Howzit Howard

Mozart on Maui, and you on another island

A classical music festival is under way on Maui, where a concert on the life of Mozart will be presented this evening at Makawao Union Church. I'll be happy to narrate the concert.

Maui and the Big Island have lately gotten thriving classical festivals produced by a combination of local musicians and music lovers and brethren on the mainland for whom the gig is also a vacation.

I wouldn't be surprised if Oahuans, currently without their own symphony orchestra and already paying more attention to the Hawaii Youth Symphony and the UH Symphony, get into the habit of flying to Maui or the Big Island for concerts and making a weekend of it, as I will do.

Bernadette and I had been talking about a weekend on a neighbor island to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary when the invitation came through.

Most Oahuans know a neighbor island getaway can be incredibly enjoyable but don't get to do it enough. I do it more than most because of speaking engagements and can tell you that every island has its own character; indeed, the Big Island is like several islands, with different scenery and different people in Hilo, Waimea, Hawi, Kona, Kealekekua and Ka'u. You can work out for yourself the varieties of wonderful experiences on the other islands.

I bring this up because this is a good time to do it. Tourism is rebounding but slacker than it will be later. You're more likely to get a good weekend getaway deal now than you will in July or August, and especially more than next week when the rebound will have progressed more.

Waiting for the doo-dah-dippety

Hawaii auto dealers know car sales will get better eventually, because the car you're driving now isn't going to last forever. But they also know that you and many of your neighbors may be able to eke out a few more months or years from the old flivver.

First quarter new vehicle registrations were up 4 percent from last year, but that was less than dealers had predicted and hoped for. They've scaled back their 2011 expectations to a 6 percent increase to 36,000 units. Let's compare that to the last few years:

• 2005 - 70,200.
• 2006 - 67,200.
• 2007 - 57,500.
• 2008 - 42,800.
• 2009 - 33,600.
• 2010 - 34,000.

So local dealers sold twice as many cars in 2005 as they did in 2010. Now you can see why they feel like something's gotta give: all those new cars and trucks sold in 2005, 2006 and 2007 ought to be showing their age by now. If only 10 percent who bought cars in 2005 and 2006 bought new cars this year, the dealers could double their expected sales.

We do see more people buying small cars and small light trucks. The market share of these smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles, is much bigger in Hawaii than on the mainland. About time, too, since we not only have higher gas prices but also tighter parking spaces.

 

 

Hawaii the hardest place to live? Don't believe it

Today we had another one of those lame national studies measuring cities or states on some made-up metricbasket, and Hawaii always seems to be the best or the worst.

In fact, this week, we actually had one of each.

One said Honolulu had the best air. Well, duh. Trade winds, no industry to speak of? But the report made no mention of vog, which periodically turns this on its head. As with any report, your mileage may vary, like if you commute on a Vespa behind DaBus.

The other one, based on a list of metrics that someone worked out on a legal pad, concluded that Hawaii is the hardest place to live. High taxes, everything costs so much, poor environment for business. You know the drill, you've flipped through Forbes at your dentist's office.

The problem with all of these reports is that, to avoid comparing apples to apple bananas, they come up with certain standards of living to measure in every city or state they're looking at.

Someone who works this out while sitting in, say, an office building on K Street in Washington, D.C., is going to assume clothing costs anywhere include a winter coat and a closetful of suits and ties. I don't need to tell you what's wrong with this.

Runzheimer, a Wisconsin consulting firm, does an interesting annual comparison of executive living costs across the nation, and concludes Honolulu is really expensive. But Runzheimer's idea of comparing apples to apples is a home with a basement, two-car garage, and a large backyard. Can you imagine how hard it would be to find such a place on Oahu? Even in Kahala?

Our taxes are high? Well, yes and no. Retirement income isn't taxed by the state at all. Did you think that was true in all the other states? Only a few states do that. And when you compare "apples to apples" on state spending, don't forget that Hawaii's state government maintains all the public schools and libraries in the state, the only state to do so.

The whole "Hawaii is a tough place to do business" thing might seem fairer, but you may be surprised. The unfairness of this lies not so much in the fact that Hawaii doesn't often put up impediments to doing business, but in the unstated inference that this is unheard of on the mainland. If you ever wondered why so many mainland companies seem willing to brave the vagaries of Hawaii to do business here, it's because they're used to it, in lots of other places.

We can continue to have fun with reports like this, but don't let me catch you taking them too seriously.

Chernobyl, 25 years later

April 26, 1986. I was doing newscasts at the UPI Radio Network in Washington, D.C., when UPI's Moscow bureau reported a nuclear power plant crisis in Chernobyl, Ukraine, near the Russian frontier, and not far north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

I remember debating with colleagues whether it was likely to be pronounced "chair-NOH-buhl" or "chair-noh-BEEL" and going off on a rant about how the daily pronouncer guide never contained a tricky word until after we had already learned how to say it.

We thought this would be another Three Mile Island. The partial meltdown March 28, 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant on the Susquehanna River south of Harrisburg, Pa., led to a comparatively small radiation leak because the radiation was held inside a thick concrete containment vessel. Chernobyl, as we would learn only later, didn't have one.

A power surge triggered a shutdown procedure at one of the plant's several reactors, but the shutdown procedure seemed to cause a more severe power spike, and that caused an explosion and a fire on the outside of the reactor that burned for five hours. A fire inside the reactor burned for two weeks. Volodymyr Pravik led the first fire crew to the scene. Two weeks later he died of acute radiation poisoning.

It took more than 24 hours - and several horrible deaths - before Valery Legasov, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences sent to the scene, gave the order for the area to be evacuated. Legasov tried to get information about the disaster to the Soviet public but was muzzled, and reproached himself for not blowing the whistle at a conference in Vienna. Two years to the day after the disaster began, distraught over suppression of information about the accident, Legasov hanged himself.

Two engineers, Alexei Ananenko and Boris Baranov, put on wet suits and swam through contaminated water to find a valve to drain the area, preventing a potentially catastrophic steam explosion. Both men later died of radiation sickness. A third man who accompanied them reportedly survived.

The radiation cloud, far greater than anything released to date from the Japan nuclear disaster, circled the globe, but it's thought more than half of it landed in Belarus, formerly known as White Russia, the nation northwest of Chernobyl.

No one is sure how many people Chernobyl killed. There are several official or semi-official death tolls below 100, but thousands of people in the region died from, or now have, thyroid cancer or other forms of cancer that are much less common in other places. 

One reason officials have so much trouble telling how many people were sickened or killed is that hundreds of thousands of emergency workers were flown in from distant corners of the Soviet Union and just tracking them all down is difficult.

The investigation of the incident followed the usual course for events like this: an initial tendency to blame human error, followed by a focus on lapses in training, and finally admissions of serious design flaws. Ultimately, delays in getting the truth out both delayed steps to reduce danger at other plants, and fueled suspicion and distrust by critics of nuclear power.

Today the melted reactor at Chernobyl is encased in cement. Vast areas nearby including areas in neighboring Belarus are off-limits, at least officially, though many families covertly moved back and live in the forest. Thousands who didn't die, live with health problems that probably stemmed from the disaster. And the Soviet empire that was bankrupted in part of the cost of this affair has moved into the history books. Have we learned anything from this tragedy?

 

 

Using Kindle to go to the library

Most people never go to the library any more, and that's sad, because it's one of the best buys our tax dollars are applied to. Now I'm trying to figure out if a new agreement between Amazon and OverDrive will make the situation worse or improve it.

OverDrive is a company that handles e-book distribution for most public libraries nationwide including the Hawaii state system. OverDrive e-book checkouts tripled nationwide from 2009 to 2010. Hawaii libraries circulated 8,500 e-books in March 2011 alone.

This week, OverDrive reached agreement with Amazon to provide electronic copies of library books to Kindle users. That got my attention. I have a Kindle and use it every day, mostly reading mysteries and spy thrillers to power down before bed.

In case you didn't know, Hawaii libraries have long had a sensational e-book system. With a library card number, you can go online and read all kinds of periodicals that would cost you a fortune otherwise. It's one of the best deals anywhere.

 

Promiscuous prescribing of drugs: a second opinion

Such thoughtful comments came in on a recent blog post about doctors pushing too many prescription drugs that I wanted to add these thoughts to the mix. Most of the responses came from medical professionals, and even when they disagreed with some of what I said, they made it clear that this question is very much on their radar, sort of like a collective rethinking of the role of medicine in life.

One physician noted that strong pain meds like vicodin are usually prescribed for 30 days or less, so more than 180 million prescriptions a year probably applies to a smaller number of Americans, many of whom are likely to be taking it for, to use my correspondent's words, "post-surgical pain, acute trauma, or other self-limiting disorders." He also notes that ailments that come with age - like arthritis and degenerative back problems - often involve pain.

A woman who currently takes vicodin for pain associated with stage 3 cancer said, while she agreed it and other meds are overprescribed, we shouldn't forget that sometimes, if what ails you is bad enough, you can be "painted into the vicodin corner" where recovery can be slowed by insufficient pain management. A fair point, and important to mention to prevent a pendulum swing in the opposite direction that could be worse than the current state of affairs.

It's not always easy writing opinion pieces nearly every day and putting them out there for all to review and chew over, but one of the joys of doing it for me has been the quality of the responses I get. I especially appreciate how patient and kind they are when they want to differ.

 

 

Music Post: When different composers have the same idea

When I was younger I was appalled at what a thief John Williams was. Every music score by John Williams seemed to mine the classical repertory for ideas.

The "Jaws" motif clearly came from the beginning of Moussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain." The theme to the "Superman" movies was a rip-off of Richard Strauss's "Death and Transfiguration."

Over time I came to realize that all Williams was doing was sneaking classical stuff into movie theaters, little hidden bits for the amusement of those who got it, and in that light it suddenly seemed laudable.

And I've also come to realize that when a composer writes something that another has already done, sometimes it's an homage, and sometimes he just had the same idea in another century.

The first main theme of Beethoven's "Great Fugue" (usually titled in German, "Grosse Fuge," to make it more imposing, which it emphatically doesn't need. It's the first of two endings of a late quartet) has six notes - the same notes in the same rhythm - as a movement of Holst's"Brook Green Suite," but the two could not possibly be more different.

Bartok and Stravinsky both composed suspenseful music using xylophone in a halting rhythm, suggesting a telegraph or a moving train, Bartok first in the second movement of "Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta" and Stravinsky in the first movement of "Symphony in Three Movements."

For me, the last two notes of Mahler's First Symphony suggest the first two notes of the scherzo from Beethoven's Ninth. The idea is nothing more than a tonic (key note) in one octave, quickly followed by the same note an octave lower, so that the first note lasts only half as long as the second. But the instrumentation is similar. And it sounds like something Mahler would do.

Big band genius Stan Kenton had a theme song called "Artistry in Rhythm" which is basically the same theme as the main motif in Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe." I've always assumed this was on purpose, since Kenton had classical training, but I don't know it for certain.

I was listening to a particularly good performance of Tomaso Albanoni's "Adagio in G minor" a few weeks ago when it hit me that this was the Baroque version of Samuel Barber's 1936 masterpiece "Adagio for Strings," similarly sad, even down to dramatic use of silence.

The similarity became even more interesting when I decided to play the two back to back and discovered, while researching the Albanoni, that this "Baroque" work may have been written in 1958. A scholar who specialized in Albanoni, Remo Giazotto, said he "completed" the work based on a scrap that survived a fire in the Saxon State Library in Dresden before it was destroyed in a 1945 air raid. Since Giazotto died in 1998 there has been a search for this scrap, but no one found it in his papers, and the prevailing view now is that Giazotto palmed off as Albanoni what was actually a little something of his own.

On my radio show Saturday morning I'll play all of these pieces as well as demonstrating the similarity of the main theme to Elgar's "Enigma" Variations and a snippet of music in the second movement of Mozart's "Prague" Symphony, which was played at a concert attended by Elgar a few days before the celebrated incident in which he was noodling at the piano and his wife told him that she thought the bit he just played was quite good. The "Prague" Symphony also appeared on the same program when the "Enigma" Variations premiered.

"Howard's Day Off," a program of "classical music and related material, packed in authentic juices," airs live Saturday mornings at 5-7 a.m. HST on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku, KANO Hilo, and streams on http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org .

Big Brother: there's an app for that

In the great 1980s television series "Max Headroom," the producer for the investigative reporter was a consummate computer hacker, able to see through security cameras wherever he went, accessing floor plans when he was pursued by bad guys, and still finding time to cue him for his live shot.

Modern police dramas increasingly use computer work. Such diverse series as "NCIS," "Criminal Minds" and "Hawaii Five-0" have a place for the Hacker Character, although in "Five-0" several of the stars take turns playing the resident geek.

One of the essential elements of many crime dramas today is the GPS pursuit, where triangulation of cell phone towers is used - in seconds, mind you, and sometimes using a simple laptop in the field - to determine the bad guy's location in time to meet him there.

In real life most states require a court order to do that, but most TV series wink at court orders; only "Law & Order" still finds drama in a cop trying to talk a judge into disgorging one.

Now that we're talking about real life, let's talk about the application hidden in your iPhone or iPad that tracks your movement through GPS, recording your latitude and longitude every time you pass a cell phone tower and keeping the data in a file for a year or more even if there are 100 entries a day. Any time you sync, the data is copied out.

Two geeks at Britain's Exeter College stumbled on this while searching their own devices for some kind of data that might be fun to represent visually. They presented their findings at a technical conference in San Francisco on Wednesday and the New York Times reported it.

Apple changes its privacy policy so frequently that this might actually be legal, but it definitely included the application without telling you, and that's bad form.

My wife loves her iPad and iPhone (I don't love her iPhone because I can never understand a word she's saying, but the iPad is very nice indeed) and I love my eMac. I praise Apple for maintaining a network of brick-and-mortar stores, which are, of course, not merely stores but also customer service desks, the only ones I've ever dealt with that I enjoy dealing with.

But putting in a snooping app and not telling anyone was not nice at all.

Is your doctor a drug pusher?

Americans spend more than $300 billion a year on prescription drugs. The most prescribed single drug in America, Vicodin, is prescribed 131 million times a year.

The entire population of America, every man, woman and child, is only about 330 million. Can you even begin to imagine how much Vicodin is being prescribed?

Most of the top 10 drugs are not painkillers like Vicodin. They are drugs to combat hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes. Each one is prescribed tens of millions of times a year in America, according to a study by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. The next most prescribed drug after Vicodin, for example, is Zocor, a statin drug for high cholesterol.

In the commercials for cholesterol drugs, the actor usually says something like this: "I exercise. I eat right. But my cholesterol is still too high. So I asked my doctor about Baboozostatin."

How does this compare to real life? Ask your friends. You'll find it easy to collect stories of people whose doctors are quick to push cholesterol drugs on them without making more than a cursory effort to get them to lower their cholesterol through diet and exercise.

Maybe this is okay. Maybe we need to accept the fact that most people these days are working longer hours, spending more time in traffic, eat drive-up food in the car to save time, and the only way they can reasonably be expected to lower their cholesterol is through a magic pill. I spend so much time parked at a computer it's a tribute to my genes I retain any semblance of human form.

But the fact is that any commercial featuring a guy with a mountain bike who trusts his heart to Baboozostatin isn't consistent with the common profile of people who take pills for their bloodstream.

It's also a fact that drug companies work very, very hard to tell doctors what their drugs can do while relegating the harm they can do to such long and sweeping laundry lists of possible side effects that the common human reaction to the contraindications is to laugh.

What needs to happen is for more arbiters of honest information and fair judgment to single out the risks that are most serious and most widespread, such as the increasing number of commonly used medicines that damage your liver and pancreas.

My doctor knows more about medicine than I do, but I know more about mass communications and image-shaping than my doctor does, and when I see a poster on a hospital room that says "You have a right to be free of pain," I know this document was paid for by, or inspired by, a pharmaceutical company pushing painkillers. I mean, where does it say that being free of pain is a right? I didn't read it in the Constitution. It's not in the Bible, the Torah or the Koran.

The mere concept is misleading, because being free of pain is not free. If you're dying and in excruciating pain, the cost of being free of pain may be to be given drugs so strong you lose your sense of loved ones in the room long before you lose your life. Is that even what you want? And what about people with mild pain that is more readily controlled? Did you know that prolonged use of anti-inflammatories like Advil can damage your liver and pancreas?

One reason for the more widespread prescribing of drugs to control blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol is that in each of these three cases the medical profession has moved the goalposts, choosing lower readings to call "desireable" - the word used to be "normal" - a decision which may be medically sound or not but which undeniably moves tens of millions of America from "normal" readings to readings that are "too high." This may contribute to the feeling that a problem, even if it would not have been regarded as a problem a generation ago, needs treatment with drugs.

In recent months, probably as a result of more protracted sedentary hours trying to cover the vagaries of the economy, my own blood sugar rose a lot, and I was given some comparatively mild pills to treat it, along with dietary instruction. It has been quite a fight, not because my condition is intractable, but because time and work responsibilities have made it difficult to stay on a regimen. Still I have worked at it, and my numbers are better. I bring it up, though, because of something odd I discovered. The kind of food I eat seems to affect the blood sugar more than the pill does. The key is to eat unprocessed food. The blood sugar spikes at fast food. Put a piece of lettuce on a sandwich and it goes down. It's as if the body functions more normally when you make it work a little to digest whatever you've consumed. And the effect works even if I forget the pill. 

This is a good place to say, never take medical advice from a blogger.

 

Kopi Luwak: Coffee made from previously-digested beans

You may remember Kopi Luwak from the movie "The Bucket List." Made in Indonesia, it's the most expensive coffee in the world, thousands of dollars a bag, because it's supposedly the world's best.

When I say the fact that it may be the best coffee in the world is only the second most interesting thing about it, you know the first is going to really be something.

Sumatran Kopi Luwak is made from coffee beans (kopi) that have been fed to Asian mountain civets (luwak) and harvested from their scat after the beans have passed through their intestines.

Like tripe stew, haggis or any form of sausage that still uses intestines for casing, one may rightly assume that there is a lot of washing involved.

But the whole idea still offends many people's delicate sensibilities, so what's so special about the civet digestive system that the beans become really good?

The main Sumatran grower, who these days has about 50 trained civets that are pampered like Punxatawney Phil, says the civet intestines alter the bean's chemistry to remove all bitterness.

Though this all started in Indonesia, civets now poop coffee beans in the Philippines and Vietnam, and someone in Vietnam claims to have duplicated the process without the use of the animals.

Leo Javar, who has coffee farms on the Big Island, takes Kona coffee beans and mails them to the land of the civets, then they are mailed back after, uh, processing.

He sells a cup of this java for $25, and it's going to be available at the May Day is Lei Day benefit for Japan on May 1, but he offered to bring some in for me to taste on Sunrise.

I've eaten tripe stew, and I know what crabs eat, and don't get me started on mushrooms, so, I figured, why not? Yes, bring it in, or bring it on, or whatever. I'll drink it.

It was good, and I said so on the air. To go beyond my on-air remarks, it was the best black coffee this milk-and-sweetener coffee drinker ever tasted.

The impact may be stronger with the actual Indonesian kind, which uses coffee that in its regular form is way more bitter than anything grown on the Big Island.

The story got a lot of reaction, including a couple of measured comments from people who have also tried it and found civet poop coffee tasty but not nonpareil.

One viewer made the entirely accurate comment that coffee is affected by many factors, from which kind you start with to the earth it grows in to the amount and timing of rainful to the way it's tried to the way it's roasted to the way it's stored to the way it's brewed, including what water is used.