Howzit Howard

When you ' re thinking of delaying a visit to the doctor

Four years ago this week, my first wife Marilyn died of inflammatory breast cancer at the age of 60. She was a nine-year survivor of the more usual sort of breast cancer when she was diagnosed with the more aggressive kind. Unlike lobular breast cancer, which grows in lumps, inflammatory breast cancer grows in sheets and can evade a mammogram. By the time Marilyn realized something might be seriously wrong, there was a little bit of scaly skin on the surface and it was warm to the touch. Even then a mammogram failed to turn it up and we returned from the diagnosis at Kaiser to find a breezy "all clear" notice in the mail. It is not comfortable for me to discuss this, because "moving on" is a myth and even a second happy marriage, wonderful though it may be, does not ease the pain, or the frustrated sense of injustice that a good person died too soon. But my son posted on Facebook that this is an international day of cancer awareness and the least I can do is remind you not to delay your doctor visit when you think something may be seriously wrong. You owe it to yourself and your loved ones.

When it comes to spin, what goes around, comes around

In the final years of the Nixon presidency, I was a radio reporter in Annapolis, Md., maybe 19 years old, and covered Naval Academy commencement the year President Nixon attended. I interviewed White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler. There was a crowd of demonstrators who wanted Mr. Nixon to resign. I asked Ziegler about them, and he responded that it was only a handful of people. The crowd was standing right there, and it was more than a handful, but he expected me to put his sound bite on the air without refuting him. Obviously I never forgot that, and ever since, for me, the Ron Ziegler school of spin has been to say anything you like, expecting reporters to pass it along dutifully as the truth, even if it isn't. The first objection one should have to lying is that lying is wrong, and, not to get all jesuitical about it, spinning is often wrong, too. A less obvious problem with spin, but one more likely to convince a politician or executive, is that it often backfires. We have seen this in the Toyota scandal, in which the automaker has hurt itself, and grievously hurt its dealers, by publicly promulgating an image of rectitude and safety, while internally not caring nearly as much about safety as we thought. Little noticed in news coverage Tuesday of Toyota testimony on Capitol Hill was that dozens of those wounded local Toyota dealers were also at the Capitol, shaking hands with their local Congressmen and telling them how many taxpayers they employ. One such dealer, interviewed by NPR, said they were there to try to counteract the way "the story has been sensationalized." I heard that while driving to work and it set off my Ziegler alarm. Sorry, lady. The story has not been sensationalized. The story is itself sensational. The carmaker that bumped all three of the Big Three as well as its rivals in Japan to become the top-selling auto nameplate in the United States, a company thought to have an excellent safety record, dragged its feet on a serious problem and may have put its own customers in danger by insisting it was merely a problem with floor mats when a more serious mechnical and/or software issue clearly existed. That's Akio Toyota's responsibility, not Katie Couric's. Toyota's reputation, the most important asset it has, has been horrible disfigured by the action of its own executives, an insult to its customers and to its local dealers. And for what? Getting in front of this would have actually burnished its image. The spin wheel rolls over he who sets it in motion.

Do you want your mayor to get something done or not?

If we want our elected officials to work on our behalf, we should learn not to greet them with cynicism when they actually do. We need not to act like we have bumper stickers for brains. The West Hawaii Today website Tuesday had an online poll so cynical, I didn't at first realize it had been made up by the newspaper, assuming a political faction had written it. "Mayor Billy has spent more than a quarter of his first year in office off-island," the poll said. "This is:

• "A good thing. His lobbying efforts will pay dividends for us in the future."
• "Typical of a politician, spending our money and time with questionable public benefit in the long term."
• "A waste of our time and money. He should be on island, doing the mayor's job."

Anyone who has ever invited self-selected online responses to anything political in Hawaii knows in advance that if you offer three responses, one that sounds gullible and two that sound cynical, you will get an overwhelmingly cynical response, mostly from people who had no idea Mayor Billy Kenoi was off-island so much and couldn't tell you where he went or what he did. One thing he did was join the other mayors on the mainland in pitching Hawaii tourism to West Coasties, a move that produced an immediate bump in bookings. This was doing the mayor's job. The Big Island is even more dependent on tourism than some other islands, and it would have been irresponsible not to go to the mainland for the tourism blitz. Last week Kenoi was on Oahu, again with all of the other mayors, to urge state lawmakers not to strip counties of their usual share of the hotel tax. "Our constituents elected all of us to solve problems, but this bill solves nothing," he said. "I understand the state is confronted by budget challenges, but so are the counties. It makes no sense to make your budget situation better while making our budget situation worse. We represent exactly the same people." Kenoi defined the problem in words of one syllable, forcing state lawmakers to confront the impact of what they were proposing to do. "When a visitor's plane touched down in Hawaii, state collects a landing fee. When the visitor rents a car, the state collects a car rental fee. When the visitor buys a drink, the state collects the liquor tax. When the visitor buys food, the state collects the excise tax. And when the visitor rents a hotel room, the state collects a transient accommodations tax. Of all those taxes, only the hotel room tax is shared with the counties, and House Bill 2598 proposes to cut off even that source of funding. Yet when a visitor calls for law enforcement help, a county police officer responds. When the visitor gets into trouble in the ocean, county lifeguards or firefighters respond. When the visitor uses sewer and water service, those are county services. The visitors drive on county roads, and use county parks. The counties haul away the visitors' rubbish." All four of our county mayors have been working almost around the clock to deal with slumping economic conditions and plunging tax revenues, with no help and sometimes outright piling on by state officials. Constructive criticism is never out of season, but scattershot cynicism in response to a mayor actually doing the right thing is probably not helpful right now. Oh, and by the way. It's Hawaii, remember? Where is a mayor going to go that will be better? Climbing onto a motorcoach on the mainland to talk to prospective visitors in a Costco parking lot?

The truth about the payroll tax

A few years ago, when Hawaii had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation,  small business owners asked state lawmakers to reduce the payroll tax. Some resisted as if it were their own money, but in the end some tax relief was granted. The payroll tax is paid annually by employers, so much money per worker, to fill up the tub of money that we drain to pay unemployment benefits to people who are out of work. At the time of the tax relief, the tub had enough money for years of unemployment checks. Instead of paying, say, $300 per employee per year, employers were told they could pay $90. Then our economic calamities began to hit. Aloha and ATA died, Wall Street broke the national economy, and we entered a period of two years of plunging tax revenues, the decline worsening so much, it kept one step ahead of the Council on Revenues no matter how pessimistic the council got. The payroll tax relief was helpful to small businesses, but the bank account for unemployment benefits was drawn down a lot as the jobless rate rose. By the end of 2009, there was only enough money for a few months. Under the formula for determining the payroll tax, so big a drawdown would raise the per-employee payment to more than $1,000, triple the normal rate and ten times the 2009 rate. Which means there are two things to worry about: not having enough money for unemployment checks, and taxing employers so much that they have to let more people go. The House has passed and sent to the state Senate a bill that would double the normal rate but not triple it. Average payment would be more than $600 and go over $1,000 next year. The Chamber of Commerce has welcomed this, but Gov. Lingle proposing further tax relief by stretching out lower payments over four years. For a business that employs 50 people, as many restaurants do, the House version would save $22,000 a year, but that's $22,000 less than the existing formula, not any real savings. The actually tax would still be twice as much as the normal tax and five times last year's reduced tax. Some lawmakers who don't understand the arithmetic are saying businesses brought this on themselves by pressing them to cut the rate last year. This is not true. The tax break is a minor contributor to the situation. The major factor is the economy, which shrank faster than anyone predicted. If there had been no relief at all last year, the legislature would still face calls to save businesses from $1,000-per-person payroll taxes.

What to read after Sherlock Holmes

You know, if you are faithful reader of this blog, that Bernadette gave me a Kindle for Christmas and I spent many happy hours rereading every single one of the nearly 60 Sherlock Holmes novellas and short-stories. Then I finished. What to read next? While surfing the Kindle Store pretty aimlessly I noticed there were a couple of Jack Reacher novels I hadn't gotten to. Quite a change from Sherlock Holmes but I've enjoyed the series in the past so I thought I would catch up on it. At first blush nothing could be less than Sherlocky. Conan Doyle's Holmes stories were based in smoggy London of the 1890s and very early 1900s. Holmes is a consulting detective, capable of physical exertion but performing most of his feats in his head. Jack Reacher is an MP (Military Police) investigator who, after being mustered out, decides to become a drifter. A military brat raised almost everywhere else in the world, he makes up for it by riding buses, hitchhiking or walking across America, working odd jobs when he needs money, buying cheap clothes every three or four days and throwing his old clothes out so he doesn't have to do laundry. Trouble finds him, but he's very tall and very tough and he always wins. I remembered that Reacher was capable of deduction - a former MP detective after all - but coming across him right after my Sherlockapalooza it suddenly struck me that Reacher is Holmes, using his knowledge of human nature and the world to put a string of rational assumptions into a plausible explanation of the mysteries around him. It's a bigger part of the novels than I remembered. A man is found murdered with drugs in his pocket and Reacher immediately smells a rat. Why? He has seen lots of drug murders and no one ever left perfectly good drugs behind. Ergo, a red herring. Another man dies of apparent natural causes in a motel room and nothing that is found in the room suggests otherwise. But Reacher sees something that isn't there: the man just flew from Europe to attend a conference and he has no attache case, no papers, no plane tickets. This is the modern analog to Holmes' remark about the curious behavior of the dog in the night. (The dog did nothing in the night, and that, Holmes tells Watson, is what was curious.) Reacher knows that when a man goes AWOL and passes through a town, if he stays the night it will be in a motel on the opposite side of town from his arrival, probably on the main road out of town. It's like I'm still reading Sherlock Holmes stories. The Jack Reacher novels are written by Lee Child, which is a pseudonym for a British writer who worked mainly in television screenplays before becoming a novelist.

Hawaii arrivals top 1 million

It happened, by my reckoning, sometime Sunday afternoon as flights from Chicago and other points in the Midwest began to arrive at Honolulu: 2010 arrivals by air topped 1 million. Arrivals include an estimate 13% returning locals, so figure 1 million actual visitors will be here by next weekend or early next week. We got to this first milestone about one day sooner than we did in 2009. January arrivals were up a third of a percent from last winter and February arrivals so far are up about half a percent. That works out to maybe 4,000 more visitors since the year began. International traffic is driving this. Foreign arrivals (not counting Canadians who are counted with domestic arrivals until the monthly reports come out) are up 10% from last year. But domestic traffic's not too bad. Down roughly 3% except to Maui, which is up 3%. This isn't the busiest time of year even in the best of times, so the industry will take what it can get, and what it's getting is (a) more visitors to Maui, (b) enough foreign visitors to Oahu to more than make up for fewer mainlanders. and (c) traffic fairly close to last winter on Kauai and the Big Island. So from here on in, it's about securing this level of visitor traffic enough to begin raising rates a bit.

The Spy Who Checked In from the Cold

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., the company behind the Sheraton, Weston, St. Regis and W hotel brands, is suing Hilton Hotels Corp. for corporate espionage. But the Justice Department says the civil suit may impede its own criminal investigation. The undisputed facts of the case are that Ross Klein and Amar Lalvani, two Starwood executives who played a big role in the development of the W boutique hotel brand, left to join Hilton, which then announced a new brand called Denizen that bears many similarities to W. Hilton returned boxes of Starwood papers that apparently came over to Hilton when the executives did, including strategic plans, marketing plans, and even contracts with owners of properties that were converting to the W brand. A Hilton attorney representing Klein handed over the papers. Starwood, which apparently thought Hilton had acquired only the brains of the two defecting execs until it read these documents, then filed suit charging corporate espionage. "The name is Klein. Ross Klein." Hilton later cancelled plans for Denizen. For months the Justice Department would not confirm the existence of any criminal investigation of whatever happened, but Friday it had to, when it filed a motion with the judge in the civil suit, asking that the case be suspended. The feds said the civil suit could compromise a federal probe of the matter. "Theft of trade secrets" is one of the possible criminal charges enumerated by the U.S. Attorney for Southern New York. Starwood is based in White Plains, N.Y., while Hilton is headquartered in Beverly Hills. When we think of corporate espionage, we usually think in Hollywood terms: computer hackers; men in black sneaking over walls; Catherine Zeta-Jones hanging from wires; that sort of thing. In real life it is more common for someone to quit one company to work for a competitor, taking with him the contents of his mind. Corporate contracts often say that any idea you have while working for a company belongs to the company even if you had the idea while fishing on the weekend. Few people feel that way. I once worked for a troubled company that was kept alive for one month by a competitor that said it was exploring whether it wanted to acquire us. At the end of the month, it said it had decided not to, and instead began soliciting our customers, using the client lists it had seen during that one month. Corporate espionage is hard to prove. A person who steals trade secrets from one company and takes them to another would have to be really, really stupid to take so much that he can be convicted. So this case will be fascinating to watch.

What will give tourism a lift

In three weeks Alaska Airlines begins four flights a week between Kona and San Jose, using a Boeing 737-800 that seats 16 passengers in first class and 141 in the main cabin. Yup: more new airlift. Alaska has been adding a lot of flights to the islands, to the point where some 12% of all its systemwide airlift is Hawaii-connected. But Alaska isn't the only one. United announced this past week it will add summer service from Chicago O'Hare to Kahului. Delta is adding flights. Hawaiian is expanding. It is the first significant rebuilding of Hawaii air capacity since the great airlift collapse of 2008, when Aloha Airlines collapsed on March 31 and ATA shut down on April 3. If you're thinking, now all we need is economic recovery so people will actually fly those flights, think again. It may be that we now have all we need, and will see improvement no matter how slowly the economy recovers on the mainland. Local economist Paul Brewbaker hypothesizes that it's all about airlift and we can rebuild tourism even in a soft economy so long as have enough seats to the islands. He offers two supporting facts:

1. Our tourism slump began when the failure of Aloha and ATA took 20% of capacity out of the market including most of its discount seats, not months later where Lehman Brothers failed.
2. International capacity barely changed at all, and international arrivals are currently running 10% ahead of last year, even though it's been a global economic slump and Japan has its own problems.

This variant on "if you build it, they will come" is an argument for building capacity that may or may not be part of the airlines' thinking, but, if true, certain raises the chance they will not regret adding flights. Hawaii has always been a premium location, and we don't require a boom economy to have a healthy tourism industry, so long as a million more affluent sorts decide they can afford to visit this year.

Music post: Our greatest hits adventure

This weekend on my public radio show I wrap up three shows of classical music's greatest hits. Even playing the briefest excerpts of many long works, I came up with six hours of all-hit music. On previous shows the first movement of spring represented the twelve movements of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," and this weekend a single movement will represent the four parts of "Scheherazade." "In the Hall of the Mountain King," will represent the incidental music Grieg composed for Henryk Ibsen's "Peer Gynt," which has several other popular themes. That was the running theme through this series of three shows. I chose melodies not based on CD sales or, as originally contemplated, based on the number of times a work has been recorded, but on the recognizability of themes to people who don't think they know classical music. Most people know that classical music is frequently sampled in cartoons and movies but may not know how often classics are mined for commercials, possibly because the original scores are widely available and out of copyright. Most people who don't think they're into classical music have never heard of Jacques Offenbach but would instantly recognize the music in Warner Brothers cartoons featuring a large character chasing a small one. The same theme is heard twice, in piccolos for the little guy and trombones for his pursuer. Last week I noted that Walt Disney did a whole cartoon on a mouse helping Schubert finish his "Unfinished Symphony" while another part of the same movement was used whenever dirty work was afoot in the Smurfs. "The Swan" by Saint-Saens will be another featured piece on this Saturday's program, and the "Troika Song" of Prokofiev, and Ferde Grofe's donkey serenade "On the Trail," and "Flight of the Bumble Bee," and "Song of India," and "Sabre Dance,' and more. "Howard's Day Off" airs 5am-7am Saturdays on Hawaii Public Radio. The program is streamed on www.hawaiipublicradio.org. Visit the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook founded by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

Tiger Woods ' difficult lie

My friend Dennis Daily, a gifted radio broadcaster currently unemployed in California, did public service announcements for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a past radio halflife, and a bunch of veterinary guys invited him to come to their golf tournament and do play-by-play. With a video camera, a microphone on a really long cord, and help from some other broadcasters including me, Dennis did what amounted to a parody of golf coverage. "Swing and a miss," he would say, as someone practiced a shot. "I don't know what his handicap is, I think it's palsy." And once, "He has an excellent lie. He tells it as often as possible." I think that may have been the player who asked Dennis if he would like an iron necktie. A lie, of course, refers to how the ball lies in position to its intended destination, from the phrase "play the ball as it lies." I thought Friday morning, watching the lengthy Tiger Woods apologia, that he had a difficult lie for the shot he was attempting: from a position in the rough, as a confessed serial adulterer, he was attempting to rewrite the rules of the celebrity journalism game. While everyone else has focused on whether they thought the statement was sufficient to quiet down the scandal, whether it was authentic, whether anything important was left out, whether questions should have been taken... in brief, evaluating the apology almost as if it were a sports performance... what struck me was the attempt to redefine what the media should or should not do in covering the world's best golfer. I thought the statement was heartfelt, it was far more detailed than I expected it to be, and the respect he showed his wife, while nothing less than she deserved, was welcome. Woods also made a reasonable point in suggesting that it was wrong for cameras to descend on a child's school, though such behavior was so predictable that Woods' extensive list of people to apologize to, which included family, fans, everyone connected with his nonprofit, and even his business associates, might have been extended to include the other families with kids at that school. Woods also said he felt any questions about the details of his transgressions were between him and his wife, so he would not address them in public. That's when I realized Woods is attempting a difficult drive: to change the rules of the paparazzo game. This celebrity brought low by his own dumb behavior, who enjoys more affection and respect from the public than most self-absorbed philanderers do, might actually be able to set a new standard for media mob behavior if he can persuade everyone that children are to be off-limits again. Woods made the case reasonably because, in making the point that his family was innocent, he did not stint on self-criticism. He did not use weasel words, he did not describe his sins in such a way as to limit their scope, and indeed he conveyed a sense of self-loathing that suggested the possibility of actual redemption. It would be a good thing if he pulls this off and the most aggressive freelance photographers no longer feel comfortable shooting loved ones of celebrities in circumstances that create danger or breach reasonable privacy. The bit about not answering questions except to his wife is, however, a bit of a stretch. This man, like all of the world's greatest celebrities, has courted free publicity, hiring people to seek it and manage it, always on the grounds that what he says and does is newsworthy. It is not reasonable to expect that, just because it no longer suits his purpose, the same people will not consider his misbehavior to be equally newsworthy. Even mainstream media have questions, if only to sort out claims made by others who say they were involved in Woods' life. He is under no legal compulsion to answer such questions but it is entirely fitting that the questions be asked. If that bothers him, then he shouldn't have had the affairs to begin with. Apologizing and changing behavior going forward cannot erase the past. That said, I'll close by saying it was interesting and even to some extent heartwarming to see how much Woods wanted to say about classy behavior of his wife. She wasn't present for his mea culpa. It would please me to learn that he could not bring himself to ask her to be there. That would be a sign of contrition indeed.