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  • Transition, and opportunity, in broadcasting

    Thirty-one years ago, almost to the day, the radio station I worked for signed off its all-news format forever, to sign back on the following morning with a music format and a new staff. The incoming disc jockeys were excited because they were putting a new format on the air called [...]
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    Posted: October 26, 2009, 3:43pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Music Post: Evolution of a few great tunes

    Number of comments: 1
    Jelly Roll Morton, the New Orleans pianist of the early 1900s, claimed he invented jazz, and what was once dismissed as a wild claim  is now gently said aside as slightly exaggerated. He does appear to have been one of the early adopters of syncopation and swing. Morton, whose real name [...]
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    Posted: October 23, 2009, 1:11pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Will Walter Dods finally get out of running errands?

    Number of comments: 1
    When I read the announcement that Walter Dods will become chairman of Alexander & Baldwin Inc., my first reaction was to think that maybe now his wife will stop asking him to run errands. In case Mrs. Dods reads this and wonders what in the Wide World of Sports I am [...]
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    Posted: October 22, 2009, 1:33pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Does anybody know a trade wind dance?

    For two months now we’ve had more days with faint winds than days with robust trades, and we’re all getting pretty tired of it. Usually when one says one is pretty tired of something, one is speaking metaphorically, but in this case it is literally true: the lack of winds, which [...]
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    Posted: October 22, 2009, 1:57am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Who’s going to start building your rail system?

    Number of comments: 1
    Kiewit Pacific may not be familiar to everybody, so when they won the first design-build contract for Honolulu rail – for $90 million less than anticipated – I thought I would fill in the blanks a little. Kiewit Corp. is one of the world’s largest contractors, an employee-owned company based in [...]
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    Posted: October 21, 2009, 1:30pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Nonprofits say: let’s put on a show!

    Number of comments: 2
    It may be a coincidence, possibly even a harmonic convergence, but some of my favorite nonprofits are busy this week preparing entertaining events to raise funds. Hawaii Public Radio, which lets me play around on the radio Saturday mornings between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., is slogging through its twice-yearly fundraiser. [...]
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    Posted: October 21, 2009, 3:10pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • When computers aren’t speaking to one another

    Number of comments: 3
    Computers and computer networks weren’t invented at the same time. But they probably should have been. Networking has been the source of some of the greatest benefits of computers, and the biggest hassles. Leaving aside such ur-computers as Pascal’s mechanical adding machine and the Ellis Island tabulators built to use punch [...]
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    Posted: October 19, 2009, 1:51pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • The Heenes and hinky reality shows

    Number of comments: 2
    I like watching spy thrillers and science fiction. Why? There is already enough comedy and tragedy in my life. What I like on the screen, rather than in my life, is physical danger, car chases, and aliens. Very little, however, is more alien to me than reality shows. I’ve never understood [...]
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    Posted: October 18, 2009, 6:28am EDT
    by hdicus

  • I’m just asking…

    Number of comments: 1
    Can vog, the sulphuric acid-laced air pollution that comes from the volcano, confer protection against flu? [...]
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    Posted: October 18, 2009, 2:11pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • The magic of Maui

    Number of comments: 3
    This should have been a thorough ennervating – that is, tiresome – day, and instead I feel refreshed after being on-duty from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. What happened to bring this about? Maui happened. The Hawaii Hotel & Lodging Association held its annual meeting at the Sheraton Maui on the [...]
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    Posted: October 17, 2009, 3:44pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Music Post: Lots of music, my pledge at pledge time

    Since Hawaii Public Radio gets more than two thirds of its revenue from its pledge drives, and since it only holds two per year, getting them right is vital to the survival of the service, which gets zero state funding and is unaffiliated with any local university, government or other [...]
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    Posted: October 17, 2009, 3:27pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • When targeted media content hits you

    Number of comments: 3
    In the 1970s I worked for a weekly newspaper in Anne Arundel County, Md., that put out a North County and a South County issue. One night I was at the newspaper office as the paper was put to bed, both issues, saw them side by side, and couldn’t figure [...]
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    Posted: October 17, 2009, 3:12pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Poem: I watched a boy who wasn’t there

    Number of comments: 1
    I watched a boy who wasn’t there He wasn’t even in the air We all thought little Falcon Heeney Was flying like a film Fellini But when the boy was finally found He turned out to be on the ground In spite of all the network static The tot had hidden in the attic According to the morning [...]
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    Posted: October 16, 2009, 1:31am EDT
    by hdicus

  • He is so grounded

    Number of comments: 3
    In the 1956 film “The Red Balloon,” a helium-filled balloon  follows a little boy like a pet until bullies destroy it. then all of the balloons of Paris come to the boy, who grabs their strings…and floats away. If a better film has ever been made, I have not seen it. [...]
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    Posted: October 15, 2009, 1:23pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Will Hawaii ever have room for more interisland airlines?

    Number of comments: 6
    So now we are back to two airlines serving the four main interisland routes – Hawaiian, with than two thirds of the market on its competitor’s best day – and go!/Mokulele, which has gotten its costs under control at the cost of giving back its best jets. Is there any hope [...]
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    Posted: October 15, 2009, 12:06pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Interisland air service and the larger U.S. airline picture

    Number of comments: 2
    A fascinating similarity has arisen between Hawaii interisland airline service of years past and the airline picture on the mainland today. It has to do with direct versus transfer flights. You can probably remember when flying from the mainland to Hawaii meant flying to Honolulu, and if your ultimate destination was [...]
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    Posted: October 14, 2009, 12:23pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Mokulele outsources itself

    Number of comments: 4
    After a difficult years of fighting over the scraps left by Hawaiian Airlines in the recession-starved interisland airline business, Mokulele and go! have decided to combine forces. Mesa Air Group’s go!, the more senior of the two, and flying smaller jets at a lower cost, will run a joint venture called [...]
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    Posted: October 13, 2009, 1:55pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Firesign Theatre – long-lived, with a chance of immortality

    Number of comments: 2
    The Firesign Theatre, all four of whose members are still alive and capable of coherent thought, appeared on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” Monday morning to flog a live performance they’re doing in Los Angeles for four nights later this week. Corporeally, they were not all together, as David [...]
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    Posted: October 12, 2009, 7:10am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Land use planning, guessing at the future, and rail

    Number of comments: 4
    Ever get a DVD from someone as a gift, and it doesn’t look like you’re going to like it, but then you watch it and you like it very much? So it was for me with “Architectures,” a three-DVD series of documentaries about interesting bits of architecture in Europe. What I [...]
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    Posted: October 11, 2009, 6:37am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Ask Howard, the personal edition

    Number of comments: 1
    The questions I get, since KGMB began doing “Ask Howard” on Wednesday mornings, seem to fall into four categories: actual questions about serious stuff, questions designed to stump me or throw me a straight line to see what I do with it, editorials in the form of a question, and [...]
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    Posted: October 10, 2009, 8:56am EDT
    by hdicus

  • What the Nobel committee is trying to tell America

    Number of comments: 3
    Surprised that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize? So was Barack Obama. But like the decision to put the Olympics in Rio, there is nothing mystifying about it to people outside America, and the message to us is clear if we will listen for it. Rio was a surprise only [...]
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    Posted: October 09, 2009, 1:44pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Music post: Latin music by the non-Spanish

    So much classical music about Spain has been written by composers who live in other places. French, Russian and American composers have found Spanish music fascinating, and can’t resist emulating it. Ravel, whose “Alborada del gracioso” I will play in the first half hour of my public radio show this weekend, [...]
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    Posted: October 09, 2009, 12:47pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Fan club: people line up for relief from muggy weather

    Number of comments: 1
    Your neighbors were lined up to buy fans at Sam’s Club this week. Portable air conditioners sell well, too. It has been the worst season in recent memory for losing the trade winds, with effects on worker productivity and domestic tranquility. Trade winds are among my favorite things about Hawaii, right [...]
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    Posted: October 08, 2009, 11:58am EDT
    by hdicus

  • What journalism really needs is time

    Number of comments: 6
    Lon Williams from Waianae writes, “Do you think we can use some of the teachers that are currently collecting unemployment benefits to fill in for teachers at least one day a week?” Lon’s thinking is, these folks are drawing checks from the state anyway – unemployment checks – so what’s the [...]
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    Posted: October 07, 2009, 1:25pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • When tender food is a tough game

    I’ve always been impressed with the food at Chopsticks & Wine, but the more Bernadette teaches me about the difficult of catering a large event, the more impressed I get. Chopsticks & Wine is an annual fundraiser for the Japanese Chamber of Commerce. The admission fee, less than $100, is less [...]
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    Posted: October 07, 2009, 1:54am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Hilo Hattie takes a giant step toward viability

    Number of comments: 1
    Hilo Hattie emerged from bankruptcy over the weekend so I had the chief operating officer on “Sunrise” to talk about the company’s plans going forward. But the most telling thing wasn’t what Mark Storfer said. It was what he wore. Storfer mentioned during the interview that the seven Hilo Hattie stores [...]
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    Posted: October 05, 2009, 1:10pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Yes, ICANN – a change in the management of the Internet

    Number of comments: 2
    In the past few days a small but important thing happened that will lead to the Internet being a lot more independent from America and the English language. But most people won’t notice any change. The Internet is managed, to the extent it is managed at all, by an organization based [...]
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    Posted: October 04, 2009, 1:20pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Music post: White Album dissed, but not by me

    Number of comments: 5
    It has been 41 years since the Beatles released “The Beatles,” which the rest of us renamed the White Album. All the Beatles albums are being reissued in new remasters some of which, including this one, are said to be really good. This in turn has led to articles reconsidering the [...]
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    Posted: October 04, 2009, 4:34am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Music post: classical music’s core repertory

    If all I wanted to play on my weekend radio show was classical music’s core repertory, I probably wouldn’t do a show at all. I could listen to everybody else’s show. “Howard’s Day Off” is usually replete with modern stuff, with cross-references to jazz and rock. In June I devoted the [...]
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    Posted: October 03, 2009, 3:56pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Looking for ways to improve tsunami warnings

    Number of comments: 2
    A certain manager here, who is responsible for hundreds of people at sea level in Honolulu, told me at week’s end that the tsunami watch earlier in the week had him worried because he figured if he waited for the watch to become a warning it would be too late [...]
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    Posted: October 03, 2009, 3:43pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • How not to bust a union

    I just finished reading a 50-page administrative law judge’s findings in the case of federal labor law violations by the Pacific Beach Hotel, and it is like a guide on how to bungle relations with a labor union. Most of the time, business owners and managers prefer to have a non-union [...]
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    Posted: October 03, 2009, 3:08pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • The real reason why Obama went to Denmark

    Number of comments: 4
    When Chicago was the first city voted out of the running for the Olympic games Friday morning, it took only a few minutes for commentators to post articles saying it was a political blow for President Obama. The idea is that the president put his reputation on the line by making [...]
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    Posted: October 02, 2009, 2:40am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Fightin’ words unhealthy for health care policy

    I did not previously consider myself a particular fan of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but she did something this week that has my admiration. She told a member of her own party to knock it off with the combative rhetoric about health care options. Florida Representative Alan Grayson, a Democrat, accused [...]
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    Posted: October 01, 2009, 1:55pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Solution to financial crisis: make big banks behave more like small ones

    Number of comments: 2
    In the first quarter of this year, more than 100 banks with assets over $5 billion had a median return on average equity of 3%. For 7,000 banks with smaller assets, it was 5%. This is the proof of what I’ve been telling you – Wall Street might not have broken [...]
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    Posted: September 30, 2009, 1:50pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Why some people don’t want Roman Polanski jailed

    Number of comments: 10
    There is a movement in Hollywood to urge prosecutors to back off Roman Polanski, who many years ago drugged, raped and sodomized a 13 year-old girl. I don’t understand it. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said. “This will be our little secret.” This isn’t going to be a screed against Hollywood. Most [...]
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    Posted: September 30, 2009, 2:31am EDT
    by hdicus

  • American Samoa now faces financial crunch

    Number of comments: 1
    American Samoa had some financial issues before the earthquake Tuesday and now those problems are going to be a bit worse. The American Samoa legislature had already been grilling Governor Togiola Tulafono on how much money he had taken from a fund that he proposed to tap yet again for $5 [...]
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    Posted: September 29, 2009, 12:18pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • The Samoan earthquake coverage and the fragility of facts in a breaking story

    Number of comments: 1
    The Sunrise program had ended at 8 a.m., but Dan and Taizo and I were still in the darkened studio when the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center sent word that there had been an earthquake. Our producer Scott Humber came in to make sure Dan Cooke was ready to break in to [...]
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    Posted: September 29, 2009, 7:32am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Things encountered on the way to the car

    You couldn’t tell it on the air, because she’s a trouper, but Ramsay Wharton sprained her ankle Monday morning when she fell while walking to her car. She came in and worked anyway, but now she’ll be out for the rest of the week. Someone left an object on the pathway [...]
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    Posted: September 28, 2009, 1:46pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Dan Brown and the Mystical Cabal of Inaccurate Novels

    Number of comments: 5
    Dan Brown, the author of “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels & Demons” and a new novel that I am now reading, has somehow gotten saddled with the impossible claim that he researches his fiction so carefully that all the key details about secret organizations and codes and stuff are [...]
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    Posted: September 27, 2009, 12:05pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Is Mufi Hannemann too tall?

    Number of comments: 2
    We have two prominent politicians in Hawaii who do us the honor of letting us see some of their emotion, and even their temper, rather than presenting some icy Stepford Politician stoneface and daring us to figure out what they’re really thinking. One of them is the very tall Mufi Hannemann [...]
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    Posted: September 25, 2009, 12:36pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Music Post: Why early music is the latest thing

    Bach was at work three centuries ago – Josquin Desprez three centuries before that. But modern listeners have come to Renaissance music more recently than music of the Baroque. Like the hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” who experiences his life out of order, the modern classical music listener has had [...]
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    Posted: September 25, 2009, 11:37am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Locavores, mocovores and other island eaters

    Number of comments: 2
    We have several native and migratory varieties of vegetarians in Hawaii, and a large number of large people who can be called mocovores for their loco moco consumption (I resemble that remark) and then there is that new group, locavores, people who prefer to eat food that has been produced [...]
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    Posted: September 24, 2009, 1:50pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • The world comes alive with news at :55!

    Number of comments: 2
    As people debate the merger of the KGMB and KHNL news departments, those of us who come from radio, and who remember the days of more detailed regulation of news, recall a time when much of the decision-making in radio programming turned on how to avoid or downplay one’s newscasts. In [...]
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    Posted: September 24, 2009, 11:03pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Sweet and sour – Hawaii and its sugar industry

    Number of comments: 2
    Hawaii’s sugar industry is about to be reduced from two companies to one, and what’s happening on Kauai is a lesson to people who live on Maui – figure out what goes on that land next, if you don’t want it to be townhomes. Gay & Robinson announced Wednesday that by [...]
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    Posted: September 24, 2009, 2:14pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Will UH wage cuts hamper recruiting?

    I want to gently point out a logical fallacy in the assertion by some members of the UH Professional Assembly that wage cuts will put UH way low on national rankings and hurt recruiting. It would be apples and oranges to compare new, lower compensation with current compensation at other schools, [...]
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    Posted: September 23, 2009, 5:50am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Who has an auditorium I can use?

    Number of comments: 2
    You know how I give the business news. What if I were to appear on a stage with half a dozen musicians and report the history of classical music? I’ve written a first draft already. And a couple of really good musicians are willing to take part, including a well-known member [...]
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    Posted: September 22, 2009, 1:40pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • No plan is an island

    Number of comments: 2
    When I was a little boy, in the 1950s, my family lived in a two bedroom house on a road parallel to the Gov. Ritchie Hwy., which ran from Baltimore, Md., to the state capital in Annapolis. It was a divided highway, a new thing in those days. I remember the [...]
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    Posted: September 22, 2009, 2:46pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Costs and benefits of monuments to our civic pride

    Number of comments: 2
    Once upon a time, time was no big deal. We did not always strive to divide the day into equal hours, and the hours into equal minutes, and the minutes into equal seconds. You could not be “on time” because there was no uniform measurable time to be on. Even [...]
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    Posted: September 20, 2009, 4:25am EDT
    by hdicus

  • Music post: Weirdly cool concerto at Blaisdell this weekend

    You can come Saturday at 7 p.m. or Sunday at 3 p.m., but come to Blaisdell Concert Hall this weekend to hear Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain perform a triple concerto for banjo, bass and tabla with Andreas Delfs and the Honolulu Symphony. The concerts actually begins at 8 [...]
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    Posted: September 19, 2009, 4:24pm EDT
    by hdicus

  • Music Post: Cartoons and classical music

    “Kill da wabbitt, kill da wabbitt, kill da wabbit!” Elmer Fudd, right? And, thanks to “Apocalypse Now,” you also know it as the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Wagner’s “Ring” operas. It is but one example of a classical work that reached a generation of Americans through cartoon soundtracks. You have [...]
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    Posted: September 18, 2009, 1:58pm EDT
    by hdicus
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