Howzit Howard

Hilton Hawaiian Village and Oahu's development dilemma

Hilton is giving Hawaii a great big hug that some think will squeeze the life out of Paradise. Like most things this is more complicated than it looks, yet that instinctive concern is not unwarranted.

The hotel chain's plans for two more high-rise timeshare towers on an already congested campus put a spotlight on two development issues that exist here and everywhere: the conflict between collective land use issues and individual land use cases, and the matter of using development in one place to relieve development pressure in another.

Hilton Hawaiian Village is the largest capacity Hilton campus in the world, with almost 3,000 hotel and timeshare lodgings. The chain does not merely brand and manage it but actually owns it outright. There are seven towers, two of which have been built in recent years. Both are timeshare towers and Hilton said Wednesday that 2009 was its best timeshare year ever.

Now the company wants to build two more timeshare towers. It wants to start construction this year on a 250-unit tower where the Rainbow Bazaar is today. Those are the little shops on the right side of the main drive as you drive into the campus. Two years from now, Hilton wants to start construction on a 300-unit tower on the Hale Koa side of the campus where the buses congregate now.

Hilton is preparing to bet tens of millions of dollars that its Waikiki business, which was mostly resilient even during the recession, will remain so. If it gets to do everything it wants to go, it will be able to employ hundreds more people, and these are jobs that can't be outsourced to India.

On the other hand, Hilton is putting a colossal amount of new stress on Waikiki roads and sewers, without acknowledging it or paying for it. Kalia Rd. is regularly gridlocked now, in an economic slump. Hilton has traffic jams whenever it hosts... well, anything... and that's with 1,800 parking spaces. The 10-year plan would add fewer than 200 new spaces. But I'm arguing both sides here: maybe more spaces will create more traffic. We can discuss this more when we break up into smaller groups.

The problem, which is not of Hilton's making, is that we have broad development issues relating to traffic, water and sewer infrastructure, and aesthetics, but each individual development is considered as a discrete event. Ten different Waikiki developers can each argue that their own project will not appreciably add to traffic, then we find out later that the ten projects collectively lowered the speed limit to 5 mph. 

The zoning already exists to develop Waikiki to the point where it would tumble into the ocean of its own weight. You wouldn't believe how many low-rise apartments sit on land that can be developed to the clouds. But there isn't any functional mechanism for factoring in the collective effect of this when reviewing one specific proposal. It's like this everywhere, too: on Molokai, for example, I learned during the flap over La'au Pt. that there was already enough zoning for individual lot development on the wet side of the island to use up what was left of the water supply and then some.

The aesthetic factor? If you buy a place with great views, you have an absolute right to have those views blocked by future development. My aerie at the venerable Waipuna in Wild West Waikiki has lost part of its mauka view to the Allure Waikiki, and I'm pretty sure the new Hilton towers will mask out some of my makai views as well. My Diamond Head view depends on Ft. DeRussy staying as it is. Hilton, ironically, is also dependent on the military, since much of the green view its new units would offer would be over Hale Koa and Ft. DeRussy.

But you might as well know now that city officials will probably let Hilton do this, or at least some of it, and this brings me to the other issue. Lacking any effective means of using a broad land use plan to limit individual development projects, city officials adopted a policy several years ago of permitting lots of dense development in areas that are already blighted with dense development, to take development pressure off of Oahu's still rural areas, especially the North Shore and Upper Windward Coast. 

Waikiki is already urbanized. People who want the kind of sleepy vacation Waikiki offered in the early 1900s have to go to other parts of the state. But it's not too late to keep Sandy Beach and points east undeveloped, to save some empty space at the end of the road on the Leeward Coast, and to limit North Shore development to a point where it never needs an extension of the H-2. This is one of the best reasons to support rail, which will draw development to its corridor, wherever that turns out to be, taking pressure off the rest of the island.

If all of this sounds like a pact with the devil, then it's time to think strategically. Waikiki is what it is, although I do think that as it becomes more residential and less transient there will be more political pressure to forbid development by people who haven't done it already. The question is, what can be done today to limit development in parts of the state that are still unblighted? Before someone with lots of money buys the land and offers to create jobs? Instead of barking like a dog at Hilton, we should move decisively to narrow where development can occur in central Oahu, and along the Kona coast, and on the road to Lahaina. 

We should acquire transportation corridors today for rail that will be built tomorrow on neighbor islands, which will bring speculators to those corridors but lessen pressure everywhere else. Everybody should stare at a map of their favorite part of the islands and figure out what can be done now to control the future before there is a powerful interest in the opposite corner staring at the same map with visions of timeshares dancing in their heads.

Cockfighting and the C-word

When the legislature session began, I made a vow to myself to give lawmakers as much benefit of a doubt as possible, and resist the urge to criticize, so long as they seemed to be working hard to resolve the huge budget deficit, a crisis created entirely by interests outside the state.

I might not agree with everything proposed by Rep. Marcus Oshiro or Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, who don't even agree with each other on all points, but it's clear to me they are really trying to come up with a budget that will do as little harm as possible. They and other lawmakers have made some tough decisions.

And then there are Joey Manahan, Roland Sagum and Gilbert Keith-Agaran, who have tried to get the legislature to recognize cockfighting, which is illegal, as a "cultural activity."

It was a forgone conclusion that such a resolution would fail - what Manahan, Sagum and Keith-Agaran should be chagrined about is that in such a crisis they wasted their colleagues' time with this. And for what? To awaken the animal rights movement to a fresh round of condemnation of the practice? To make Hawaii look bad in places where they don't condone cockfighting, which is most of the republic? What was the point? There was no point. No point that makes a lick of sense.

The C word? Culture. "It's our cultural tradition," one Filipina said to our reporter. So was lynching, in some places, but that didn't make it a good idea.

It's tradition in legislatures to waste time on stupid side issues, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea in the current economic crisis. Lawmakers who want to serve ethnic Filipino constituents will do better to work for whatever combination of spending cuts and tax hikes will do the least harm to those fine people.

If you don't hear anything more from these guys about this, I say, give them the benefit of a doubt and assume they're back to work on things that matter. If they harp on it and try to defend it, pretending it wasn't a silly waste of time, make a mental note to vote 'em out.

February tourism report: better than it looks

We got fractionally more visitors in February 2010 than we did a year earlier, they stayed 2% more days, and they spent $850 million, down 0.2% from last year. This is a great report.

What? Doesn't sound like a great report? Yes, I know it doesn't. But it is. For three reasons.

First, there is the incredible matter of the bump from the Pro Bowl. 

"But this year we didn't have the Pro Bowl," you say.

Exactly. That's what's incredible about it. We didn't have the game, yet our winter visitor traffic held close to even nonetheless. That's the first reason why this is a great report.

The second reason is that some of the reasonably strong visitor traffic came before the current increase in air capacity to the islands, and represented some flights running fuller. We got 17% more Canadians, for example, which is why visitor days rose 2% - Canadians tend to take longer vacations.

The third reason is that hotel room rates were down an average 8% or more from year-ago levels in February, and the Japanese in particular took good advantage of this, yet overall visitor spending was down only a fifth of a percent. This means some visitors were spending more on other stuff.

Because of the commoditization of travel services that can be booked online - it's so easy to click on a price that is two cents less than another price - it is hard to raise prices once they have been lowered, and many hoteliers think it will be two years before they can regain peak pricing, if then. Like some many things in the business world, this bad or good depending on where you stand.

Reporters instinctively report lower room rates as bad news for everyone but the consumer, but it's not that simple. Lower room rates means profit compression for hotel owners, and for the hotel chains that manage the properties; but these interests are mostly based out of state.

For hotel workers who are very much part of our local economy, more hotel guests means more work, no matter what the guests are paying for a room. If you get more hours because more beds need to be changed, what do you care whether Starwood revpar is slightly lower than its executives would like?

And beyond that - every dollar a guest doesn't spend on his room is a dollar he can spend on a tour, or a restaurant meal, or shopping. Who knows how much the lower hotel room rates may have helped Paul Kosassa and the crew at ABC Stores, for example?

Now we wait and see how much the added airlift helps. Early signs suggest a measurable improvement in arrivals by air already, and some of the new capacity is just now coming online.

Musical chairs in reverse: Hawaii passenger air capacity

Airlines will fly 5.1% more seats to Hawaii in the next three months - 2,322,737 seats, total, according to the state Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism.

You knew there would be more flights. You heard the announcements from Alaska Airlines, shifting capacity to Hawaii to the point where 11% of all its capacity winds up here in the islands. That smiling guy on the tail should have dressed lighter. But what we learn from the new DBEDT report is just how much capacity everyone is adding, or, in some cases, taking away. I'll walk you through it.

Seats are up to all four major airports. Capacity is up a little from Japan and up a lot from Canada. It's down from several other countries, but the impact is small because none were high-volume markets. Let's look at the numbers by destination first:

• Honolulu: 1,610,796 seats, up 1.8% from April-May-June 2009. I'm doing the math in my head but it works out to about 30,000 more seats, or 10,000 per month.
• Kahului: 414,127 seats, up 13.8%. That's almost 60,000 more seats, and Maui County really needs it. Alaska is hiking Portland connections to Maui by half. LAX capacity will be up almost a third. Delta is ending Salt Lake City nonstops to Maui, however.
• Kona: 176,636 seats, up 15.8%. That's more than 25,000 more seats. LAX capacity will be up 18% and there are new nonstops from Oakland and San Jose. 
• Lihue: 121,178 seats, up 7.9%. That's almost 10,000 more seats. United is reducing Denver connections to Kona and Kauai alike, but LAX connections will be up 19%.

On the international side of the ledger, Japan still accounts for two-thirds of airline seats to Hawaii even when Canada is counted. It works out to 612,800 spring seats to the islands, up 2.4% from last year, of which almost 403,000 seats are from Japan. 

Canada accounts for another 64,000 seats, and that's up 37.6% from spring of last year. Sydney and Manila put together equal Canadian airlift if we also throw in the fewer than 6,000 seats from New Zealand. Seats are actually down from Australia and the Philippines but only fractionally.

The other main international markets are Seoul and Guam, together originating fewer than 60,000 seats to Hawaii this spring but not that many fewer. 

Strikingly, Taiwan's China Airlines has canceled nonstops here. You may have mixed feelings about that if you remember it was a China Airlines pilot who, a few years ago, flew so far off the proper landing approach to HNL that people who live in the Pacific Century Tower could see passengers in the windows.

Music Post: More from the Honolulu Symphony report

There are now 20 orchestras in America with a 52-week season. That tidbit can be found on page 29 of the 162-page research report Mark Wong put together for the Honolulu Symphony.

Wong's research, focusing on original sources of data rather than media reports or editorials, documents a crisis in the arts, not just classical music, that leaves one wondering, not why the Honolulu Symphony is bankrupt, but how it managed to operate for so long with a more extensive season than most cities of the same size enjoy. My previous post mentioned the aging of the concert audience, the plunge in musical instrument sales, and signs that many people who are not averse to hearing great music live simply don't have time for it after working long days bracketed by long commutes.

As a former player in the Symphony who is now a business executive, Wong has a better understanding than many people do of the labor and management points of view. He mentions in the report that the life of a symphony musician is never an easy one. This is certainly true. In many professions, the employer is expected to provide time and money for travel and education. People in my trade, broadcast journalism, sometimes whine that they're expected to read newpapers on their own time. But this is nothing compared to a classical musician who provides his own (expensive) instrument and has to practice for hours on his own time to maintain enough proficiency to meet the demands of his job.

What is the significance of 20 orchestras with 52-week schedules? Herman Kenin, president of the American Federation of Musicians, explains it with refreshing candor. "Sure, the schedule is murderous," he says. "But the goal is not 52 weeks but 52 checks." In others, the musicians, many of whom also hold university posts and most of whom give lessons for extra income, are trying to gain some kind of reliable income. Most symphony orchestras get into trouble by giving more concerts than there is an audience for.

There is a fascinating detail on page 33 of the report, the sort of thing you kind of knew already but a connection you may not have made. In the 1880s, when the first U.S. symphony orchestras were founded, a significant part of their audience base was a very substantial number of European immigrants, people who had come from lands where symphonic concerts were essential live entertainment for generations. In 1890, when the New York Philharmonic was already 48 years old, the population of New York was 1.5 million and 42% of that population was foreign-born, mostly from Europe. It wasn't just New York. In that same year the foreign-born population of Chicago was 41%, Cleveland 37%, Boston 35%, Pittsburgh 31%, Philadelphia 26%, St. Louis 25%. 

It's not in the report but I might add in passing that many who were not foreign-born still had strong European roots. More than a fourth of the populations of both Philadelphia and Baltimore were ethnic German when the Declaration of Independence was signed. H.L. Mencken, the great Baltimore newspaper reporter and columnist, who was 10 in 1890, wrote memorably of a drunken party where he and some friends stayed up all night playing though all nine of Beethoven's symphonies in order. No one could remember how close they got to the "Ode to Joy." This large ethnic European population helps explain the high profile of symphony orchestras in 1890 when only four U.S. cities had populations above 1 million (Los Angeles had 40,000 back then and Honolulu fewer than 23,000).

The research discovers that, if you measure the size of a symphony's budget, then divide it by consumer price-adjusted personal income, the richest symphony budgets in the country are all in cities that were already large cities in 1890, with two exceptions. One is Raleigh, N.C., where the symphony gets significant state funding. The other is Honolulu.

I looked for the Richmond Symphony because, when I lived in suburban Washington, D.C., I would drive the two hours to Richmond to attend concerts. I was on friendly terms with several people in the orchestra including the manager and the shop steward and they would let me into rehearsals, knowing I wanted to learn more and be better qualified to write the classical CDs reviews I was already writing for the UPI wire service. The Richmond Symphony was quite good, by the way, and had a nice, resonant hall. Well, the Honolulu Symphony budget has been triple that of the Richmond, as a function of adjusted personal income. It's not hard for me to understand. The Richmond musicians could drive two hours north and moonlight with any of three decent symphonies in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. They could drive southeast and moonlight in Norfolk, or west to Charlottesville. 

Manifestly the opportunities to supplement orchestra wages by playing in other orchestras are constrained in our archipelago.

What else is different in Honolulu? A brilliant analysis that measures correlation of many factors to the size of the orchestra budget in symphonies across America finds that the single closest corelation is the number and size of large employers - companies with more than 500 employees. 

This is notable because a particular feature of Hawaii is that most businesses are small, even to a greater extent than in most other places. In other words, Hawaii has few large corporations whose largesse can be tapped to fund a symphony orchestra. Apart from "captive" companies like Hawaiian Electric Industries and Bank of Hawaii, most of Honolulu's large employers are hotel chains based far away from us. Even Alexander & Baldwin, one of the bigger companies headquartered in Honolulu, has its biggest division, Matson, based in Oakland, Calif. A&B and HEI are the only Fortune 1000 companies based in Hawaii and we have no Fortune 500s.

What about individuals? Who can afford to give big? For that matter, who can afford concert tickets? The report checks median household income and then adjusts it for the local consumer price index, and finds Honolulu is 98th out of 100 cities, almost the bottom of the list. It also appears that Hawaii residents have more of their wealth tied up in real estate, or in small family businesses, effectively making them less affluent than they at first seem to be. The report does not merely mention this but documents and measures it. This is significant considering that per capita support for the Symphony to maintain operations as they have been would have to be several times what that support is in other cities of about the same size.

If Honolulu residents can ill-afford to give to the arts, then why are Hawaii residents so generous when it comes to charity? The report says that is "a widely-held misbelief." 

The research finds that a large percentage of Hawaii residents give, compared to other states, but they give very little, and indeed rank last among the states for total contributions as well as contributions per individual tax return.

It may be true that Hawaii residents give a lot of time to charity, and give a lot of money considering their very high expenses, but it is not true that charitable giving is a large reservoir to tap. It is the opposite. (I might also point out that giving a lot of time to charity means still less time for going to concerts.)

Mark Wong also reports he tried without success to find any evidence to back up the claims of a New York marketing company in 2009 that Hawaii leads the nation in millionaires per overall population. Whatever the number is, it appears not to be of much use, due to the high number of Hawaii households where household worth is inflated by related families or multiple generations sharing a single residence.

Now let's turn to budget size in comparison to other orchestras and their market sizes. 

To understand the key finding in this area it is necessary to know the difference between an average and a median. Realtors, reporting home prices, prefer to use median prices because a very few high-priced sales can skew the average price higher, creating a false impression about the prices most sellers are getting. The median is the midpoint of sales range. If the median is $500,000, that means half the home sales were for more, half for less. It yields the information we usually think the average price would give us.

We see something similar in symphony budgets. A very few orchestras in huge metropolises skew the average budget size higher. The median budget size is more telling. In a sample of 102 orchestras and their market populations, the Honolulu Symphony budget is below average, yet it is close to the 68% percentile, which is pretty darn high for such a small city. 

We're up to page 64 of the analysis, with more specific information about the Honolulu Symphony still to come.

Music post: The Carnival of Saint-Saens

Camille Saint-Saens was the greatest prodigy. He composed at three, accompanied a Beethoven violin sonata at five, and at 12 gave a concert offering to play any of Beethoven 12 piano sonatas from memory.

Born in 1835, he lived to 1921, so his career lasted more than eight decades. He wrote extensively on astronomy, acoustics, archeology and Egyptology. He wrote poetry and a play.

He was the first well-known composer to compose a musical score to a movie, in 1908. He was well-traveled, conducting a concert in San Francisco in 1915 and spending his last year in Algiers.

Along the way he also managed to marry and have two children, though the children both died young and Saint-Saens left his wife a couple years after that, remaining single for most of his life.

The standing of Saint-Saens' music has suffered from several things that ought not to have any effect on it. Few of his contemporaries could keep up with him intellectually and he was a bit superior about it. He made lacerating remarks about other composers that got repeated by others, making no friends. He lived long enough to be out of touch with new musical trends, storming out of the premiere of "Rite of Spring."

For his sins, Saint-Saens is remembered mostly for "Carnival of the Animals," which he dashed off for a private party. Most of it is funny and "The Swan" is one of the most beautiful short classical pieces.  

On my radio show Saturday morning I'll play a great deal of Saint-Saens including several movements from "Carnival of the Animals" interspersed throughout the program. You'll also hear, in the 5:30 a.m. half hour, the song in the movie "Babe" whose melody comes from the Saint-Saens "Organ" Symphony.

Saint-Saens composed three symphonies all of which have their points; the "Organ" Symphony is the last one, and takes its nickname from a noisy, dignified part for the organ in the finale. There is also a busy role for piano that is actually more difficult than what the organist plays. 

This symphony is also notable for its interesting architecture. The first two movements are tied together and so are the last two. And the organ theme in the finale is a major key metamorphosis of the minor key theme that drives the opening movement.

Most of the time I like to throw in a lot of change-ups in the show, so the program will also include the finale of Howard Hanson's "Romantic" Symphony, the first movement of Hindemith's tightly-written Symphony in E flat, the Forlane from Ravel's "Tombeau de Couperin," and the first movement of Honegger's "Basel Delights."

Howard's Day Off airs live 5 a.m.-7 a.m. Saturdays on Hawaii Public Radio (5 a.m. HST is 11 a.m. EDT) and streams on www.hawaiipublicradio.org. Visit Max Cacas's Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook.

Music post: Symphony crisis... this time in full score

The Honolulu Symphony, working to reinvent itself after filing for bankruptcy and scrapping half its season, has made an important contribution to public discourse on the national crisis in the arts: it has done some decent research on the problem for a change.

A 162-page report which is just now circulating explodes some myths about how Honolulu compares to other cities on financial wherewithal to support a symphony orchestra, and provides such interesting national detail that the report can be useful to orchestras across America.

As I read it, it becomes clear to me that the only surprise in the collapse of many symphony orchestras across the republic is that this didn't happen sooner, and nothing less than classical music itself is at stake, with ramifications for all other kinds of music.

Before proceeding, I should tell you that the Symphony board has decided, after gathering all this information, that its once $8 million annual budget is unsustainable in a city the size of Honolulu.

"For all its artistic excellence," the report says, "the Honolulu Symphony has been suffering the crushing weight of its rich budget for much of the past 20 years. Making payroll has been a chronic problem. Over the past years the orchestra was rescued by a series of last-minute bailouts."

The plan is to greatly shorten the season, thus cutting costs a lot, and then try to make up the work shortfall for the musicians by creating education programs that can tap other funding sources, and which seem to be necessary anyway if a future generation of classical music listeners is to exist.

Mark Wong used to play keyboards in the Honolulu Symphony. Now he heads the foundation that manages the meager Symphony endowment and gave the orchestra its last loan. Wong runs the largest I.T. company in Hawaii and used its resources, writing web crawlers to gather information on the arts, focusing, significantly, on original research instead of news articles and commentaries.

The big picture nationwide is that there is only so much money available for the arts:

• The arts follow the nation's business cycle. Downturns happen.
• More organizations want money. Americans for the Arts reports arts nonprofits grew from 73,000 to 104,000 from 1998 to 2008, with a third running in the red even during the economic boom. 
• Arts patrons are giving more of their money to non-arts charities, the Giving USA Institute says.
• Businesses give billions to the arts but much is eroded by inflation, the Conference Board reports.
• When you dial out inflation, giving to the arts by state arts agencies is down 11% since 1998 and down 37% from a peak in 2001, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies reports.

As people spend more time working and commuting they are spending less time going to concerts:

• Performing arts attending are increasingly older than the average American adult. according to ongoing surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts.
• Since 1982, the number of 18-24 year-olds attending concerts has plunged, not just for classical concerts but also jazz, ballet and theater.
• Since 2002, even 45-54 year-olds have attended fewer concerts; in fact, the steepest decline has been in this demographic that used to make up the core audience.
• Musical instrument sales, which show how many people are experiencing music intimately, fell 12% from 2005 to 2008, the National Arts Index reports.
• The percentage of American adults who go to the symphony was 13% in 1982. Now it's 9%, the National Endowment for the Arts reports. Jazz, ballet, musicals, and even sports attendance are also down. 
• Americans are also less likely to engage in participatory sports, gardening or other outdoor events, which why I say this is about lack of time. NEA also reports that the only age group which has increased its classical concert attendance since 2002 is age 75 and older.

Things are rough all over:

• The Cleveland Orchestra, one of the world's finest, is losing millions of dollars a year and drew down more than a fifth of its entire endowment in one year.
• The Philadelphia Orchestra, also with a global reputation, is losing about $3 million a year on a $47 million annual budget, despite wage cuts.
• The New York Philharmonic saw its $205 million endowment plunge to $178 million from the end of its 2008 season to the beginning of its 2009 season.
• The Atlanta Symphony, which has won lots of classical Grammies in recent years, is close to bankruptcy and its endowment has almost evaporated.
• There have been layoffs or furloughs at the New York City Opera, Metropolitan Opera, and Houston Symphony, and pay cuts at the Baltimore Symphony, Chicago Symphony and Minnesota Orchestra.
• Seasons have been canceled by at least eight other small symphony orchestras on the mainland in the past two seasons.

I spent a brief time as an active board member of the Honolulu Symphony - my hospitalization last year ended my involvement in board meetings and I have not enjoyed any special input or access to inside information while the board was making the tough decision to file for Chapter 11. One thing that strikes me in retrospect about the meetings I did attend was that we knew the Symphony needed to be on a more secure business footing - and there was broad agreement on this by everyone including the musicians - but we did not fully realize how deep and how common was the crisis we faced.

What we didn't entirely grasp back then was that the Honolulu Symphony's budget, which has been in the range of $6 million to $8 million, was huge for a city of Honolulu's size. Even $6 million is unsustainable economically. Charlotte, North Carolina, has a symphony budget of about $8 million but has almost twice the population and triple the personal income adjusted for local costs. Louisville, Kentucky, has a $7 million budget but its population is one third larger and its personal income adjusted for local costs is more than double Honolulu's.

I'll let you digest this, and over the next few days I'll post more.

When life has too many rules

When I first moved to Hawaii there was one year when a substantial amount of my income came from freelance fees, and since taxes are not withheld from such fees, I owed money at tax time.

I remember how confusing it was when the tax preparer suggested to me that to avoid a repeat of this I should reduce the number of exemptions claimed on my withholding.

"But I'm entitled to another exemption," I said.

"I know you are," he said.

"So why am I not claiming it?"

"You will claim it," he said, "on your tax return. But not on the withholding form."

Eventually he made me understand that this was an expedient to get my main employer to withhold "too much" money, from the standpoint of that one employer, but close to the right amount of money, when one considered the income I was getting from working freelance for others.

This memory came back to me today when a lady asked me to explain what her tax preparer told her. I'm not sure I understood it, and she is quite sure she didn't understand it. It had something to do with exemptions. I finally suggested she tell the same person she forgot the explanation and ask for it again.

Coincidentally, my wife and I were talking about the van I recently bought her, and she persuaded me that I never completed the process of registering it. I could have sworn I did - I'll check the glovebox of the van before looking elsewhere for paperwork - yet I am compelled to admit it's possible I forgot. I only remember for certain that I added it to my insurance policy.

Which reminded both us that I can't transfer the title to an older vehicle I had until I can first get paperwork affirming that the title came to me after the death of my first wife, something I managed not to get done at the time. I found a death certificate, and a document affirming I was the executor, but I won't know until I talk to my lawyer whether this is sufficient. I left him a message asking about it but that was the week my cell phone died and if he returned my call I didn't get the message.

The last time I saw him, Bernadette and I were over to sign documents setting up revocable trusts. Do you know about those? You put everything you have into a trust whose trustees are yourself and your spouse. Then, when one of you dies, the other doesn't have to wait months for probate court to accept the will, because the surviving spouse becomes the surviving trustee in control of the estate. Bernadette was so distraught about having to even think about such a thing, she no longer remembers the briefing at all.

Even bankers and lawyers, who collectively make up most of the rules of our lives, will agree that there are too many rules and they are too complicated. No normal person can possibly understand them all. They are understood only by those who make it their life's work.

This is pervasive. You see it everywhere. You wouldn't believe some of the clauses in my personal services contract with my employer. No one sat down and said, "What can I do to totally screw this employee?" They like me. But a lawyer isn't doing his job unless he tries to foresee every situation and protect his client's interest. And there are many, many situations.

You see it in the law, where many states make it illegal to run a yellow light, not because they care so much about yellow lights as because when you get a ticket for running a red light it doesn't cut any ice to say it was yellow when it passed over your windshield if running the yellow light was also illegal.

Here are two examples from politics. One of the hurdles the city is encountering with its rail project is a regulation about the height of a station if it's within a certain number of feet of an airport runway. The station isn't actually in the flight path, but the way the regulation is written, it's an issue. 

And you wouldn't believe some of the contradictory legalia connected to the state's parking funds in highly-liquid investments that suddenly not liquid at all. The company that sold the investment - and if you knew the full story you would consider the sale to have been unethical - points to some of the finest of its finest print, which clearly states that something might go wrong.

In many of these matters, it's not possible to make a case that who's right is obvious and simple without omitting a lot of information that makes the matter a lot more ambiguous.

In the meantime, it's tax time, and if you picked up a second job this past year because of the economic slump, don't be surprised if your withholding doesn't cover your tax liability, and if you don't follow the tax preparer's explanation, sigh deeply, invite him to do the same, and make him start over.

A tale of two Chinas

Faced with unyielding censorship by China, but not wanting to simply leave its biggest expansion market, Google has moved to servers in Hong Kong. The move spotlights a singular aspect of China today.

Britain leased Hong Kong for 100 years but peaceably handed it back to China at the end of that time, in 1997, after China said it would adopt a policy of "one country, two systems."

What China decided at the time was not to destroy Hong Kong's unique wealth-generating free market economy, even though that meant allowing uncensored communication and other things it did not allow anywhere else on Chinese territory.

Hong Kong is not just unique in China. It is unique in the world. It is the apotheosis of the free market. It makes New York, Tokyo and London look like hick towns. Hong Kong is so like a business that its mayor is called the chief executive.

It had not occurred to me before, but keeping Hong Kong the way it is, though done out of economic necessity, has turned out to be a brilliant move. It allows China to do some things the free market way without messing with the rest of the country.

The problem with the Google debacle is that the Internet isn't in this place or that. It is everyplace. If Google is allowed to route visitors to the Hong Kong servers, and if Google is available at all in China, then censorship has ended. And Chinese officials do not appear to be ready for that.

China Mobile, the biggest wireless company in China, was close to signing a contract with Google to make it the default search engine on its devices. The New York Times correspondent in Beiing reports the deal is now off, apparently under government pressure.

My own non-media contacts who know China says there is a complicating factor that muddies the waters for Chinese policymakers: pornography. 

Most of the world has long since gotten used to the fact that the Internet is replete with lurid photos and video, they do what they must to shield their kids from it, and they don't even think of it as a government issue any more. In China it's still seen by many as a non-political problem that officials ought to do something about. Even some people in China who have civil libertarian views about political free speech still think censors should somehow block out racy content.

Nude photos have given officials a fig leaf to cover up their attempts to censor political speech.

Whatever Beijing does about Google in Hong Kong will tell us more about the current leadership, but ultimately it will be easier to dam the Yangtse than to stem the tide of Internet content of all sorts, including such seedy sirens as float in on that tide.

First anniversary of The Black Leg

It has been a year since my hospitalization for an infection that could have cost me a leg, and rereading the posts from a year ago reminds me how lucky I am to still have the leg at all.

We're also just past the first anniversary of me being a fool about the swollen leg, because it happened once before to the other leg and I should have known better.

Some seven years ago I was bitten by a brown recluse spider - more probably a Mediterranean recluse spider if you want to get technical, because that's actually what we have here - that was lurking under the bed sheets at the Hyatt in Koloa. 

I was over there to speak to the Kauai Chamber of Commerce, the hotel was full, and my comped room was at the far end of a wing and probably not often used. There was even a sign on the wall warning that we're in the tropics and there are very small animals on hand from time to time.

It happened in the afternoon while I napped. That evening, giving my speech and taking questions from the audience, I felt fine. The audience was very warm, the questions were intelligent, and I felt good about the evening.

The next morning, the bite had a blue ring around it, which I later found is the trademark of a recluse bite. I had seen the spider and it wasn't all that big. Recluses aren't. I didn't take it seriously. Stupid me. While viewing Waimea Canyon I began feeling feverish and queasy. Marilyn and I returned to the hotel. I have a vague recollection of her phoning the nice lady who set up a boat ride to cancel. Later she asked me a question and I distinctly heard myself answering in complete gibberish.

"Okay, now you're scaring me," Marilyn said.

"That made no sense at all," I said.

"Let's go home. Now," she said. And when we got to Honolulu she drove me straight to Kaiser. I was there all night on IV antibiotics. By now the right leg was swollen. But the antibiotics worked. The leg was scarred a little, down at the ankle, but otherwise I made a speedy and total recovery.

Time passed. Marilyn went into her slow decline from cancer and for about two years my own health was the last thing on my mind. Years later, married to Bernadette, working hard at a new job at the television station, the experience on Kauai was quite a distant memory. 

It didn't even come to mind when, in early March 2009, while having lunch with Pacific Century Fellows at Turtle Bay, I felt something bite my other leg. That was on a Saturday, I think. By Sunday evening my left leg was swollen, I was delirious with fever, and Bernadette was telling the triage nurse at the Kaiser ER that she scarcely recognized me from my mental fog. 

This time IV antibiotics on an outpatient basis were not enough and the leg swelled to the point where it turned black. Really. The bandages were taken off and Bernadette freaked. My doctor, an amiable, unflappible sort, looked at her, looked at me, and said, "I guess we're admitting you, Howard."

A week and a half in the hospital is no fun, though as I blogged soon afterwards it wasn't the people so much as the organization. Each individual person was quite nice. The organization made a curious mistake that has not been resolved to this day. A nurse told me a doctor who was visiting from Russia would like to look at the leg and would I mind. This is a close paraphrase and nothing else was said about the doctor's status. I said okay. The woman looked at the leg a couple of times, doing nothing the nurses weren't doing already. No big deal... until the bill came. 

To this day the Kaiser billing apparatus thinks I owe more than $700 for this doctor's superfluous presence, and if I read the bills right Kaiser itself has paid the woman thousands it shouldn't have.

The leg was slow to recover. It was months before I could throw my cane away and July before two deep surgical wounds (where they checked to make sure the inner tissue was not dead) fully closed. The scarring will be present for the rest of my life. To this day the leg swells if I'm on it too long. But it does everything a pretty leg does. I am grateful to my doctors and nurses for that, and to Bernadette for taking me to Kaiser after I stopped making sense.