Howzit Howard

Halloween spooks me

Maybe it's because I never had any pleasant experiences with costume parties, but I've never liked Halloween. I never liked trick-or-treating, even as a child. Oh, the candy is okay, but Easter is a much more efficient chocolate delivery device than Halloween will ever be.

But the history of Halloween is fairly interesting.

Harvest festivals date back to pre-history, and it is not surprising that pumpkins, among the largest and sweetest of all foods, would figure into both Halloween and Thanksgiving. But the big orange gourds are native to the New World and are a comparatively recent Halloween feature. Jack-o-lanterns were carved from turnips in the British Isles.

The Celtic festival Samhain, pronounced like "sow'-an," translates to "Summer's End," and it was a harvest festival, but with macabre overtones, including animal sacrifices in some places, but Halloween is more closely derived from All Saint's Eve, also known as All Hallow's Eve, when the dead were seen as having a shot at getting revenge on the living before All Saint's Day. People wore masks to avoid being spotted by the dead. Good clean fun for the kids!

Halloween was a known event for the earliest Americans colonials but the Puritans didn't believe in it, and it didn't really catch on until the late 1800s after a lot of people had emigrated from Ireland and Scotland. Because Samhain had been around for centuries, Irish and Scottish clerics took a  more benign view of Halloween than some others, and let's not forget that the New England puritans were fundamentalists who emigrated to the New World in part because they did not find the religious environment in England congenial. They had a strong sense of knowing better than others what was good and what was wrong, as Hawaii residents soon learned when people began moving here from Boston later on.

Trick-or-treating, a term that first appeared in print in 1927 in Canada and was commonplace by the 1940s, is thought to stem from a Scottish practice of children walking from one house to another, singing or performing for food, and from wassailing, better known nowadays as Christmas caroling. Shakespeare in 1593 in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" refers to a man whining "like a beggar at Hallowmas." So the practices of Halloween are to an extent the gently perverted pre-echoes of the somewhat more wholesome festivites of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The practice of going into Waikiki, or some similar place in other cities, anonymous behind a mask and costume, for dancing and shouting and enebriation, is a curious twist to all this, since it is more similar to Mardi Gras and the masked balls of Venice than to Halloween.

And how will I celebrate Halloween? I just did, by writing this. Good night and keep it down.

 

Richard Muller, global warming, and real life vs. Hollywood foes

Remember the Northwest Passage? The mythical short cut from Europe to Asia sought by Henry Hudson and others? The one they never found because it's iced in? Well, it's not mythical any more. A northwest passage to Japan opens up every summer now, due to global warming, I guess, and maritime shipping lines use it, saving a lot of fuel.

Most scientists think it's pretty clear that global warming is real, some don't, and one of the more prominent physicists in the second group has changed his mind and joined the first. The drama surrounding this event tells us much about the difference between Hollywood bad guys and the battles that go on in real life.

Richard Muller was a famous global warming skeptic, questioning research results announced by NOAA and NASA, and the Charles Koch Foundation gave him some money to go over the research data. Charles and David Koch aren't as well known as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, but they, too, are among the world's richest men, oil money, mostly, and they write some of the biggest checks backing the Tea Party movement. They always figured global warming was a fraud, and it would delight them to have a guy like Muller, who does not have pinwheel eyes, prove it.

He didn't retrace every step ever made in the field, but identified two key areas where the previous research could be wrong. Global warming skeptics have long suspected that weather station data may not be as reliable as it looks. And they have also assumed that measurements taken in cities may be too hot compared to other places - it's a proven fact that places with more concrete than trees have "heat islands" where the temperature shoots far above whatever we're telling you on the air.

Muller learned two things: (1) the data he found corresponded closely with what has been reported by others, and (2) this suggests that the other researchers were unbiased. For those on the fence, the latter implied finding is important, thanks to that bozo in Britain who wrote emails that made it clear he was concerned about how the presentation of data would be received by warming skeptics. (Bad scientist! No Klein bottle!)

Here is Hawaii, where an ocean rise of a few inches would change real estate values forever, inattention to global warming seems careless to say the least, but I can see how it would look the other way if you're Charles or David Koch and an overreaction of one or two degrees could reduce your emissions-creating fortune by billions. The Tea Party hurt their stock investments way more this year than global warming, but let that pass. The point is that in the real world, the enemy is often simply another person who holds an opposite view.

We sometimes have trouble getting our minds around this concept because we keep meeting villains on television and in movies who wear black hats, talk in deeper voices made gravelly by alcohol abuse, and have a penchant for throwing their own people out of windows for failing at some assigned task. The worst boss I ever had never did that, and the Koch brothers wouldn't think of it.

In a movie, Muller would have a sneering conversation with his benefactors before he goes off to find or fabricate evil evidence, and when he came back, sniveling, to report he instead discovered that the other guys were right, one of the Koches, the one on the right, would pull a level and open the floor beneath Muller, while the other one, the one on the left, stroked his cat. In real life, Muller has proclaimed his findings, which he intends to present to a global warming conference put together by another prominent warming skeptic, Petr Chylek, who says, "Of course he'll be welcome. The purpose of our conference is to bring people with different views on climate together." And the Koch Foundation says it will be happy to fund more research.

Why does it matter to make this distinction between real life foes and the cinematic sort? Because in the movies there is no point in bothering to try to change the other guy's mind. In the real world, it's entirely worth the effort.

Union action: Hawaiian Telcom vs. Qantas

Not just chaos theory but simple laws of probability teach us that things sometimes happen in clusters, and so it is that we have two labor-management disputes in the news as this week begins, a strike authorization vote at Hawaiian Telcom and an escalation of labor-management tension at Qantas.

In the movie "The Maltese Falcon," Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet act out a memorable conversation about how demands aren't taken seriously unless backed up by force or the threat of force. This is well-known to labor unions, who must be taken seriously by employers chiefly because they have the option to disrupt business and cost shareholders money.

The interesting thing about strikes and other job actions is that they are joint efforts by many people, and a critical component of such an event is a widely-held belief by a lot of people that they are in the right. For this condition to be met, it is necessary either for management to be unfair, or to be seen as unfair. Sometimes the situation is clear-cut, sometimes it is not, and good people on both sides can have differing views of the matter.

Hawaiian Telcom's union workers, represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (full disclosure: this union also represents many technicians and engineers in the broadcasting industry and I have some dear friends back in Washington, D.C., who are IBEW members; the union also represents some of my colleagues at HawaiiNewsNow), work under sometimes difficult conditions. They get called out at night and on weekends. They work outdoors in all kinds of weather. They sometimes work on the same utility poles that carry electrical lines.

There exists, from the days when the telephone company was a lavishly-staffed monopoly, a public expectation that the service will always be there no matter what. But at the same time, Hawaiian Telcom is not the monopoly that its distant predecessor was. Much of its revenue base has dispersed to a variety of wireless providers, and even when the company has managed to hand off a former land line account to its own wireless division, the profit margin is smaller. It is false to lay this at the doorstep of the current management because it came in after this happened, and because every telephone company on the mainland has the same problem, some of them more so.

Anyone who works for - well, for anyone else, practically - will be astonished to learn that Hawaiian Telcom union workers get free medical and up to 26 weeks fully paid sick leave per year. The company, in what it said was its final offer, called for a 10% copay and eight weeks full paid sick leave per year plus a workers compensation program.

Let's be frank here: if the existing benefits called for eight weeks sick leave and the company wanted to cut it to four, outsiders would consider that reasonable, and would be surprised that the union was so upset about it. Most of us don't even get that much. How can the workers consider this unfair to them given current economic conditions and the changes in their own industry?

This is why. First, they've already made concessions. Second, they're not asking for wage increases. The company is offering something like 1%, not enough even to keep up with inflation, even now. Third, and maybe this is most important, if there is one thing I've learned in my personal experience negotiating contracts from both the labor and the management side of the table, it is that both sides have an infinite capability to persuade themselves that whatever they have already should never be changed except to improve it, no matter how much profits have improved (management) or no matter how much the company is going into the toilet (labor). It's human nature.

I'm not taking sides, in part because I don't know how much actual sick leave Hawaiian Telcom workers take, and it is the actual amount of leave taken that determines the cost of a benefit like this.

One footnote on Hawaiian Telcom: Current management has been slammed for outsourcing some jobs, but the creation of Hawaiian Telcom a few years brought office functions back to Hawaii from the mainland, and even now there is a net increase of jobs from the Verizon Communications days.

Now let's turn to Qantas.

Three unions, representing pilots, mechanics and other workers, have been gradually increasing work stoppages against Qantas. In place of the regular sort of outright strike, they've been reducing the hours they will work. After cutting back service, Qantas executives decided that the mechanics were no longer working enough to guarantee the safety of service, and on Saturday they somewhat dramatically shut the airline down. I mean all of it. Jets that were literally on taxiways turned around and returned to the gate. Only flights already in the air kept moving.

The Australian government, angry at getting only three hours' notice behind the scenes that this was going to happen, convened hearings and ordered (1) the airline to fly, and (2) the unions to halt job actions and return to the bargaining table. What started as a lockout has turned into the reverse, in which the employees are more or less locked in until an agreement is reached.

The backstory of the Qantas situation is interesting. Faced with mounting labor costs that have put the world's number ten airline at a competitive disadvantage, Qantas founded a discount subsidiary called Jetstar, basing it in Southeast Asia where the labor laws are different, and placing its subsidiary in direct competition with itself. For example, Jetstar now flies more Australians to Honolulu than Qantas itself does.

This is reminiscent of Texas Air, a one-time holding company of Continental Airlines, which bought Eastern Airlines, sold its profitable New York-Washington shuttle to Donald Trump, then began canceling its other profitable routes while simultaneously having Continental launch service in the same place. In those days Eastern was union, Continental was not, and when the owner was done, he had killed Eastern and made Continental into one of the major U.S. carriers.

The rightness or wrongness of either side in the Qantas dispute can be argued by people who know more about the relative labor costs of Qantas, Cathay Pacific, etc. But it safe to say that in the Qantas case, like the Hawaiian Telcom case, the elephant in the room is a changing environment for the industry the companies are in, something ignored by the players at their peril. Labor needs to realize this, but there is also something management needs to realize. Again I refer you to "The Maltese Falcon," when Bogart's Sam Spade assures Sydney Greenstreet's Gutman that he can't find the bird without him so he can't kill him. Gutman agrees, but adds, sometimes in the heat of passion, men do things which are not in their best interest.

 

 

 

Howard's management school: Embracing change, vs. Liliha Bakery

This week, recovered from illness and feeling cabin fever, Bernadette and I went out to Like-Like Drive-Inn. I always order either the mahi sandwich or the fry-rice. Bernadette gets something different every time. Like-Like has been around forever. As a teenager my first wife Marilyn went there with dates after bowling. When we went there on my first trip to Hawaii in 1978 she found it unchanged and was quite happy about that. It has changed since, but not much. The menu was was redone, and the fry-rice became fried rice, and the decor was changed to late Howard Johnson, but the people are nice and the clientele is local-local and I consider it a privilege to be welcome there.

When Bernadette and I eat out, especially in non-chain restaurants, her food service background and intense curiosity about everything always leads to a discussion of restaurants, their menus, their service, their ethos, and their business. We talked about Liliha Bakery, another place that has been around forever, but there is something important that is different about Liliha Bakery. Like-Like Drive-Inn is still owned by the same family. Liliha was sold, but the new ownership was smart enough to keep everything the same.

This is really unusual. New owners like to mark their territory. They nearly always persuade themselves that they can "improve" a place, and sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. Liliha Bakery started out as a good bakery in a good location with almost enough parking even for busy nights; over the years it became more. As similar establishments closed or changed, Liliha, by staying the same, became more than an establishment. It became an experience. It's still a very good bakery, and I speak as someone who is not quite as enthusiastic about Cocoa-Puffs as some others - I'm more of a cinnamon twist guy - but it's also a piece of Old Hawaii, and the day the management forgets that is the day they start to go downhill.

There is a lesson in this, because one of the most oft-repeated mantras in business is, "Embrace change." It is, in my view, a perilous mantra, missing the point it means to make.

A business can die from refusing to change - we've all see it happen - but a business can also die from changing in the wrong direction, and from changing when it should have held the line. Countrywide Financial embraced change. Enron was a change agent. Montgomery Ward was too late to change and then made the wrong changes.

Edsel.

Do you know the Serenity Prayer? You do, even if you didn't know its name: it's the one about being able to change what can be changed, and accept what cannot be changed, and having the wisdom to know the difference. The correct attitude for business is to embrace change when change is good, hold the line when it is wrong, and develop the judgment to tell the difference.

I actually think developing good judgment is not the hardest part. The hardest part is that most people feel more comfortable with changing or not changing, one or the other; regardless of which sort of person you are, one option will always feel good, the other will be less comfortable, and from one circumstance to the next the right course could be either one.

A willingness to embrace change, like the instinct to defend tradition, is no substitute for thought.

Music Post: The Paris salon of a century ago

See if this sounds like a good time for you. You're invited to the home of someone wealthy and important. You know the food will be good, the company will be scintillating, and, get this, there will be live music by well-known performers, much of it brand new.

Such was the Paris salon of the very early 1900s, when you could go to a party and hang with Ravel and Picasso and captains of industry and their wives and drink free cognac until your whiskers reeked of alcohol and smoke Galoises until you wheezed during your denunciations of German composers.

The French did not invite the salon. In the early 1800s, the indigent but talented Franz Schubert pretty much made his living mooching off friends by writing music for their parties and performing i it with them. Some of Schubert's friends had real money, but they weren't exactly the power establishment of Vienna. By the middle 1800s, Paris was a great industrial city, and like all great industrial cities it was eager to be a great cultural city. Why do you think the Cleveland Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Saint Louis Symphony are in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and St. Louis?

Socialites were called the "idle rich" but some worked quite hard putting together parties to do for, and by the late 1800s they even realized they were not just throwing parties, they were helping to create culture by providing comfortable venues and appreciative exposure for composers and other artists who needed both money and approval to thrive.

I speculate that the circumstances were good for the creation of interesting new music. If you were a young composer looking for a reputation, you wouldn't offer music that was so difficult they never invited you back. Yet your audience was not without sophistication and it would be hoping to hear something novel. The pieces written for these events reinvigorated chamber music, and five minutes later, when the same composers wrote orchestral pieces, affected the rest of the classical repertory. Debussy and Ravel may not have been possible in quite the same way had it not been for salons.

This week on my Hawaii Public Radio show, I'll feature French chamber works, mostly, from the 1890s to the 1930s. You'll hear movements from trios by Ravel, Debussy, Gabriel Faure, Charles-Marie Widor and Joaquin Turina. The Turina, which I wasn't familiar with until recently, is a really good piece and it will be worth tuning it just for that.

Howard's Day Off airs 5am-7am HST on Hawaii Public Radio. Max Cacas of Washington, D.C., founded the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society on Facebook.

 

Is the Euro debt crisis over? Really?

You can be forgiven for not having followed the European debt crisis. It's over there. You're over here. It may or may not affect us, but either way what can we do? Relax. It's okay. I totally understand. But we ought to care at least a little. So many U.S. companies sell in Europe. And we in Hawaii actually welcome a few thousand Europeans a year. Brits and Germans, mostly, but others, too.

A couple of moderately interesting things are happening in Europe this week so I thought this might be a window of opportunity to give a simplified explanation of what's going on there. Let's begin with a really simple explanation of what the Euro debt crisis is.

Rich banks in France and Germany lent a pantload of money to countries like Greece, Italy and Spain, with both lender and borrower alike assuming the economy would grow forever. It didn't. Now these countries can't pay back their loans without (1) more time, and (2) cutting back government spending way more than what everyone is talking about in America.

To settle the debt crisis, European leaders, led by French President Nikolai Sarkozy (NEEK-lye Sar-koh-ZEE) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (AHN-gla MER-kle), have been pressuring the banks to write down their loans and accept smaller payback, while pressuring Greece and other debtor nations to cut jobs and wages, which is what everyone means when they say "austerity measures."

Wednesday night, according to news reports from Europe, Merkel and Sarkozy were facing the bankers. The meeting went late, 2 a.m. or so. The banks refused to back off more than a fifth of what they are owed. They sat back and waited for Merkel to flinch.

She didn't.

What she did instead was lean forward, and invite them to stick to that position. If they refused to back off from HALF of what they had coming to them on paper, she would announce that no deal was available, setting off an instant financial crisis all over the world, and she would blame it squarely on them.

They backed down.

This was a major reason for the European stock market rally Thursday, which spread to Wall Street and led to a 300-point Dow ascent and the largest monthly gain for the S&P 500 since January of 1987. Everyone is acting like the crisis is over. But this is wrong.

Two things need to happen to end the Euro debt crisis. The lenders need to be realistic and accept writedowns of what they're owed, but the debtor nations need to curtail their spending, and that's a bit dicey, because while the bankers merely have to turn around and face their own shareholders, most of whom saw their portfolios improve mightily on Thursday, the leaders of Greece, Italy, Spain, etc., have to turn around and face demonstrators, even rioters, and that's just the opposition parties in their parliaments, never mind the guy on the street.

Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, who has been on trial for corruption and sex with a minor, allegations so severe that even Italians are scandalized a little, has promised to speed up the privatization of nationalized businesses and change Italian labor laws so companies in financial peril can more readily lay off workers. But his coalition government doesn't appear to have enough power to make things happen, and political rivals are taking advantage of the crisis to demand he step down in favor of some other leader who, I dunno, dates women his own age. Italian unions, which are used to the government playing daddy to them, oppose any change to Italian labor laws. Ironically, the Italian government isn't running very large deficits these days, and if it weren't for the larger crisis it would probably turn out fine, repaying its own debts; but the crisis could lead to higher interest rates for the Rome government, which would put Italy in line with Greece, Spain, etc.

And I might just throw in that Berlusconi and the rest of Italy really hate being dictated to by France and Germany, and I heard a BBC reporter in Paris take note of the fact that someone asked about Berlusconi at a news conference with Sarkozy and Merkel and before the two answered they kind of smirked at each other. If this guy noticed this in Paris, you can be sure it was noticed in Italy, the third largest economy in Europe after Germany and France.

The Euro debt crisis: it's more interesting than you thought it was, no?

Clear Channel layoffs and the future of radio

Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in America, handed out pink slips by the hundreds this week including, in Hawaii, Mike Buck, Kutmaster Spaz and Jimmy the Geek. In Honolulu and many mainland cities, people lost their jobs who had been on the air for decades.

When radio people discuss Clear Channel they often act like the company is the death star and its leaders evil. The truth is that the company is acting out of desperation, under the compulsion of financial challenges that are the direct result of expanding rapidly with borrowed money.

In 1970 when I broke into radio at the age of 17, a company could not own more than five television stations, five FM stations, or seven AM stations. This created a financial incentive to own stations in large cities and develop them for maximum commercial revenue.

Now a company can own as many stations as it wants provided it does not reach too high a percentage of the audience in any given market. Several companies own hundreds of stations. The new financial incentive is on the cost side: to grow ever larger and attain economies of scale.

Several companies competed to grow fastest and did leveraged buyouts. That's where you buy a company with borrowed money, intending to repay the lender with profits from the newly acquired business. Clear Channel leveraged and expanded and borrowed and leverage and expanded until it was bigger than anyone else - and staggering under billions in debt.

Just as Countrywide Financial loan salesmen convinced themselves, and then their patsy customers, that home prices would soar forever, so did Clear Channel and its rivals project ever-rising ad revenues. Oops! We had a recession! And the recovery is really slow! And some radio ad revenue has been permanently captured by the Internet! Maybe we'd better redo the numbers.

Once these conditions became apparent, there was nothing Clear Channel managers could do but figure out how to survive it, and that meant identifying really major cost cuts. And in radio, the single greatest cost-reduction is achieved by doing more "turnkey" program from networks and syndication and less local programming.

In 1970, radio stations were required to have at least one person on duty at all times, and virtually all stations had news departments, so networks existed mainly to cover world news and were expected to get this over with in five minutes so stations could return to local programming and local commercials. But over the ensuing years, the rules were relaxed, until stations were allowed to do almost nothing but play music, and could operate at night with no one at all on the premise. Now it made economic sense to take programming from satellite.

Major radio groups like Clear Channel invented new forms of networking - for example, if you had a really good air personality in Cleveland and owned stations in Toledo, Cincinnati and Columbus, you could put him on stations in all those markets save three other salaries. The layoffs done this week by the company will mean much more extensive use of this sort of thing.

Is this a good idea in the long run? They pretty much had to do this now. But what about the long run?

You can probably figure out the answer if you have Sirius or have ever rented a car that has it. Satellites can provide you with more jukeboxes than local radio stations can hope to offer. There is nothing Clear Channel - or its competitors - can do in the business of national talk hosts or disc jockeys playing music that can't be done better by Sirius. In the long run, the future of radio is going to be local, local, and local.

I do think some of the current experimentation with using talent from other markets will be adpted to provide economical support for local programming. For example, someone who does voices can supply "bits" for local morning shows in dozens or hundreds of markets. In some states it may be possible for a news operation or a matrix of talk shows to be based in several markets, sharing programming. It will be impossible to do local radio without higher cost, so the owner can't be a leveraged, debt-ridden company. Therefore, I think this will take off only after Clear Channel has been obliged by its own economic circumstances to spin off some of its lower-performing stations to local interests.

A few broadcasters read this blog: any contrary predictions?

 

 

 

 

 

Will air fares rise or fall between now and Christmas? Yes

A pattern is emerging in the pricing of airplane tickets which will make planning your leisure travel more tricky than previously: higher fares, more sales.

As I write this, on Wednesday, Oct. 26, United Continental and Delta Air Lines have hiked their domestic fares for the second time in two weeks. The previous, started by Delta, was matched by such discount carriers as Southwest and JetBlue, so it stucks. United and Delta executives are now waiting to see if their modest new increases, $5 or less on most routes one-way, will be matched by the discounters. If not, they will probably have to roll it back.

Nothing new there. But what is new is that airlines seem to be simultaneously raising base fares and doing more fare sales. I've been telling people who want to know if they should book their Christmas travel now that, yes, they should, because fares could rise more between now and Christmas. But it also appears that consumers might experience more fare sales opportunities, though I seriously doubt that Christmas week won't be blacked out.

This is revenue management. You raise your prices so a nicely profitable level, precisely so that you can cut those prices and remain profitable when you sense a slack period. The fare sales are designed to fill the unsold seats, which is why I don't see it happening for Christmas travel: there won't be any unsold seats.

Do you get used to pain?

I go years without headaches or hurling, so either one really throws me for a loop. But we all know people who have these issues frequently who simply get used to it.

What I'm used to is neck pain. It started after I was rear-ended in traffic in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, seemed to ease, but then never quite went away. In recent years it has worsened, probably from being slumped over the computer so many hours a day.

I don't take anything for it, ever, because I don't want to make it worse by accident. I've known several people who worsen their back problems by medicating the pain so they don't know when they're straining it.

Have you had any experience like that?

Winners and losers in the APEC Summit

Hawaii officials worked hard to get the APEC Summit here, and for good reason. It benefits Hawaii in the long-term for officials around the Pacific Rim to see Hawaii as a gathering place for meetings.

But it is unquestionably true that some businesses will see nothing but harm from the summit, because the long-term benefit in better times won't compensate them for taking it in the shorts now.

This is apparent when you read Restrictions in the Vicinity of the Hawaii Convention Center, a State Department advisory detailing road closures around the summit. There is a separate one detailing disruptions around Ko Olina, and everything is subject to change, and every change has the potential to make things worse.

It's easy to understand why. The most sympathetic State Department or Secret Service official, however empathetic with a shop that won't see many customers due to traffic or parking restrictions, cannot seriously consider relaxing restrictions, because no one back in Washington will thank them for helping Eggs n' Things serve its usual clientele, and if some head of state gets knocked down because there wasn't enough of a security zone the same people back in Washington will never forget who drew up the map. So everyone is going to err on the side of, well, gridlock.

The advisory to which I linked you above, detailing Convention Center traffic prohibitions Nov. 7-13, also says "additional restrictions" will be in force Nov. 11-13 without detailing them. They're probably still working them out. If I know my D.C. bureaucrats, they have a map drawn up already but one or two guys in the room are making passionate speeches in favor of larger security zones so if anything goes wrong they'll be remembered as the ones who wanted to close off more streets.

And what are you gonna do? They're paid, they're trained, to think like that. What I guarantee you'll never hear in that room is, "Hey, it's Hawaii. It's the middle of the Pacific. Who's gonna fly all the way out here when they can try to get at someone in a way more convenient place? Plus, blending in would be 50 times harder in Hawaii than anywhere else. Everybody should just relax."

The plan in the advisory is to close Atkinson Road from Kona St. to Kapiolani Blvd., and Kapiolani Blvd. from Atkinson Road to Kalakaua Ave., and to close some lanes of Kalakaua Ave. where it goes next to the Convention Center. In brief, it's going to be a traffic nightmare even more than usual.

Wild West Waikiki, where I live, will have all kinds of parking restrictions. Bernadette and I plan to stock up on supplies as if it were a tsunami.

The thing is, just as these security planners are doing what any human beings would do in that situation, so will consumers do what any human being would do in their own position: not only will they not patronize businesses on the roads that are closed, they won't go anywhere near those areas, so even Ala Moana Center shops will probably see a decline in business, as well as many shops in Waikiki, especially the ones back toward the canal.