa-Orlando-Miami.
• Los Angeles-Las Vegas.
• Chicago-St. Louis.
• Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati.

Billions to build, but a better use of federal money to bailing out megabanks for several times more. [P.S. Poster Charlie, writing to my email address instead of the response box here, reminds me that the Germans adopted their own maglev technology for only a few routes in favor of fast trains roughly comparable with the TGV. I had left it out but Charlie adds that the Metroliner route now has ACELA trains built with special banking ability so they can go fast on old curvy lines. He calls ACELA "a pale imitation" of European high-speed rail and I think is a fair statement.]

The politicization of Honolulu rail

Mufi Hannemann and Linda Lingle are having a spat over Honolulu rail that plays into the hands of the asphalt huggers who oppose it. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know I'm from Washington, D.C., where a rail system focused development in sensible places and slowed the worsening of traffic, and I'm an avid rail fan. All public works projects, whether they are rail lines or highways, cost more if delayed. One way to oppose a project covertly is to pretend you're for it, but insist on "doing it right," calling for restudy and replanning. Gov. Lingle's sign-off is required on the environmental impact statement for Honolulu rail. The EIS, which has been delayed to make sure it's done right, is not yet in her hands. She vows to review it thoroughly.  Good. But she's also saying she will review affordability. If that's her job, she should have done it more than a year ago when the economy began to turn south. Why bring it up now? Mufi's camp seems to think it's political, an attempt to delay or weaken his own bid to be governor by denying him the shovels in the ground he wants before declaring. Mufi said he was starting to see Lingle as anti-rail. Lingle's mild-mannered spokesman invited the mayor to "stop lying." Are people saying and doing things that can be seen as anti-rail because they are anti-Mufi? They say Mufi gets too personal in arguing with opponents, but it's his opponents who try to make everything about Mufi. Remember this the next time you hear one of them refer to "Mufi's train." It is not Mufi's train. It is your train. He's just trying to give it to you. Pay close attention to who's trying to keep you from having it. The governor? I can't tell yet. She may yet demonstrate that she really is a proponent of the project.

Foreclosures: how bad a problem is it in Hawaii, really?

Like most economic calamities, there is the big picture and there is your life. If you're losing your home, it matters little that your state has one of the lower foreclosure rates. But we still need to know how bad the big picture is. So... how is it? Realty Trac, the go-to source for data in this particular field, counts all kinds of foreclosure filings; in fact, doublecounts sometimes, because in most states there are multiple points of filings before the auctioneer gets the home. Realty Trac counts 9,963 filings in Hawaii last year including more than 1,500 just in December. But it also counts just 74 actual foreclosure sales in December and 880 for the full year. How can there be so many foreclosure filings and so few foreclosure sales? Well, I already mentioned the multiple points where filings are made. Beyond that, there are people who dig out in time and refinance. There are others who do short sales, handing over the house before an actual foreclosure seizure, which leaves them deep in the hole but with a less damaged credit rating. Finally, there are filings which haven't led to foreclosure sales yet because the matter is still in the pipeline. Of the 880 foreclosure sales Realty Trac counted in 2009, fewer than half were on Oahu even though more than three quarters of Hawaii residents are residents of Oahu. Partly this is because there is more economic pain on the other islands, which also have a disproportionate share of unemployment. But mostly it is because a majority of foreclosure sales in Hawaii, so far at least, are for properties that were never owned by Hawaii residents at all. They were second homes of people who live in other places, who found it expedient to walk away from the properties in Paradise to save the home they actually live in. This leaves a much smaller, but still notable, foreclosure problem for Hawaii residents, a few hundred of home lost their homes in 2009. Many of these sales were on West Oahu, especially Ewa, where getting out of a home when the payments become too much is complicated by the availability to would-be buyers of new home inventory. It is a wonderful thing that this is an even smaller problem than it looks. It is a terrible thing for those who are affected, and there are now hundreds of households that have gone through this or yet may do so.

A reminder of how dangerous maritime shipping is

A Horizon Lines containership, sailing Oakland-Guam, hit rough seas with waves to 30 feet and 50 mph winds, until at last some 20-foot containers began to shift. Six fell overboard. The ship reached Honolulu with other containers dented and askew. Most shipping lines, including our local suppliers Matson and Horizon, spare no expense in making their containerships safe. They are solidly built, with massive rods and cables to hold containers tightly in place. Shipping lines do this because their best people will die if a ship isn't shipshape, and the economic cost of losing containers is great - you can buy insurance, but what happens to your policy rates if you keep losing containers overboard? So there aren't many incidents like this. But there are some from time to time. I googled for "container ship accident" and found a page of photos from similar incidents and others even worse in which ships actually sank, though most of those seemed to becaused not by winter storms but by skippers who put their vessels on a reef, as happened in the Exxon Valdez disaster. I've done video interviews aboard the two newest Matson containships, from the bridge to the engine room. The bridge is a command center replete with GPS computers as well as traditional navigation charts. The engine room is Swiftian, a place where a human can look up at an engine two stories tall, so big he could walk into a piston, so big there is a crane just to lift spare parts for installation at sea. Spare parts are bolted to the deck, because you're not calling AAA in the middle of the Pacific. Bolting or tying things down, making them fast in nautical parlance, is key to the survival of a containership, where, once something big and heavy begins to move, it won't be stopped. Loading a containership is even more complicated than balancing the weight, because the shipping line also has to consider which containers need to be offloaded first. Time is money loading and unloading containers. But safety comes first if the shipping line is to survive. That's why what happened to Horizon Lines this week doesn't happen often.

When the economic forecast calls for rain

Gov. Linda Lingle has proposed reinventing the Rainy Day Fund so that it becomes a cushion against a future recession in which tax revenues drop off precipitously. The state constitution currently requires that the legislature, after two years of revenue surpluses, enact tax relief to give money back to taxpayers. This happened just before the current recession and some Democrats in the legislature resisted the requirement, saying it would be better to save the extra revenue for a rainy day. At the time it seemed like they just couldn't bring themselves to give some money back, but now they appear to have been prescient, and the Republican governor is on board. Lingle proposes amending the state constitution so that whenever tax revenues rise, 5% of the money goes into - well, here is one tiny problem - the "Fiscal Stabilization Fund." The governor's people decided the Rainy Day Fund needed a new name if it was going to be configured differently, and that was the best they could come up with. Well, let that pass. This is so sensible a proposal, and as I note one with bipartisan roots, that one should view with suspicion anyone who is against it. The proposal came after a glum but accurate assessment of the state's current economic condition. "The mid-term economic outlook requires that we further downsize," Lingle said. How's that for an applause line? But she's telling the simple mathematical truth. More of the governor's specific proposals from Monday's State of the State address:

• An income tax credit for businesses that create new jobs and fill them with people who are now on the unemployment rolls. It would be equal to the wages withheld by the employer. The credit would last three years, until 2012, provided the business remained operational. The governor said 10 other states are doing this and it looks like businesses in those states have responded by creating jobs they might not otherwise have created.
• A 10% tax credit for costs incurred to build or renovate hotel or resort properties from now through the end of 2012. Construction has lost 6,000 jobs in the past year and some might be rehired under this program, which would apply only to big projects, $10 million to $100 million. Drawback: almost every major resort in Hawaii has renovated already.
• Renewable energy credits. A tax rebate for buying an electric car or hybrid. And a big break for big renewable energy projects.
• Internships for the unemployed. Instead of drawing benefits and looking for jobs that aren't currently out there, the Department of Labor & Industrial Relations would put you into an internship at a local business for up to 32 hours a week for eight weeks. You keep drawing jobless benefits while learning a job you might not originally have been qualified for.

And then there is the matter of the payroll tax. Backstory: employers pay a payroll tax, a certain amount of money per employee per year. This is where the money comes from for unemployment benefits. The amount of money is usually a few hundred dollars per employee but it varies according to how rich or poor the fund becomes. The fund was so rich two years ago that the business community convinced lawmakers to reduce their payments, but then unemployment soared and now the fund is heavily depleted. Filling it conventionally would require tripling the payroll tax. That's so much it could put some businesses out of business. In other cases an employer would have no funds left over for hiring more people or even for decent raises. None of that is desirable when you're trying to grow your way out of recession. Gov. Lingle proposes a 40% trimming of the increase in the payroll tax which she says would save businesses $497 million. If businesses would pay the other 60% of the scheduled increase, it means under her proposal the increase in the payroll tax will cost businesses $744 million. As lawmakers consider how much relief to grant in this area, they may find it helpful to erase from their minds the monolithic term "business" and consider the impact on several different kinds of businesses. Say, Hawaiian Airlines, a family-owned corner drug store, and a restaurant that employs 30 people. One more note from the State of the State. Remember at the beginning of the governor's first term when she proposed seven different public school systems, basically one for each major island? It proved to be a non-starter in the legislature. On Monday the governor again said the state school system was mired in mediocrity but this time proposed something a lot simpler - put it back under the governor, giving the governor the authority to name the superintendent and creating a clear picture of who's accountable. It will be interesting to see if this, too, is dead on arrival; what's different this time is that Lingle is asking for something that will redound to her successor, quite possibly a Democrat.